The Best Desktop Workstation Ever

DESIGN AND FEATURES

The new Mac Pro is an all-aluminum
cylinder measuring 9.9 inches tall and
6.6 inches in diameter, and weighing
10.93 pounds. Though it appears to be
burnished black in photos, Apple calls
its color “Space Grey”—almost a cross
between obsidian and polished chrome.
The chassis is formed whole from a
single billet of aluminum, shaped
through several advanced
manufacturing processes to have just
the right shape, feel, and finish. The
milled edges of the top and the window
for port access are not simply cut into
the metal once; they are then cut and
polished, for edges that are smooth to
the touch. The lock that keeps the cover
in place is almost invisible but smooth to operate.
It’s a futuristic look indeed; from the first unveiling to
the subsequent ads and private briefings, Apple has
pushed the idea that this is the design of the future.
Central to this sleek rethinking are two new concepts.
The first is Apple’s new Unified Thermal Core, which

leverages both materials and design for cooling hot
components. The Mac Pro’s internal components are
mounted onto a triangular aluminum frame that serves
as the primary heat sink for the processor and graphics,
with heat-dissipating vanes further enhancing cooling.
Sitting on top of the whole thing is an exhaust fan,
which pulls air up from intakes on the bottom of the
case and pumps it out through the top.
The second concept is one of peripherals
over upgrades. Apple’s new paradigm does
away with the easily accessible drive bays and
swappable graphics cards of previous models
in favor of an external, modular approach.
About all you can upgrade are the RAM in the
four DIMM slots and the PCIe-based flash
storage. Anything else you want to add must
be done via the rear ports: four USB 3.0, six
Thunderbolt 2.0 (each offering up to 20GBps
of throughput, for connecting up to three 4K
displays or six regular Thunderbolt displays,
external storage, and more), two Gigabit
Ethernet, HDMI, and headphone and audio
line out jacks. The rear panel containing these
ports lights up for easy visibility.
Finally, the Mac Pro has the latest wireless
connectivity options, with Bluetooth 4.0 and
802.11ac Wi-Fi, the new faster connectivity
standard set to eventually replace 802.11n.
This helps further futureproof the Mac Pro,
assuming the CPU and GPUs don’t ever need
an upgrade until you’re ready to replace the
whole system and hand it down.

CONFIGURATIONS

Every configuration of the new Mac Pro comes outfitted with a single Intel Xeon
E5 workstation-class processor, designed to offer plenty of raw processing
power with minimal latency and maximum throughput, along with two AMD
FirePro graphics cards. Unlike consumer graphics cards, which are optimized
for gaming and multimedia, professional GPUs are designed to offer powerful
and reliable processing for media editing and creation programs, engineering
tools (such as CAD), and to drive multiple displays for enhanced productivity.
The entry-level Mac Pro ($2,999) comes with a quad-core Intel Xeon E5
processor and 12GB of RAM, two FirePro D300 graphics cards (each with 2GB
of dedicated memory), and 128GB of local flash storage. At the other end of the
spectrum, a Mac Pro kitted out with the best of everything rings up at $9,566: a
12-core Intel Xeon E5 CPU, 64GB of RAM, two AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, and
1TB of flash memory.
Our $6,799 review unit fell somewhere in between, with a 3GHz eight-core
Intel Xeon E5-1680 v2 processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of flash storage, and two
AMD FirePro D700 GPUs (with 6GB of dedicated memory each).
Apple covers the Mac Pro with a one-year warranty, and offers 90-days of free
telephone support. Though this is the standard for Apple products, it falls far
short of industry norms, with other workstations from HP and Dell being
covered by three-year warranties. AppleCare+, Apple’s extended warranty
service, will extend that warranty and technical support up to three years from
the initial purchase date for $249.

SOFTWARE

The Mac Pro comes preinstalled with OS X Mavericks, which includes all of the
same iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand) and iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
software that comes with a new consumer-level Mac. This is basic business
software that you would need to purchase separately for a new Windows
workstation, but Apple now includes it for free with every new Mac. Also free is
the latest version of Final Cut Pro for taking advantage of the Mac Pro’s 4K
video capabilities with features such as the simultaneous editing of multiple
video angles, or the option of viewing footage in full 4K on one display while
editing said footage on another.

PERFORMANCE

Peel back the slick marketing and fancy design, and you’ll find that the Mac Pro
is still a potent work machine, built to offer the sort of performance that
professionals need. In CineBench, the Mac Pro scored 13.54—the best score
we’ve seen among single-CPU workstations. It easily outpaced the Dell
Precision T3610 (7.44) and HP Z420 (7.21), but fell behind the Lenovo
ThinkStation D30 (25.31), which uses two eight-core Xeon processors.
The Mac Pro also made short work of multimedia benchmark tests, finishing
Handbrake in 29 seconds and cranking through Photoshop in 3 minutes 3
seconds. The Photoshop performance isn’t shabby, but it is more toward the
middle of the pack than expected—the Lenovo ThinkStation
D30 edged ahead (2:55), and the Dell Precision T3610 fell just
behind (3:16).
With its two graphics cards, the Mac Pro also offered solid
performance in our Heaven 3D gaming test.
Set to 1,366-by-768 resolution, the Mac Pro pumped out 113 frames per
second (fps), ahead of Dell’s and HP’s workstations (which
scored 67fps and 40fps, respectively). The Nvidia-equipped
iMac came closer, with 108fps, and the dual-GPU
gamingoriented systems pulled further ahead, with Maingear’s GTX
Titan–loaded F131 Super Stock leading with 288fps. Even
when I increased the resolution to 1,920 by 1,080 and
cranked up all the detail settings, the Mac Pro still held its
own, its 41fps result putting it ahead of every workstation,
but again falling behind the high-end gaming rigs.
To push the Mac Pro a little harder than our regular testing does, I ran our
Heaven benchmark test again, this time ramping up as far past our regular
settings, with full 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,160, the maximum resolution
offered on the Asus PQ321 monitor), and detail settings maxed out. The frame
rates dropped to 10fps, but even during this test the Mac Pro was virtually
silent. The portable hard drive I plugged into the back made more discernible
noise than the system itself did. Although the Mac Pro didn’t get louder, it did
get warmer, with its exterior reaching 96° F, and air from the top exhaust
hitting 106°.

CONCLUSION

Beneath the blank, inscrutable surface of the Mac Pro, there’s a lot going on,
from the potent processor and graphics hardware to the completely new
approach to hardware expansion. The Mac Pro is expensive, its one-year
warranty and 90-day tech support terms are lackluster, and the lack of internal
expansion will force many professionals to change how they approach their
work. But the Mac Pro offers some of the most exciting updates to desktop
design we’ve seen, and backs it up with powerful professional-grade
performance. The system is our new Editors’ Choice for single-processor
workstations, and one of the best high-end desktops we’ve seen in years.