Ever since it was discovered that the new Mac Pro uses a socketed CPU, there has been some debate as to whether that meant a user could upgrade the CPU on their own. Other World Computing rolled up their sleeves and put any contention to rest.

We got our hands on an Intel E5-2667 V2 8-core 3.30GHz with 25MB Cache processor, installed it in the new Mac Pro and have done some benchmarking to get an early look at the performance vs. the stock Apple / Intel E5-1650 V2 6-core 3.50GHz with 12MB Cache model. The testing was done with 64GB of OWC memory installed. Our benchmarking showed a significant 30 percent multi-processor performance bump with the upgraded processor.

This is exactly as it should be. Yet another reason to appreciate the design of the new Mac Pro.