It's finally here. We've been
waiting for Apple's new high-end Mac since
the summer of 2012, when a user
emailed Tim Cook about the apparent neglect of the Mac Pro range and was
promised "something really great for later next year".
A year and a half on it finally
arrived, but was Apple's late 2013 Mac Pro worth the wait?
If you'd rather not take the
Apple path, there are plenty of high-end Windows PCs to choose
from. Overclockers Gold Rush Gamer Pro gives a great gaming
performance, and has a 250GB solid state drive. The Aria Gladiator Diablo
GTX is great value for money but runs a little noisily, and the PC
Specialist Vanquish Eclipse 670 MKII features a built-in Blu-ray drive,
unlike the Mac Pro, which has no optical drive at all.
At first glance, the most
striking thing about the new Mac Pro is the radical redesign of its casing.
It's just 9.9 inches tall and just over 6.5 inches in diameter. By volume, it's
an eighth the size of the previous-generation Mac Pro, and only a little
over a quarter of the weight. But its smaller size doesn't mean it puts in a
pint-sized performance...
It features the latest Intel Xeon
processors, quad-core or six-core off the shelf. Eight-core and 12-core
processors are available as custom options if you buy from the Apple Online
Store, but there's no option for two processors. Its two AMD FirePro GPUs
deliver up to eight times the graphical performance of the previous-generation
Mac Pros, though to be fair, when the 2012 Mac Pro went off sale early last
year due to an amended EU safety regulation, the graphics card it offered was
already well out of date.
Unsurprisingly given its compact
size and the way Macs have developed over the last few years, storage is solid
state. Equally unsurprisingly, there's no optical drive. If you still use CDs
and DVDs, you'll have to invest in a USB SuperDrive or similar external disc
drive.
Specification:
At the heart of the new Mac Pro
is the thermal core, a unified heat sink around which the processor board and
two graphics processor boards are attached. Where the previous Mac Pro had
eight separate fans, the new Mac Pro only has one. It draws air through the
base and out through the top of the casing, over the heat sink that stretches
from the top of the Mac Pro to the bottom.
Apple is known for its delightful
design features, and the new Mac Pro is no exception. Turn the Mac Pro to get
at the expansion ports around the back (as far as a cylindrical casing can be
said to have a 'back'), and they all light up. Even if the Mac Pro isn't
currently powered up, the ports are lit so you can plug in or disconnect peripherals.
Leave it still for a few seconds, and the light fades to off again. Neat.
Most of the Mac Pro's main
expansion options are geared around external peripherals, so it has an
excellent range of data ports. There are four high-speed USB 3.0 ports, and six
– yes, six – Thunderbolt ports. These are based on the new Thunderbolt 2
protocol, which combines the two 10Gbs channels offered by first-generation
Thunderbolt into one 20Gbs bi-directional channel, making it ideal for
streaming large amounts of data, such as 4K video. As up to six Thunderbolt
peripherals can be daisy-chained to each port, the Mac Pro can support up to 36
Thunderbolt devices at once. You can, of course, use Mini DisplayPort monitors
in a Thunderbolt port, and with adapters (sold separately), you can also
connect your old FireWire peripherals.
There's also a HDMI port and two
Gigabit Ethernet sockets, but don't expect an SD card reader. For wireless
connectivity, there's 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.
Every system ships with dual
GPUs. Off the shelf, these are Dual AMD FirePro D300 or D500 cards, but you can
custom-configure them up to D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM on the Apple
Online Store. Likewise, the processor (a Xeon E5) starts at a quad-core 3.7GHz,
but it can be upgraded as high as a 12-core 2.7GHz chip. Memory is
industry-standard, so can be user-upgraded. Up to 64GB can be installed.
The Mac Pro reviewed here has a
3GHz, eight-core Xeon E5 with twin AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, 64GB of RAM and 1TB
of PCIe-based flash storage. The two off-the-shelf Mac Pros cost £2,499 (USD
$2,999, AUD $3,999) and £3,299 (USD $3,999, AUD $5,299) respectively, but the
custom options included in this review model drive the price up to £6,579 (USD
$8,099, AUD $10,229).
Benchmarks:
Geekbench 3 single core: 3656
Geekbench 3 multicore: 25490
Handbrake: 15 mins 60 secs
Boot Time: 18 secs
Cinebench R10 Single core: 5895
Cinebench R10 Multicore: 34141
Cinebench R15 OpenGL: 88.37 FPS
Cinebench R15 CPU: 1180 cb
Unigine Heaven 4.0, FPS: 27.6
Unigine Heaven 4.0, Score: 695
Arkham City, 1080: 79 FPS
Arkham City, Native (4K): 48 FPS
Blackmagic Read: 869.6
Blackmagic Write: 951.7
NovaBench, Score: 2342
NovaBench, RAM: 311
NovaBench, CPU: 1418
NovaBench, Graphics: 545
NovaBench, Hardware: 68
As you'd expect from a high-end
Mac Pro – especially a custom-enhanced model such as the one on review here –
performance is excellent.
The new 2013 Mac Pro can drive up
to three 4K monitors at once. That's three screens, each with a pixel
resolution of 3840x2160, four times that of high-definition 1080 screens.
Software that's optimised to take advantage of the two graphics cards really
flies. Its fast flash storage is ideal for video editors too. The latest
release of Apple's own Final Cut Pro X is designed to take full advantage of
the power offered by the new Mac Pro.
Using its multi-cam feature, on
the new Mac Pro you can view nine feeds of 4K video at once, with no stuttering
or lag. The previous generation of Mac Pro could manage four. Video editors who
work in Ultra HD will experience a hands-on immediacy that simply wasn't
possible before.
According to Apple, the new Mac
Pro 'redefines what it means to be expandable'. Whereas the last generation
could be expanded by opening the casing and fitting new hard drives, replacing
the graphics card or adding new PCI Express cards, the new Mac Pro's expansion
options are largely focussed on its four USB 3.0 ports and six Thunderbolt 2
ports on three Thunderbolt controllers (this is the first time more than a
single controller has been used on a Mac).
That's not to say the new Mac
Pro's internal components can't be upgraded. At the flick of a switch the
cylindrical cover can be removed, exposing the graphics and processor boards
within.
The solid state drive can be
removed and slotted into a different Mac Pro. If you have a Mac Pro at home and
another at work, you can use the same SSD in both, effectively carrying your
computer in your pocket with minimal disassembly. As welcome as this is, some
might bemoan the lack of opportunities for internal expansion. Although the
Thunderbolt 2 port has enough bandwidth to make performance a non-issue in this
respect, adding (for example) extra storage on a new Mac Pro demands an
external drive, with its own power supply and desk space. The tower models that
preceded it offered four internal bays, where you could slot relatively cheap
bare drives, with no clutter and no extra power supply needed.
Because Apple wisely made the new
Mac Pro's graphics cards and SSD user-removable, it's theoretically possible to
upgrade these internal components by replacing the ones supplied. But at the
time of writing there's nothing on the market to replace them with. It's
possible third-party manufacturers will release Mac Pro-specific components in
the future, but as it wouldn't be possible to use them in anything other than a
Mac Pro, they might be reluctant to make the investment. RAM is
industry-standard, and can be added or replaced by the end user.
Like the Core series chips, the
Xeon E5 processor used here offers Hyper Threading and Turbo Boost features.
Hyper Threading means each of its eight cores can run two threads
simultaneously, for 16 virtual cores, and at times of high processing needs, Turbo
Boost takes the clock speed from 3GHz to up to 3.9GHz.
The new technologies certainly
proved their worth in our benchmarking tests, as you can see from the results
above, but it's worth noting that three of our four graphics test – the Batman:
Arkham City frame rate test, the Cinebench tests and the Unigine Heaven test –
can at present only use one of the two graphics processors. No doubt they – and
third-party Mac applications built for the pro user – will be optimised to get
the most out of the new machine soon. In the Novabench test, which does use
both GPUs, the new Mac Pro was over 56% up on an iMac custom-configured with an
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M, the top-of-the-range graphics option in a Mac other
than the Mac Pro.
Conclusion:
According to Apple, the new Mac
Pro redefines what is meant by expandability. This is achieved by using three
Thunderbolt controllers, six Thunderbolt 2 ports and four USB 3.0 ports. The
new Mac Pro is expanded by adding external peripherals rather than internal
components, though the graphics cards, solid state storage and memory sticks
are user replaceable.The new Mac Pro is around an eighth of the size of the
previous generation by volume and a quarter of the weight. Because its
components are built around a single thermal core, only one fan is needed.
Therefore it's quiet enough to use on top of your desk instead of under it. Its
small footprint and great looks mean it's very welcome as a desktop computer
too.
