Apple Mac Pro (late 2013) review

If the desktop market is doomed, nobody seems to have told Apple. With its long-awaited update to the Mac Pro, Apple has crafted a desktop computer that’s both staggeringly beautiful and desirable. In fact, it’s the only desktop computer we’ve ever seen that attracted a crowd to watch us unboxing it.

As soon as we saw it, it begged the question, why can’t all desktops look this good? Its cylindrical body, finished in polished aluminium looks absolutely stunning and, until you’ve seen one in the flesh, it’s hard to believe just how small Apple has made it.

Of course, it’s got those nice touches that let you know that this is a product that has been thoughtfully designed, rather than just built: the power cable sits flush in the case thanks to its shield, and the ports light up when you move the computer so you can see what you’re plugging into where.

Our one slight disappointment is that you don’t even get a keyboard and mouse in the box. For a computer like this, we were kind of hoping that Apple would release a keyboard and mouse that matches the Mac Pro’s new colour scheme.

Beautiful as the computer is, the new design isn’t just there to look good. It’s also eminently practical and has let Apple distil the truly important part of a Mac Pro – power – into a tiny and quiet case. This truly is an end to big square boxes and hello to 21st century computing.

The added advantage of making a computer so small, is that it’s extremely portable. For people shooting 4K video professionally, it means that it’s now easy to carry around the editing kit, too, providing a way to check footage and make a first edit onsite. This kind of flexibility hasn’t been seen in a workstation before and certainly not in one that’s this powerful.

Thanks to the lip underneath the top of the Mac Pro, the computer is also extremely easy to pick up and move around. Our one piece of advice is to make sure that the case lock switch is engaged, otherwise picking the Mac Pro up this way will just release the outer casing, which could prove a costly mistake; fortunately, with the lock engaged, the outer case is completely secure.

MAC PRO INSIDE

Flick the unlock switch and disconnect all of the cables, and the slender metal exterior lifts off in a single smooth motion, unveiling the true smartness of Apple’s design. Rather than using a traditional desktop layout, the Mac Pro consists of three circuit boards arranged standing up, with a triangular footprint. On the boards are the CPU, dual graphics cards, memory and SSD.

The beauty of this layout is that there’s a single thermal core, requiring a single fan to cool it. The fan draws air up through the bottom vents and out of the top, shifting hot air out of the computer. A single fan in any desktop computer is impressive, but when you’re talking about a machine with an Intel Xeon E5 processor and dual GPU graphics, that’s actually quite staggering. And, boy does it work: in operation, the Mac Pro is super quiet; even at high loads, you’d have to strain to hear the fan over office air conditioning.

Impressively, the new internal design doesn’t ruin or alter the upgradeability of the Mac Pro, with all four DIMM slots (four-channel DDR3, supporting up to 64GB of 1,866MHz DDR3) and the PCI-E SSD drive (models from 256GB to 1TB supported) all accessible. At some point in the future it may be possible to upgrade the graphics cards and CPU, too.

Size means that there’s no enough space for any more storage and certainly no mechanical disks if that’s the way you want to go. That’s nothing to worry about, as expanding externally is now the way to do things, without any compromise on quality or speed.

To that end, the Mac Pro has six Thunderbolt 2 ports, powered by three individual Thunderbolt controllers, each capable of delivering 20Gbit/s throughput. On top of that you get four USB3 ports, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, so you can connect to a LAN and storage network at the same time. Given the speed and convenience of external storage, there’s simply no need to have a bigger desktop in order to accommodate more internal storage.

MAC PRO PERFORMANCE

As you’ve probably guessed from the specs we’ve mentioned so far, the Mac Pro is aimed at professionals and prosumers that require and demand the best performance. Primarily that’s a creative audience, with photographers and video editors top of the list of people that will want it.

For video editors in particular, the Mac Pro could well be the computer they need, as it’s designed for 4K workflow. As well as providing super-fast external storage and connection to other peripherals, Thunderbolt can also be used to drive displays (it’s Mini DisplayPort compatible), with the Mac Pro supporting up to three 4K displays. If you don’t mind a little less resolution, you can use six 2,560×1,600 monitors instead. In addition, there’s an HDMI 1.4 output, which supports 4K at 24p, so you can hook up a TV as monitor.

Then, there’s the power of the components. The base-level computer has a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 CPU, a 256GB SSD, 12GB of RAM and dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. There are plenty of expansion options, including six-core, eight-core and 12-core CPUs, up to 64GB RAM, up to 1TB of storage and AMD FirePro D500 or D700 GPUs. In other words, even the most hardcore computer user will be able to find the spec that suits them.

The thing about this kind of specification is finding something that can adequately test it. In our standard benchmarks, which run natively on Mac OS X, as well as Windows, the 3.7GHz quad-core version managed an overall score of 112, which is quick for a quad-core CPU.

To see what the Mac Pro was really capable of, we also run two copies of our benchmarks at the same time. This time, we achieved an impressive overall score of 68, showing that this computer really can take a lot.

Still, we wanted to know what a fully-loaded Mac Pro could do, so we also ran our benchmarks on the 12-core 2.7GHz Intel Xeon E5 version. In our standard benchmarks, a score of 125 isn’t that much faster than the quad-core version got. This is because the apps in our benchmarks find it hard to use all of the cores efficiently, and the 12-core version has a lower clock speed. However, running two copies of our benchmarks simultaneously showed just how incredibly powerful this computer was: it scored 112.

In other words, the 12-core Mac Pro can run two copies of our demanding tests and it’s the same speed as quad-core version. Fast doesn’t even begin to describe this computer.

MAC PRO FINAL CUT PRO X

Our benchmarks us open-source apps that are heavily dependent on the CPU, but this isn’t a particularly fair test of the Mac Pro. One of the advantages that Apple has over the competition is that it can optimise its software to run on its hardware. This is particularly true of the Mac Pro, where Apple has written Final Cut Pro X to take full advantage of the dual GPUs inside.

Most video editing applications are only capable, if at all, of offloading some of the work to a single GPU, using a second GPU for display only. With the Mac Pro, OS X and Final Cut Pro X, Apple can use both GPU’s simultaneously for processing.

What the cards are capable of depend on the models you choose, but getting specs for them is hard, because the GPUs are custom parts made specifically from Apple. A bit of investigation shows that the D300 is a Pitcairn-based GPU, with 1,280 stream processors, and 2GB of RAM. The closest AMD card available is a Firepro W7000, which has 4GB RAM and costs £600. In other words, the entry-level Mac Pro has around £1,200-worth of graphics cards.

The next step up is the Tahiti-based D500, which has 1,525 stream processors, a 384-bit memory bus and 2GB of RAM. There’s no identical AMD model, although the W8000 is the closest, selling for around £1,000 each.

The Tahiti-based D700 is the top-of-the-range choice, with 2,048 stream processors, a 384-bit memory bus and 6GB RAM. It matches the W9000, which costs around £2,500 per card. So, buy the top-spec Apple GPUs and you’re opting for £5,000 of graphics.

So, what are these cards capable of? Using our entry-level Mac Pro, with a quad-core CPU and dual D300 graphics cards, we were deeply impressed. Dragging a 4K clip into Final Cut Pro X, we applied six effects in real-time, with the Mac Pro rendering them all seamlessly with no slow-down. That’s incredibly impressive, as it means that video editors can really work in real-time, without the need for proxy files or having to pre-render anything. Adjusting the effects produced a very slight slow-down in playback temporarily, but nothing to get upset about.

With a fully-fledged D700 system, you can go even further. Final Cut Pro X has a 4K multicam view, which lets you have up to 16 simultaneous streams, so you can pick the shot you want in real-time. We’ve seen it run this many streams, without a single bit of slow down.

In fact, taking our test 12-core Mac Pro and adding multiple 4K and 1080p clips, and applying lots of effects, we didn’t find a reasonable limit to the software: you’ll run out of effects you want to apply before the computer slows down. With the more powerful graphics cards, adjusting effects on the fly produced no noticeable slowdown.

MAC PRO SSD

Helping everything along is the super-fast SSD inside the Mac Pro. This uses a PCIe connector, rather than the SATA connectors inside most computers. The difference is that the PCIe interface is a lot faster, with Apple claiming that its new SSD is capable of throughputs of 1GB/sec. We have to say that the company is telling it straight, with benchmarks proving that this is the case.

As well as making it quicker to load large files and start applications, the fast SSD has a noticeable difference on boot times. In fact, restart the computer and you’ll miss everything if you blink. It’s great to see that Apple has worked on eradicating all potential bottlenecks inside its new PC.

MAC PRO PRICE AND CONCLUSION

There’s no getting away from the fact that the Mac Pro is expensive, with the base model starting at £2,499, rising to £7,779 for the fully-loaded model (plus, £3,499 per 4K monitor if you buy through Apple). However, compare it to similarly-specced workstations from HP or Lenovo and the Mac Pro comes out cheaper for a single purchase.

With HP or Lenovo, you’re getting a regular desktop computer, rather than the quieter, more practical design of the Mac Pro. On top of that the Mac Pro is a computer that really knows what it’s about: serious power for the professional market. Its combination of stunning raw performance, mixed with OS X and Final Cut Pro X’s ability to use both GPUs, means that this is a computer that can’t be rivalled – real-time 4K editing like this is beyond impressive.

It’s good news to see that there’s now an official Apple Kensington Lock Adaptor. While these locks can be snapped off with enough force, they generally tend to damage the product as well, ruining any chance of a thief selling them later on. With such an expensive computer, having a deterrent is a very useful thing indeed.

On top of all that, it’s the most attractive and desirable desktop computers that we’ve ever seen. If you need a workstation-class computer, the Mac Pro is a landmark computer and our Ultimate choice.