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The top-end Mac Pro may have met its match in Google Chrome

The new Mac Pro is Apple’s most powerful computer ever and, when specs options are maxed out, offers enough oomph to breeze through even the most power and memory-hungry computing tasks.

Many have tried to push the Mac Pro to its limits, but none have succeeded… until now. YouTuber Jonathan Morrison, who has been attempting to give the Mac Pro all it can handle, reportedly encountered the limits of the 1.5TB of RAM.

It wasn’t via an intense video editing or music making application – two of the most popular needs for the abundance of random access memory. The stress test was conducted using the humble Google Chrome web browser, as the iMore website reports.

Related: Best desktop PC

The notorious RAM-hogging browser was using 75GB of RAM, as shown by the Mac Pro’s activity monitor, so Morrison decided to go with it and see how high he could push the memory consumption.

So, he pushed. He opened 2,000 tabs… then 3,000, 4,000, and 5,000, which took the RAM consumption past 170GB. The real leap, allegedly came after opening 6,000 tabs in Chrome.

That took the RAM use to 857GB and rapidly rising beyond 1TB of RAM, judging by the Twitter thread Morisson used to document the experiment. At that point, he decided to halt the experiment for fear of killing his super-super expensive desktop OS.

 

Considering his previous efforts to trouble the mountain of RAM held within the cheese grater-esque Mac Pro, it’s massively surprising to see Chrome push the desktop to the limits. Previously he’d enjoyed 16K video playback from a single graphics card and deployed two world-renowned music producers. Neither experiment troubled the Mac Pro.

Just before Christmas it emerged the top-end, specced-out Mac Pro will set punters back in excess of £48,000, including all of the bells and whistles. The cheapest configuration is £5,499. We know which we’re picking.

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