There was much disappointment back in June when the new Mac Pro‘s CPU – the 12-core Xeon E5-2697 – delivered a surprisingly low Geekbench score of 23,901. It had been widely expected to break 30,000.

Some cautioned then that the score, based on a 32-bit build of Geekbench running on an early pre-release version of the CPU with a beta version of Mavericks, might not tell the whole story, and new tests by Tom’s Hardware on V2 of the chip appear to confirm this …

Curious as to how the very same 12-core Xeon E5-2687 V2 compared in Windows, I ran my own test on a 64-bit build of Geekbench and scored in excess of 30,000 points—more than 25% faster than the leaked number.

While this is still some way short of Apple’s claimed ‘2x faster’, the claimed performance boost did show up in specific areas, like 3D modelling and optical character recognition.

[3D modelling] is the greatest victory yet for Intel’s upcoming Xeon E5-2697 V2. It flies past the eight-core Xeon E5-2687W, finishing our Blender workload in less than half the time of a Core i7-4770K. It’s looking like 3D modelers are going to seriously benefit from the potential that Ivy Bridge-EP offers to Apple’s Mac Pro, even in a single-socket configuration […] Fully-threaded optical character recognition software FineReader fully utilizes the Xeon E5-2697 V2, finishing our benchmark workload in close to half the time of a Core i7-4770K. It’s even able to shave off 20% of the time from Intel’s 150 W eight-core Xeon E5-2687W. Impressive, indeed.

Mac Pro owners had for a long time expressed concern that Apple had lost interest in its high-end desktop machine, with no significant updates for some time. The unveiling of the new model at WWDC in June was welcomed, though there was some criticism that Apple had prioritised form over function by requiring storage expansion to be external rather than internal.

Check out the full report for chapter-and-verse.

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