Hard drives proved to be a deciding factor in another test as well.
Our Professional Application Multitasking suite tests how well a system can perform while running Photoshop, Compressor and Cinema 4D simultaneously. In that test, the 3GHz system posted the fastest time by quite a noticeable margin. The eight-core 2.8GHz system took 24 seconds longer than the 3GHz model, while the quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro trailed the new model by just three seconds. Keep in mind that these systems are running with just 2GB of RAM (standard shipping amount for Mac Pros) and so hard drive speeds will be a factor in tests like this multitasking suite.
When we swapped the 250GB Western Digital drive in the 2.66GHz Mac Pro for the 320GB Seagate hard drive in the 2.8GHz Mac Pro, multitasking performance on the 2.66GHz model slowed by 14 percent to 1 minute, 37 seconds and sped up considerably by 31 percent, to just 57 seconds on the 2.8GHz machine (which would have bested the 3GHz Mac Pro’s multitasking suite score).
