Mac Pro 8-Core AC Power Requirements

I have an 8-core (Nehalem) Mac Pro with 14 GB of RAM and two internal drives. The measurements cited here are observed on the information display of an APC Back-UPS XS 1500 that has an additional 20" Apple Cinema Display plugged into the (measured) backed-up outlets of the UPS.

This Mac has a second display but it is not connected to the backed-up outlet of the UPS and therefore not measured, but there could be extra power draw by the GPU because of it.

The measurements are taken with the line voltage at about 119 volts RMS.

When booting, there is a large instantaneous in-rush that showed over 400 watts, but it is just for the blink of an eye, so I wouldn't trust what the XS-1500 tells me. The in-rush current is non-trivial, though. I had to change to the XS-1500 UPS because an RS-900 UPS that I had earlier used with a dual core G5 PowerMac, which this MacPro replaced, did not have enough capacity to allow this Mac Pro to boot.

During booting, the peak power draw is about 205 watts. The XS-1500 may not see spikes in the power draw, so the actual peaks may be a bit higher than 205 watts.

After booting and when idle (no active apps), the power draw is about 170 watts.

When put to sleep, the Mac Pro and the display together runs about 14 watts.

I have written a (antenna design) program that uses Grand Central Dispatch and it can push Activity Monitor past 800% (I have seen it go up to 1200% on this mere 8 core machine, so I am not sure how much you can trust Activity Monitor either). In that condition, the power draw is 270 watts.

All in all, the Mac Pro is quite power efficient, but you may want to stagger the booting of your 18 machines just in case the in-rush is too great.

That being said, there is an unresolved bug as of 10.6.2 (you can find it in a different Mac Pro thread here) that causes power consumption to bump up to 240 watts (on my machine) whenever Core Audio is actively running. This jump in power occurs even when you play music in iTunes and occurs even when I use a couple of external USB or FireWire Sound Cards that I have (including the Griffin RadioShark and an external USB speaker). A couple of apps that I have written uses Core Audio -- and I can tell that the jump in power happens the instant you start causing Core Audio to issue callbacks.

Kok Chen