Goodbye PowerMac, hello Mac Pro

For the three of you that weren't keeping up with Engadget's Stevenote liveblogging earlier, you and your credit card provider are probably still blissfully unaware of the new hotness out of Cupertino: the Mac Pro. Gone is the last of their consumer PowerPC-based systems, the venerable PowerMac; in its place is a giant end-boss of a system, featuring two dual-core Intel Xeon processors (that's four cores, dang!), up to 16GB of DDR2 RAM, four hard drive bays for a current maximum of 2TB of storage, and dual optical drives.

"But what about the graphics, man?"

Fine, the graphics. The good news, unlike the integrated options in the MacBook and Mac mini, this one is a real graphics card. And unlike the iMac and MacBook Pro, the Mac Pro's graphics system is upgradable. The downside, the default offering is a (relatively) anemic 256MB GeForce 7300 GT. For an extra $350 on top of the already pricey starting point of $2499, you can throw an AMD-owned ATI Radeon X1900 XT with 512MB of RAM into your Intel-based Mac, making that issue a nonstarter, while turning your Mac Pro into a serious gaming system. They're shipping today, so if you're made of money, get splurging. However, know this: we hate you.

Stare – Engadget's hands-on (with Mac pr0n!)
Covet – Apple's Mac Pro product page
Weep – Apple's online store page

Graphics Card Specifications

	NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT	ATI Radeon X1900 XT	Quadro FX 4500
Memory interface	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Frame buffer memory	256MB GDDR2 SDRAM	512MB GDDR3 SDRAM	512MB GDDR3 SDRAM
Memory bandwidth	10.7 GB/s	41.6 GB/s	33.6 GB/s
Vertices per second	350 million	1.2 billion	940 million
Fill rate (billion pixels per second)	2.8 billion	9.6 billion	10.8 billion
Ports	One single-link and one dual-link DVI	Two dual-link DVI	Two dual-link DVI, one stereo 3D
Slots occupied	One standard slot	One double-wide slot	One double-wide slot
Price	$2499 + $0	$2499 + $350	$2499 + $1650