The New Mac Pro: 12 Cores of Macho

If you want to meet Apple's ultimate gaming machine, look no further than the next generation of the Mac Pro. Announced yesterday, this new monster has twelve - count 'em, twelve - cores of power under the hood. Combined with new ATI graphics muscle and a whopping price tag (starting at $4,999 for the 12-pack), you're never going to blame another gaming loss on framerates again.

The aluminum case is home a few different configurations: The first (and cheaper) is a $2,499 system that comes with a 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeon W3430 CPU with 8MB of shared L3 cache, 3GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory, ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on-board, 1TB SATA hard drive, 18x SuperDrive, four PCI Express 2.0 slots, five USB 2.0 ports, four FireWire 800 ports, AirPort Extreme 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, two Mini DisplayPort adapters and one dual-link DVI port, Apple keyboard with numerical keypad and Magic Mouse. You can also bump it up to a $3,499 system with two quad-cores with 12MB shared L3 cache and 6GB RAM. The 12-core rings in at 2.93GHz with two six-core processors.

Practice your apology for your neighbors when the brownout on your block happens as you power it up.