What are the differences between the "Early 2008" (Harpertown/Penryn) Mac Pro configurations?

Just as the company did with the original Mac Pro, Apple decided to offer a single stock configuration of the "Early 2008" Mac Pro with literally millions of possible configurations available via build-to-order.

Regardless of configuration, the "Early 2008" Mac Pro models are powered by one or two quad-core Intel Xeon 5400 (Harpertown/Penryn) series processors -- either four or eight cores total -- with 12 MB of level 2 cache per processor (each pair of cores shares 6 MB), a 128-bit SSE4 SIMD vector engine, and 1.6 GHz "64-bit dual independent frontside buses."

All of the "Early 2008" Mac Pro systems use the same easy to upgrade case (introduced by the original Mac Pro), and have four easy to access "cable free" hard drive bays (marching across the middle in the photo below) that support Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drives (or Serial Attached SCSI with the installation of the Mac Pro RAID card), two 5.25" optical drive bays (top left), eight fully buffered (FB-DIMM) slots on two easy access riser cards (bottom right), two PCIe x4 expansion slots, and two PCIe 2.0 x16 expansion slots (in the default confugration one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot is occupied by the graphics card).

Photo Credit: Apple, Inc.

A rundown of all the millions of combinations would be painfully boring, but comparisons of the default to "bare bones", "better", and "best" configurations are provided below for your convenience.

This default to "bare bones" comparison shows the least expensive way possible to configure the Mac Pro. As you can see, the only "downgrade" Apple offers is to remove one of the quad core processors.

	Default	"Bare Bones"
Processors:	2.8 GHz Quad Core x2	2.8 GHz Quad Core (x1)
Memory:	2 GB	2 GB
Video Card:	ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT	ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
Video Memory:	256 MB	256 MB
Hard Drive Capacity:	320 GB	320 GB
Optical Drive:	16X "SuperDrive"	16X "SuperDrive"
Price:	US$2799	US$2299

This default to "better" comparison also may be of interest.

	Default	"Better"
Processors:	2.8 GHz Quad Core x2	3.0 GHz Quad Core x2
Memory:	2 GB	4 GB
Video Card:	ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Video Memory:	256 MB	512 MB
Hard Drive Capacity:	320 GB	500 GB
Optical Drive:	16X "SuperDrive"	16X "SuperDrive"
Price:	US$2799	US$4399

This default to "best" -- but far from "maxed out" configuration -- shows one potential way for a "power user" to equip the Mac Pro (although "power users" generally choose to install their own memory and hard drive upgrades to save money).

	Default	"Best"
Processors:	2.8 GHz Quad Core x2	3.2 GHz Quad Core x2
Memory:	2 GB	4 GB
Video Card:	ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Video Memory:	256 MB	512 MB
Hard Drive Capacity:	320 GB	500 GB x2
Optical Drive:	16X "SuperDrive"	16X "SuperDrive"
Price:	US$2799	US$5449

To purchase a new or used Mac Pro, free of sales tax, please visit site sponsor PowerMax. To purchase high-quality hard drives or memory for the Mac Pro for hundreds or even thousands of dollars less than Apple charges, please visit site sponsor Other World Computing.