2013 apple mac pro is a sight to behold: In
black aluminum with an eye-catching cylindrical design, there’s little
chance you’ll ever mistake it for any other computer. The previous Mac
Pro was iconic too, of course, but this one is also just slightly larger
than a football and dimpled on the top with a recess like a jet engine.
But the true power lies under the hood, and what’s contained therein
will satisfy even the most pressing need for speed.
If you're a professional photographer, videographer, audio engineer,
animator or what-have-you, you might actually be considering spending
$2,999 on one of these -- maybe as much as $9,599, if you have the
means.
Internals :
Under the case you get to the heart of the machine, a tall, three-sided
board Apple is calling the "thermal core." Two of the sides are taken
up by the GPUs -- dual graphics cards are standard here -- whereas the
CPU occupies the third. I'll get to performance and configuration
options in a moment, but for now, suffice to say you can configure this
thing with two AMD FirePro D700 GPUs and 12GB of video memory, amounting
to up to seven teraflops of computing power (the last Mac Pro maxed out
at 2.7 teraflops). Meanwhile, there are two RAM banks (with two slots
each), located on either side of the CPU board. Combined, these can
accommodate up to 64GB of DDR3 memory, with bandwidth of up to 60
gigabytes per second.
With the exception of the processor, everything is user-replaceable --
the RAM, the GPUs and the solid-state storage. (I still wouldn't
recommend that the average person replace the GPU himself, but then
again, the Mac Pro isn't exactly for the average consumer in the first
place.)
Performance :
But that’s not what the Mac Pro is for: It’s a professional machine designed to help filmmakers create elaborate graphics, 3D animations and feature-length films. It’s aimed at the most demanding photographers, working in extreme resolutions and doing batch processing on huge files. It’s for audio producers, creating the next hit album using Logic Pro X and low latency, high bandwidth I/O external devices.
For me, Final Cut Pro was bound to be the wrench that would otherwise throw my existing Mac setup some trouble. On the Mac Pro, FCP X ran like a dream, rendering and publishing in the blink of an eye. I had to pinch myself to prove that I wasn’t dreaming after it took fewer than 10 seconds to render and publish the final edit of a 1080p video a little over two minutes long. And again, nary a peep from the Mac Pro itself.
For the super nerdy, you can check out the Geekbench scores of the new Mac Pro Remember, this is the baseline, entry-level version without any customization options, so it’s the bottom of what you can expect in terms of performance.
Configuration Options :
And here we arrive at what's actually one of the more important sections of this review: the part where we tell you all the ways you can trick out your new beast of a workstation. On Apple's site, you'll see two ready-made models, both of which are scheduled to ship in February. The base version goes for $2,999 with a quad-core 3.7GHz Intel Xeon E5 processor, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory and a 256GB PCIe SSD. In other words, it's basically the same unit I tested, except ours had 16 gigs of RAM instead of 12. Otherwise, same specs.
The other model listed on Apple's site is a six-core unit with dual FirePro D500 GPUs. As a higher-end machine, this has 3GB of video memory per GPU, not two. Additionally, it comes with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, just like the base model.
But don't be fooled by the simplicity of Apple's purchasing page. Click "select" for either and you'll be opening up a wide array of customization options. And really, that's what you're most curious about, right? Let's unpack all the choices here. For starters, if you're configuring the lower-end quad-core model, you can step up to a six-core CPU ($500), an eight-core one ($2,000) or a 12-core chip ($3,500). From there, you can upgrade to 16GB ($100), 32GB ($500) or 64GB ($1,300) of RAM. As for storage, there are larger 512GB and 1TB SSDs available for $300 and $800, respectively. Finally, there's graphics. In addition to the base option, which includes two 2GB FirePro D300 GPUs, you can opt for two 3GB D500s ($400) or two 6GB D700s ($1,000).
Obviously, the upgrade prices are different if you start with the higher-end model. Regardless, the Mac Pro always comes with dual GPUs, as I said, along with other amenities like 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0, neither of which was included on the last-gen Mac Pro.
If you still have room in your budget, Apple is also selling a $3,595, 32-inch 4K Sharp monitor on its site, in case you don't already have a screen for viewing and playing back ultra-high-res media. Apple is also selling the keyboard and mouse separately, as it has in the past. Already, we've seen some commentary on the internet criticizing Apple for being stingy, but keep in mind that many of the folks buying this might well be businesses that already have keyboards and mice lying around, so they might not actually be missing these accessories as much as you think they are.
Conclusion :
I debated even putting the word "expensive" in the cons list of that review card you seen down there. It's hard to say if the Mac Pro is pricey, per se, given that there's nothing else quite like it. There are plenty of Windows-based workstations, certainly, but none are quite this small or quite this portable (many aren't quite this quiet, either). And if you're a creative professional already hooked into Mac-only apps like Final Cut Pro, this is really your only choice: The new Mac Pro is a serious improvement over the old model in every way, and is likely worth the upgrade. So, while $2,999 (let alone $10,000) is indeed a big investment, it's well worth it for people who live and die by their workstation, and for whom (rendering) time is money.
