Mac Pro (late 2013) review

When Apple puts its mind to a task, it’s a safe bet that the end product will be something pretty impressive; but the new Mac Pro is beyond even that. After years of research and design work at Apple’s labs, what has emerged is radically different to any serious PC you’ll ever have seen – a high-end workstation packed with cutting-edge components, which looks more like a hi-tech bin than a desktop PC.

In keeping with much of Apple’s aesthetic ethos, the Mac Pro is a minimalist affair. Its unusual cylindrical shape, finished in a dark, polished gunmetal grey is blemished by not a single mark – not even an Apple logo – until you reach the “rear” of the device, where all the Mac Pro’s connections are housed on a single panel.

Even this panel has been meticulously designed, with all Thunderbolt, USB and Ethernet ports all stacked in two columns. Cleverly, the labels and lines surrounding each individual group are backlit, illuminating when the system fires up, or whenever movement is detected – if you happen to have your Mac Pro stowed under a desk, it’s a nice touch that makes it easier to locate the port you’re looking for.

The Mac Pro’s party trick, however, is how easy it is to open up. Flip a single catch next to the port panel, and (assuming all cables have been disconnected) it’s possible to pull the entire exterior sheath up and off, with a satisfying, Star Trek-esque whoosh. It reveals a suitably exotic interior, with four RAM sockets sitting in two spring-loaded banks on either side, and the system’s two graphics cards between them, one of which plays host to the system’s single PCI Express-based SSD.

Internal design

The Mac Pro is certainly eye-catching, but what’s really clever about the design of the Mac Pro is the way Apple has deconstructed the traditional desktop design. Instead of everything sprouting from a single, monolithic motherboard, Apple has opted for a modular approach, with each major component mounted on a separate board.

You might think that squeezing a clutch of powerful components into such a small chassis (it really is compact, rising a mere 251mm from the desk and measuring 167mm in diameter) would be a recipe for disaster. However, while shrinking everything down, Apple has also seen fit to redesign the traditional cooling system.

In a high-end workstation, it is usual for there to be a fair amount of heat to expel, which entails multiple fans to cool the power supply, to draw air into the box, cool the graphics cards and CPU, and further fans to pump the hot air back out of the box again, which often results in lots of noise.

In the Mac Pro, the main heat-generating parts – the CPU and graphics cards – are attached to a single, Toblerone-shaped heatsink that runs up the centre of the tubular chassis, with one component to each side. Apple calls this the “thermal core”, and it requires only a single fan to keep things cool; it’s mounted at the bottom of the heatsink. This sucks air in from outside, pushes it across the surface of the heatsink and vents it out of the hole you see on top of the Mac Pro.

It’s an incredibly efficient system, and the result is, despite the cramped nature of the chassis, the Mac Pro barely ever registers more than a quiet hum. Even with all 24 logical cores of our test system at full utilisation, we had to put our ear right over the vent located at the top to hear it over the steady rush of the office air conditioning.

Internal specification

The hardware inside the Mac Pro is, inevitably, a touch less exotic than the exterior design. Nonetheless, the sheer amount of power it’s possible to pack into it remains impressive. Our review unit came with a 12-core 2.7GHz Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPU (complete with HyperThreading, Turbo Boost capability up to 3.5GHz, 30MB of L3 cache and a QPI of 8GT/sec). It also had 32GB of DDR3 RAM, a 512GB PCI Express SSD with a claimed throughput of 1GB/sec and a pair of AMD FirePro D700 GPUs.

The graphics cards are custom parts, and thus can’t be compared directly with AMD’s retail FirePro boards. With AMD’s Tahiti XT core at the centre of things, though, and 6GB of GDDR5 RAM on each, the closest comparison is with AMD’s FirePro W9000, which cost a breathtaking £2,765 (inc VAT) each.

For the spec above, you’ll be paying a handsome £6,739. This isn’t, however, the only specification available. The range starts at a much more reasonable £2,499, for which sum the Mac Pro comes equipped with a quad-core 3.7GHz Xeon E5-1620 v2, 12GB of DDR3 RAM, a 256GB PCI Express SSD and twin AMD FirePro D300 cards. It tops out at £7,779 for a 12-core system like ours with 64GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and in between there are options based on six- and eight-core Xeon E5 v2s.

Input, output

Whichever specification you opt for, though, you’ll get the same – rather impressive – array of external connectivity: twin Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3 ports, and six Thunderbolt 2 ports. Thunderbolt 2 is no faster than the first version, but it enables channel aggregation, so where the original Thunderbolt allowed no device to able to use more than 10Gbits/sec up and down, on the Mac Pro, those channels can be lumped together, giving up to 20Gbits/sec in either direction.

What this means is the Mac Pro doesn’t only possess the capability to shunt around a huge amount of data very quickly, but since Thunderbolt also allows monitor connections, it’s also possible to hook up higher resolution displays. In the case of the Mac Pro, it’s possible to connect up to three 4K monitors simultaneously via its Thunderbolt ports – one for your video-editing window, one for your full-screen 4K preview and one for your 4K email client. If the budget won’t stretch quite as far as three 4K monitors, however, you can drop down to 2,560 x 1,440 and hook up six of those instead.

Whichever way you look at it, though, when it comes to raw data-shunting prowess, the Mac Pro is an absolute beast, and that includes the 512GB Samsung SSD. As mentioned above, it’s connected to the PCI Express bus, and Apple claims throughput up to 1GB/sec. Testing with AS SSD under Windows 8, we achieved close to these claims, with maximum sequential read and write rates of 1080MB/sec and 850MB/sec, speeds far in excess of anything we’ve seen from a SATA/600 drive.

Benchmarking the Mac Pro

With so much power to burn in all sectors, it was going to take more than just our standard tests to push the Mac Pro to the limits, and so it proved. Initial results had us puzzled, however. In our Real World Benchmark suite under Windows 8, the Mac Pro achieved an overall score of only 1.31.

We say “only”, because despite the 12 cores in our test system, which with HyperThreading appear as 24 logical cores to the OS, this isn’t the fastest Real Word Benchmark result we’ve seen. That accolade belongs to the Chillblast Photo OC V, which gained 1.43 overall with its overclocked, six-core, 4.5GHz Intel Core i7-4930K Ivy Bridge-E CPU.

Why is this? The answer is simple. The majority of the applications in our test suite are single-threaded – Sony Vegas Pro and Cinebench being the exceptions – and thus unable to take full advantage of all the Mac Pro’s cores. With a clock speed much lower than the Chillblast’s 4.5GHz Intel Core i7-4930K, therefore, it winds up being slower in those non-multicore tests.

Compare only the intensively multi-threaded Sony Vegas Pro test, however, and the Mac Pro streaks ahead. In the video-rendering test it cranked out a score of 2.39 – a full 10% faster than the Chillblast.

It isn’t all about the CPU with the Mac Pro, though. Remember those twin GPUs? They’re not there for window dressing, nor are they there for gaming. They’re there to provide extra horsepower – to process video effects, help churn through heavy-duty video-rendering jobs, complex number-crunching tasks and 3D rendering jobs in double-quick time. But they’re no good if the software you’re running isn’t aware of them.

Alas, our benchmark suite doesn’t help much here either. To really show off what the Mac Pro can do, you need software specifically written to take advantage of both GPUs. So first, we switched back to OS X Mavericks and loaded up the latest version of Final Cut Pro X, which Apple has tweaked to take full advantage of the Mac Pro’s dual-GPU grunt.

Final Cut Pro X is intelligent about how it uses the CPU and GPUs, employing the Mac Pro’s dual D700s not only to speed up rendering, but also to distribute the compute load so the editing system remains responsive, even with rendering and effects processing jobs churning away in the background.

To give you an idea of what this means in terms of a real-life editing task, we carried out a quick stress test. We added three 1080p video clips to the timeline, adjusted the opacity of each one, to force the preview engine to show them all at once, then applied a total of 24 effects, plus sharpening and colour correction. For a final touch, we overlaid a 4K video clip, adjusted its opacity, and then hit play.

This sort of effect and clip-stacking doesn’t represent a particularly realistic video-editing workload, but it would bring most video-editing software and hardware combinations to their knees. The Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro X, however, were able play a full-resolution preview of this project relatively smoothly, and when we kicked off a full render in the background, we were able to continue editing with barely a hitch in performance.

As another illustration of the potential of the Mac Pro’s dual-GPU setup, we ran our benchmark on Sony Vegas Pro 12, which features improved GPU acceleration over the PC Pro benchmark version (Vegas Pro 10). In this test the Mac Pro finished the render in a mere 32 seconds. That’s twice as fast as with Vegas Pro 10.

Once again, it’s worth reiterating that, while this was all going on, the Mac Pro remained whisper quiet and never more than warm to the touch.

Verdict

The Mac Pro is a hugely impressive hardware, of that there is no doubt. It isn’t unique in offering this level of power, but to do so in such a compact and efficient package is a truly impressive feat of engineering. To our knowledge, there isn’t any other workstation machine that’s as compact and portable, or as quiet. It’s an unparalleled triumph in this regard.

For that reason, and that reason alone, we can see an awful lot of individuals and businesses seriously considering purchasing a Mac Pro. Imagine being able to edit multiple streams of 4K video on location, while shooting TV programs or films, without having to ferry footage back to the studio. The sheer logistical advantage of using a Mac Pro over and above, say, a full-sized desktop tower is difficult to ignore.

The real killer blow for the Mac Pro’s rivals, however, is likely to be that Apple has managed to squeeze in all this custom engineering and potency at a price that doesn’t – at least in comparison to equivalent workstation-class desktops – break the bank. If you need a workstation-class machine, especially if your software can take advantage of the dual GPUs, the Mac Pro simply has to be on your short list.

Warranty
Warranty	1 yr return to base
Basic specifications
Total hard disk capacity	512GB
RAM capacity	32.00GB
Processor
CPU family	Intel Xeon
CPU nominal frequency	2.70GHz
Processor socket	FCLGA2011
HSF (heatsink-fan)	Apple thermal core
Motherboard
Conventional PCI slots free	0
Conventional PCI slots total	0
PCI-E x16 slots free	0
PCI-E x16 slots total	0
PCI-E x8 slots free	0
PCI-E x8 slots total	0
PCI-E x4 slots free	0
PCI-E x4 slots total	0
PCI-E x1 slots free	0
PCI-E x1 slots total	0
Internal SATA connectors	0
Internal SAS connectors	0
Internal PATA connectors	0
Internal floppy connectors	0
Wired adapter speed	1,000Mbits/sec
Memory
Memory type	DDR3 ECC
Memory sockets free	0
Memory sockets total	4
Graphics card
Graphics card	AMD FirePro D700
Multiple SLI/CrossFire cards?	yes
Graphics card RAM	6.00GB
DVI-I outputs	0
HDMI outputs	1
VGA (D-SUB) outputs	0
DisplayPort outputs	0
Number of graphics cards	2
Hard disk
Hard disk	Apple SSD SM0512F
Capacity	512GB
Case
Dimensions	167 x 167 x 251mm (WDH)
Free drive bays
Free front panel 5.25in bays	0
Rear ports
PS/2 mouse port	no
3.5mm audio jacks	2
Operating system and software
OS family	Mac OS X
Noise and power
Idle power consumption	49W
Peak power consumption	420W
Performance tests
Overall Real World Benchmark score	1.31
Responsiveness score	1.01
Media score	1.37
Multitasking score	1.55