Anandtech's Mac Pro Review Is Out!

[shaunp]

I play BF4 on 1440p with Medium settings. Not stellar frame rates, but definitely playable. GTX 680MX.

iMac graphics are barely powerful enough for 1440p.

Pretty much as I thought. Thanks for sharing.

 

[deconstruct60]

I agree that the only talk of throttling was under the "power virus" situation.

However, Anand didn't really benchmark it at standard loads over time, as far as we know, these were all cold benchmarks. In short, neither of you know for sure (or if you do, please point me to the part I missed).

Many gaming sites measure FPS over many minutes to see how the coolers handle it. It'd be nice to see a pretty graph showing how it performs over the course of an hour or so at gaming and other tasks.
....

It wasn't an hour but then again no game is going to crank this Mac Pro this high either.....

"... I ran FurMark under OS X in parallel with a relatively heavy 4K render in Final Cut Pro. I was rendering a 20 minute 4K project with two effects applied across the entire timeline. The basic render used up 4 - 8 threads, while the effects ensured the compute GPU had some work to do. FurMark obviously kept the display GPU busy. After around 25% of the rendering task was complete the Mac Pro’s fan smoothly scaled up to 1400 RPM, then 1600 RPM and finally stopping at what I believe is full speed: 1900 RPM. ... "

http://anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/14

At the lower fan rates, it is extremely unlikely that the heat sink is loosing absorption capacity (due to CPU/GPUs filling it too fast). Otherwise the fan would crank back up to full speed. [ Presuming Apple's thermal management system is at least moderately competently implemented. That the fan is cranked higher when the heat sink fills up. ]

When the tests showed was that the fan doesn't run at max speed for normal apps.