Apple Mac Pro review

What is the Apple Mac Pro?

The Mac Pro is that computer you would dearly love to own, but probably never will. Not only is it expensive, with the base-spec leaving you no change from £2,500, it's not really a consumer PC. 

You could use it as such, but the dual AMD FirePro graphics and numerous options, topping out with a 12-core CPU and 64GB RAM shows this is no ordinary PC. It's a PC meant for sound engineers, video editors, and other creative professionals - basically anyone who needs a standard desktop that can handle serious intensive work. 

In other words the Mac Pro is, in the old school parlance, a workstation. But it is nothing like any workstation you've seen before. The Mac Pro is one of those great moments where form and function are totally at one, and that's a very exciting thing indeed.

Apple Mac Pro: Design & Features

The Mac Pro wills you to just stop and stare a while. We don't get too many visitors to our corner of TrustedReviews towers, but the Mac Pro has seen assorted randoms pop by for a peek and nose around. We felt duty bound to oblige. 

In this sense the Mac Pro is the best kind of Apple product, one that makes even the most ardent Apple detractors nod approvingly.

To understand why you need to appreciate how much power is crammed inside the Mac Pro, and how astounding it is considering it's about the same height and width as an iPad Air. Sure, it looks lovely on the outside and it's easy to admire that, but it's what's going on inside that's really interesting.

No matter which version of the Mac Pro you start with you will always get two GPUs. In the base-spec it's two 2GB AMD FirePro D300 cards, which are joined by a quad-core 3.7GHz Intel Xeon E5 processor, 12GB 1,866MHz DDR3 ECC memory and 256GB PCI-e flash storage. To fit that much hardware into a PC this size is a serious feat of engineering.




To do so Apple has designed a custom 'thermal core' for the Mac Pro. The inside of the Mac Pro is basically one giant heat sink that runs from top to bottom with the two GPUs and the motherboard bolted to it. 

This core combines with a single large fan at the top to draw cool air in from the bottom to and kick it out the top. It's an incredibly efficient system that, not matter what we threw at it, always kept the Mac Pro running cool, and with barely a whisper of fan noise.

There are some other nice design flourishes, too. The design of the 'trash can' exterior means it's very easy to simply pick up and carry your Mac Pro somewhere else. 

It weighs 5kg, which is heavier than you expect when you look at it - but is very light by workstation or even standard desktop PC standards. You really could pop it in a bag and take it to wherever you need to use it. It also, dare we say it, makes it very easy to steal as there's locking mechanism to secure the Mac Pro to a desk.

The other thing we like is how easy it is to take the casing on and off. It slides on and off with ease with a single switch locking it into place. Inside the RAM and flash storage is user accessible and replaceable. The GPUs aren't user replaceable per se given they're custom designed for the Mac Pro, but they are removable and Apple hasn't ruled out offering upgrades in future.

Apple Mac Pro: Connections

At the rear is a decent selection of I/O ports dominated by the six Thunderbolt 2.0 ports. We'll cover these in a little more detail later on, but Thunderbolt 2.0 offers a maximum 20Gb/s throughput and can support up to 36 daisy-chained peripherals.

There are four USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and also an HDMI port. Sadly, however, the HDMI port is only a version 1.4 port, not 2.0. This means it can't support 4K resolution at 60fps without some compromise in colour sampling, a common issue with most current 4K TVs with the exception of the Panasonic L65WT600. 

Indeed, Panasonic is the only company to have an HDMI 2.0 decoding chip, which is why it's the only company to offer it on its products. All is not lost, however, as the DisplayPort supports 4K without any restrictions, and each Thunderbolt port doubles as a Mini DisplayPort connection.




The Mac Pro supports up to three 4K resolution screens connected at once, or up to six non-4K monitors. If you think you need more than this then you're in a very exclusive club indeed.

Finally, inside there's Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless cards as you'd no doubt expect at this price. There's a combined optical/analog line out for audio, and a separate headphone jack. There's also a built-in speaker, which is a surprisingly welcome addition to ensure you don't have to plug in speakers or headphones to benefit from audible system alerts.

Apple Mac Pro: Setup

While there isn't that much to setup per se with a Mac Pro, it's here that our first criticism of the system is exposed. Support for 4K monitors is, at present, a little lacking. 

A key purpose of the Mac Pro, among other things, is to act as the perfect 4K video editing PC -- it's the one thing Apple talks about most. As we'll get into in a moment, Apple's Final Cut Pro X software is specifically engineered with the Mac Pro in mind, to the point where it can handle some pretty astonishing workload levels with little in the way of inconvenience.

We hooked up Dell's 4K monitor (review coming soon) to the Mac Pro and while it works absolutely fine at native resolution, you get none of the 'HiDPI' modes available on Apple's MacBook Pro line-up.

What does this mean? It means that while the 4K resolution is fantastic for video and photo editing, UI elements are often a little small for comfort and are bound to cause eye strain for some. The only alternative at the moment is to use a scaled, lower resolution, which rather defeats the point of having a 4K monitor.

There are hacks around this problem, but none can guarantee you'll get an ideal experience that works perfectly. We suspect and hope that Apple will rectify this problem as more 4K monitors go on sale, but it's an irritating point that any early adopters will have to traverse to make the jump to 4K straight away.

Apple Mac Pro: Performance

Such issues begin to melt away once you start actually using the Mac Pro, however. Our system is the entry-level spec, but even it is a seriously powerful PC that cuts through intensive tasks with ease. 

We started our testing by running Geekbench 3. Our point of comparison for this test is our recent review of the Haswell revision of the 27-inch iMac -- a useful comparison in this case given we reviewed a top-spec config of the iMac that includes the fastest CPU and GPU option, which runs to £2,350 inc. VAT.

Geekbench 3 is predominantly a CPU benchmark, so we weren't especially surprised to discover that the iMac we tested (which had a 3.5GHz quad-core Core i7) nearly matched our Mac Pro (3.7GHz Xeon CPU) in this particular test. The Mac Pro scores 14,734 against the 14,462 of the iMac. These are both exceedingly high scores, but Geekbench 3 doesn't tap into the Mac Pro's true strength: its dual GPUs. 




For that you have to fire up Final Cut Pro. The real world benefit of the power and tight integration of software is that you can work with multiple videos streams in real time and apply effects to them in real time, reducing (and in most cases eliminating) the need to spend time rendering your changes. Your mileage will vary depending on the spec you choose and the kind of work you're doing, but with a top-spec Mac Pro (as 12-core CPU and the top-end FirePro D700 graphics) Apple claims you preview 16 4K video streams and apply effects in real time.

Ultimately, though, even with the entry-level spec you can view and apply effects to several HD and 4K video streams in real time -- a lower spec simply limits the numbers you can play with. Not only will this save videographers a great deal of time and money, it ultimately means you can spend more time editing and experimenting to get the perfect result knowing you aren't constrained by the time needed to render.

This is great if you're using Final Cut Pro, but it's a reminder that you really need software support to make the most of the power inside the Mac Pro. Apple's Final Cut is the best example of a program that makes best use of the dual GPUs on-board, but you shouldn't assume that the programs you use every day will do the same. Support will improve over time, of course, but it's worth checking before you buy to decide whether it's worth waiting.




In theory the Mac Pro ought to make an impressive (though not outstanding) gaming machine, too. This is limited, however, by the same issue mentioned above: its performance is totally dependent on the individual game addressing the two GPUs present as by default. This rules out our usual cross-platform game benchmark, the very strenuous Unigine Heaven benchmark, which only saw one card.

There is a workaround, though, because by Bootcamping and installing Windows you can rely on the universal dual GPU support offered by AMD's Crossfire drivers. Sadly we didn't have enough time before Apple snatched our review sample back to test this out, but others have and verified that it works a charm.

The final piece to consider in the Mac Pro's performance is the SSD. Like all Macs now, it uses a PCIe bus to dodge the bottleneck of the SATA interface that is now too slow to accommodate the fastest SSDs. It's easy to see why as our SSD read and write test recorded 797MB/s write speeds and 940MB/s read speeds. No bottleneck there, then.

Apple Mac Pro: Heat & Noise

We love all this raw power, but the truly mind bending quality of the Mac Pro is how cool and quiet it remains while doing all of this. Even when you're pushing the system to its limits the most you'll hear is a soft, barely discernable whir. It's so quiet you won't hear it over the top of the air con and general background noise in any office.

To verify this fact we ran a stress test overnight. We returned the following morning to find the Mac Pro still running as stable as when we left, and was still so quiet we could only hear it by putting our ear to the top, where the air escapes. The case does get mildly warm, but in our experience never so hot to be dangerous or even uncomfortable to touch.

Apple Mac Pro - Options

As with most Macs there are just a couple of base specs to the Mac Pro, but plenty of upgrades available. Our test model is the entry-level version, which has a 3.7GHz Intel Xeon E5, 12GB of ECC memory, two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB memory and a 256GB PCIe SSD.

If you're a heavy Photoshop and After Effects users, this is likely enough for you. The two D300 GPUs are very effective for image work and handle most video editing workflows well, though it's worth looking further up the range if your video duties are heavier or if you're doing 3D graphics work. If it's the latter you should probably be looking at the top-end D700 cards.

CPU options include 6-core (3.5GHz), 8-core (3.0GHz) and 12-core (2.7GHz) Xeon processors, though each step up results in a slightly lower clock speed. This isn't a problem if the programs you're running are heavily multi-threaded, but it does mean single-threaded ones run slower on the more expensive CPUs.

Memory options run from 12GB up to 64GB, all of which is 1,866MHz DDR ECC memory. The RAM slots are standard though and user accessible, so you can easily upgrade these yourself if you so choose -- as ever it's cheaper to do it yourself.



The memory modules pop out easily

The GPU options are 'custom' cards made specifically for the Mac Pro, namely with 2GB D300, 3GB D500 and 6GB D700 memory. These are basically slightly down-clocked versions of AMD's FirePro cards, but they're all very capable cards in the right context. The key difference, apart from clock speeds, between these and AMD's standard desktop FirePro cards, is the lack of ECC memory. This won't matter a jot to Apple's target market of video and creative professionals, but it does rule out the Mac Pro for most scientific uses where any data corruption and errors are unacceptable. 

Where things get particularly interesting is storage. That's because the Mac Pro only ships with SSDs, the largest being a 1TB one that's a mere £640 upgrade on the 256GB standard one. As we've already noted they're seriously fast SSDs, but they do mean it's more or less essential to rely on external storage. This is where the Thunderbolt 2.0 comes in.



The SSD is a non-standard config, but third-party upgrades seem likely

One of the benefits of Thunderbolt 2.0 is it runs at a seriously fast 20Gb/s, double the first generation of Thunderbolt. This isn't fast enough to match a PCIe connection, which could cause a problem for anyone who needs to use external cards (GPUs, audio cards etc.), but it's more than fast enough to provide extremely fast external storage for those who need it. The ability to daisy chain peripherals means you can have up to 36 Thunderbolt devices connected to the six Thunderbolt ports, though good luck keeping track of all them.

There's always some debate about the extra expense compared to internal RAID setups in existing desktops, and it will mean additional cost for those upgrading from old Mac Pros, but the benefit is any external Thunderbolt storage you use is also compatible with any Mac. This means you can take your work with you and carry on where you left off without any bottlenecks. On balance it seems an acceptable compromise with some useful benefits, and of course it's one of the key reasons Apple can make the Mac Pro as small, quiet and efficient as it is.



What, if any, GPU upgrades Apple will offer is unknown.

Other things to consider

One thing your £2,500 won't get you is a mouse or keyboard. Neither is supplied as standard. In one sense this is annoying, but if you're a pro you probably have peripherals you have and like, and have no intention of trading in. It's not a big deal.

A greater concern is the upgradability of the Mac Pro. The memory is easy to upgrade and the SSD is user accessible, though it's a non-standard part. But the GPUs are neither standard nor particularly accessible. 

They're accessible in the sense that you can disassemble the Mac Pro entirely, but they're non-standard cards you can't buy right now. Apple has been fairly non-committal on its plans to offer GPU upgrades. It hasn't ruled it out, but neither has it committed to doing so.

This is no doubt a concern for those who feel they'll want to trade-up to faster GPUs in three or four years’ time, but don't want to trade in for a new Mac Pro. Apple might counter that many in the movie business lease rather than buy Mac Pros outright, but that's only one subset of a much larger market. If you're buying a Mac Pro outright, upgrade options have to be concern and it's one we'd like to see Apple be clearer on.

Should I buy the Apple Mac Pro?

As noted right at the beginning of the review, the Mac Pro is for a very specific kind of person. This is both a good and a bad thing. Apple has clearly targeted video pros as the key market, and provided you're an Apple and Final Cut Pro user, the Mac Pro is an absolute must-buy. It's an equally good buy for any particularly demanding photo editor, though the entry-level spec will likely suffice for most.

The only caveat, as we've repeated several times before, is application support. If what you're using can't address the two GPUs, upgrading straight away doesn't make a great deal of sense. Equally, the true strength of the Mac Pro is the dual GPU setup, but this benefit is moot if you're predominantly running CPU-limited programs. Apple is betting the farm on GPU acceleration being the future for workstation level computing, but support (and confidence in) GPU processing won't happen overnight. It depends very strongly on the field you're working in.

But none of these points make the Mac Pro any less of a triumphant product. The engineering and design behind it are nothing short of astounding. The power is impressive, but it's the stability, coolness and near-silent operation that will really floor you. And while the Mac Pro is expensive from an 'ordinary' perspective, for a workstation it's by no means extortionate and it delivers something no other can match.

Verdict

Apple has redefined what a workstation can be with the Mac Pro. It's not for everyone, but it delivers handsomely on what it sets out to do and sets a new standard for what's possible in a desktop computer.