On Tuesday, Apple took the wraps off its long-awaited Mac Pro refresh, but totally copped everyone’s high by announcing that the new desktop models wouldn’t be available until August. As it turns out, you may be able to at least place an order for the new systems beginning on August 9.

MacRumors is reporting that potential buyers of Apple’s latest Mac Pro refresh announced on Tuesday will be able to start ordering on August 9. This comes from several MacRumors readers who were given the date by Apple Store representatives, and the website later confirmed it as well, with both chat and telephone sales reps citing the same date.

What’s unclear is whether or not the new Mac Pro will actually be shipping on August 9, or whether this is just the first date that orders will be taken. The reps that MacRumors have spoken with claim that August 9 is for “actual orders” and not simply a pre-order program launch, so it sounds like the systems will be start shipping reasonably soon after that date.

As noted on Tuesday, the new Mac Pro will be available in both a $2,499 quad-core and a $3,499 eight-core model and Apple is offering a huge array of configure-to-order options which include:

• one 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3565 processor for the quad-core Mac Pro;
• one 3.33 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon W3680 processor for the quad-core Mac Pro;
• two 2.66 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 processors (12-cores) for the 8-core Mac Pro;
• two 2.93 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X5670 processors (12-cores) for the 8-core Mac Pro;
• two ATI Radeon HD 5770 cards with 1GB of GDDR5 memory;
• one ATI Radeon HD 5870 card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory;
• up to 16GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory for the quad-core Mac Pro;
• up to 32GB of DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory for the 8-core Mac Pro;
• up to four 512GB solid state drives (SSD); or
• up to four 1TB or 2TB Serial ATA hard drives running at 7200 rpm;
• Mac Pro RAID card;
• dual-channel or quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel card; and
• up to two 18x SuperDrives with double-layer support

Warm up those credit cards, folks! August 9 is just around the bend…

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