Apple picker For three long years, professionals have been waiting for a new generation of Mac Pro, because the previous one began to fall far behind the other Macs in Apple's portfolio. USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, none of this could be used by "pro" users for a long time. Already at last year's WWDC, the company finally revealed its new vision in the field of workstations with an unconventional appearance and great-looking parameters, although the cylindrical machine has only been reaching customers in recent weeks. As the Mac Pro is intended exclusively for professionals, we asked a friendly UK developer for a review, and he provided it to us after two weeks of use.
A large proportion of Mac Pro users are creative people who edit videos, create animations or do various graphic work on a daily basis. I am not a typical representative of this group of professionals. Instead, my work mostly revolves around compiling code, building the user experience, analyzing, and so on. Honestly, a decent iMac would do the job for many people, but with the new Mac Pro I can get to what I need much faster.
So why Mac Pro? Speed has always been the number one requirement for me, but the expansion of peripherals also played a big role. The previous Mac Pro I owned (Early 2010 model) had probably the most expansion ports and the most options for connecting external devices when it came out. Long before cloud storage was popular, I relied on fast external hard drives that I had collected over the years, including newer SSDs, and I could use them all with the Mac Pro. Creating RAID drives was easy on the old Mac Pro thanks to the flexibility and ability to use the internal hard drive slots, and the support for external devices via fast FireWire was a boon. This was not possible with any other Mac.
Design and Hardware
Like the previous model, the new Mac pro offers the widest configuration options of all Apple computers. The basic model, which costs 75 crowns, will offer a quad-core Intel Xeon E000 processor, 5 GHz, two AMD FirePro D3,7 graphics cards with 300 GB of memory and a fast 2 GB SSD disk. A Mac Pro is a once-in-a-lifetime investment for a professional, you won't be replacing it as often as a cell phone, and for my own needs it was impossible to settle for just the basic build. The configuration covered by this review will offer practically the highest performance that can be purchased from Apple - a 256-core Intel Xeon E12-5 v2697 2 MHz, 2700 GB 32 MHz DDR1866 RAM, a 3 TB SSD with a PCIe bus and a dual AMD FirePro D1 graphics card with 700GB of VRAM. The intention was that three 6K monitors would need to be powered in the future, and the additional graphics power was an obvious upgrade, as was the CPU's maximum compute cores for fast compilation and simulation.
The above configuration will cost a total of 225 crowns, which is not exactly a small investment even for seasoned professionals. However, if you consider only the hardware itself, the Mac Pro is not really expensive. Just as with hardware the whole is better than the sum of its parts, the same can be said for price. The processor alone costs 000 CZK, the equivalent FirePro W64 graphics card (D000 is just a modified version) costs 9000 per piece, and Apple uses two. The price of the processor and graphics card alone exceeds the price of a complete computer. With other components (SSD disk - approx. 700 CZK, RAM - 90 CZK, motherboard - 000 CZK,...) we could easily reach over 20 CZK. Is the Mac Pro still expensive?
The Mac Pro arrived a month and a half after the December order. The first impression was already made during the unpacking process, which is what Apple is notorious for. While most products don't feel like much when you unbox them and how many times do you end up tearing or destroying the box to even get to its contents, the experience with the Mac Pro was quite the opposite. He seems to actually want to get out of the box on his own without you having to try too hard.
The computer itself is the pinnacle of hardware engineering, at least as far as desktop "box" computers are concerned. Apple managed to fit its most powerful computer into a compact oval with a diameter of 16,7 cm and a height of 25 cm. The new Mac Pro would fit four times the space that the old boxed version would have filled.
Its surface is made of black anodized aluminum, which is incredibly shiny all over. The outer casing is removable and allows easy access to the insides of the computer. In the upper part, which looks a bit like a trash can, there is actually a vent for venting hot air, cold air from the surroundings is sucked in from the slits in the lower part. It's actually an ingenious cooling system, which we'll get to later. You can easily tell the front and back of the computer by the connectors. The Mac Pro rotates on its base, and when you turn it 180 degrees, the area around the ports lights up. You probably won't do this often, especially in the dark, but it's still a nice little trick.
Among the connectors you will find four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports (with double the throughput compared to the previous generation), two Ethernet ports (standard for Mac Pro), a common output for speakers with 5.1 audio support, and an input for a microphone, headphone output and HDMI. The Mac Pro also comes with a special network cable that blends into the back of the computer, but using a standard cable is not out of the question.
While the older Mac Pro was largely expandable with PCI slots and disk slots, the new model offers no such expansion. It's a price for significantly smaller dimensions, but it's not like Apple has completely ignored expandability. Instead, it is trying to push other manufacturers to switch to Thunderbolt, which is why it also has six ports. The Mac Pro is meant to be a sort of hub for all your expansions and external peripherals, rather than a box that holds them inside.
After removing the outer casing, which is possible by pushing the button on the edge that releases the casing, it is quite easy to get to the insides of the computer. Most of them are replaceable, just like Apple's more professional machines. The processor is embedded in a standard socket, the RAM can be easily removed and the graphics cards can also be replaced. However, if you plan to upgrade your Mac Pro like this in the future, keep in mind that most peripherals are custom made. For example, the graphics cards are modified versions of the FirePro from the W series, while the RAM has a special temperature sensor, without which the cooling would still be running at full capacity. You can thus upgrade only with peripherals exclusively compatible with Mac Pro.
To clarify, only the RAM is truly user-replaceable, the other components – SSD, processor, graphics cards – are bolted on using star-head screws and require more advanced assembly. The flash SSD is still easily accessible, screwed with only one screw on the outside of the board, but with a proprietary connector. However, at CES 2014, OWC announced the production of SSDs with this connector to fit Macs. Replacing the processor would be more work, namely disassembling one whole side, however, thanks to the standard LGA 2011 socket. Replacing the GPU is practically impossible, since Apple here uses custom-made cards to fit into the compact chassis of the Mac Pro.
One gets the feeling that Apple was inspired by origami, the motherboard is divided into three sections and bolted to a triangular cooling core. It's a clever design, but pretty obvious when you think about it. The way heat is drawn from the individual components and channeled into the top vent and blown out is hardware engineering genius, it's true.
First launch and first problems
The Mac Pro left me in awe as soon as I pressed the power button and connected the 4K Sharp monitor. I may have gotten used to hearing the constant hum that came from the old model, but judging by the silence, I had to check that the computer was actually running. No hum or sound of air flow was noticeable even when I put my ear closer. Without the assistance of the display, only the warm breeze flowing from the top of the computer gave away the running of the computer. The Mac Pro is truly dead quiet, and for the first time in years I could hear other sounds coming from the room that were drowned out by the old model's fan.
A rather pleasant surprise was the often neglected built-in speaker. On the original Mac Pro, the quality of the sound reproduction was not good at all, one would say lousy, especially since it came from inside the computer. When I plugged in the new Mac, I forgot to connect my external speakers, and when I played a video on my computer afterward, I was surprised by a clear, loud sound coming from behind the monitor where the Mac Pro was placed. While I would have expected a classically raspy sound, with the Mac Pro there was no way to tell that it was a speaker built inside. Here again, Apple's perfectionism can be seen. We see such a significant improvement of something so rarely used as the internal speaker from only a few manufacturers. The sound is so good, in fact, that I didn't even bother plugging in external speakers. Not that it will surpass a quality speaker, but if you are not producing music or video, it is more than sufficient.
The joy lasted until the moment when the data from the old machine had to be migrated. With a backup on an external hard drive (7200 rpm), I had a backup of about 600 GB ready, and after starting the Migration Assistant, I was greeted with a message that the transfer was complete in 81 hours. Since this was an attempt to transfer via Wi-Fi, I wasn't that surprised, and followed by trying to use Ethernet and backing up from a significantly faster SSD. The remaining 2 hours that the Migration Assistant reported was definitely more positive than the previous estimate, however after 16 hours with a still constant two hours to go I ran out of patience.
My hopes were now set on FireWire transfer, unfortunately the Mac Pro lacks the appropriate port, so a reducer had to be purchased from the nearest dealer. However, the next two lost hours of travel did not bring much fruit - the display remained unchanged for the next almost whole day with the estimate "around 40 hours". So two days were lost just transferring data and settings, all because of the absence of expansion slots and certain ports. The older Mac Pro didn't have Thunderbolt, while the new one didn't have FireWire.
In the end, the whole installation was solved in a way that I wouldn't really recommend to anyone. I had an unused SSD from an old Mac. So I took apart one external USB 3.0 drive and swapped it with my old solid state drive to connect it directly to the Mac Pro with a theoretical transfer rate of up to 5Gbps. After all the other attempts that cost a lot of time and money, after Time Machine, FireWire and an external USB 3.0 device failed, this DIY proved to be the most effective. After four hours, I finally managed to transfer 3.0 GB of files with a self-made external SSD drive with USB 600.
Performance
The domain of the new MacU Pro is undoubtedly its performance, which is provided by the Intel Xeon E5 processor on the Ivy Bridge architecture, a pair of AMD FirePro graphics cards and a significantly faster SSD using the PCIe bus with a higher throughput than SATA allowed. This is how the performance comparison of the old Mac Pro model (highest configuration, 12 cores) looks like with the new version measured by GeekBench:
The drive speed itself is also remarkable. After the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test, the average read speed was 897 MB/s and the write speed was 852 MB/s, see the figure below.
While Geekbench is good for general computer performance comparisons, it doesn't say much about the Mac Pro's performance itself. For a practical test, I took one of the larger projects in Xcode that I usually compile and compared the compile time on both machines. This particular project contains roughly 1000 source files including sub-projects and frameworks that are compiled as part of a single binary code. Each source file represents several hundred to several thousand lines of code.
The old Mac Pro compiled the entire project in a total of 24 seconds, while the new model took 18 seconds, a difference of around 25 percent for this particular task.
I notice an even greater speedup when working with XIB (format for Interface Builder in Xcode) files. On a 2010 Mac Pro it takes 7-8 seconds to open this file, then another 5 seconds to go back to browse the source files. The new Mac Pro handles these operations in two and 1,5 seconds respectively, the performance increase in this case is more than threefold.
Video Editing
Video editing is undoubtedly one of the areas where the new Mac Pro will find the greatest use. Therefore, I asked a friendly production studio that deals with video editing for their impressions of the performance, which they were able to test for several weeks with a similar configuration, albeit only with an octa-core version of the processor.
Macs are generally about optimization, and this is probably the most obvious on the Mac Pro. It is not only about optimizing the operating system, but also about applications. Only recently did Apple update its professional editing program Final Cut Pro X to take full advantage of the Mac Pro's performance, and the optimizations are really noticeable, especially against applications that are not yet optimized, such as Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
In Final Cut Pro, the Mac Pro had no problem playing four uncompressed 4K clips (RED RAW) simultaneously in real time, even with a number of effects applied, including more demanding ones such as blurring. Even then, the framerate reduction was not noticeable. Rewinding and jumping from place to place in the footage was also smooth. A noticeable drop could only be noticed after switching the settings from the best performance to the best image quality (full resolution mode). Importing a 1,35GB RED RAW 4K video took about 15 seconds, 2010 seconds on a Mac Pro 128. Rendering a one-minute 4K video (with h.264 compression) took about 40 seconds in Final Cut Pro, for comparison, the older model needed more than twice as much time.
It's a completely different story with Premiere Pro, which has not yet received an update from Adobe that would prepare the software for specific Mac Pro hardware. Because of this, it cannot use a pair of graphics cards and leaves most of the computing work to the processor. As a result, it even lags behind the old model from 2010, which, for example, handles export faster, and most importantly, it won't even play a single uncompressed 4K video in full resolution, and it needs to be downscaled to 2K for smooth playback.
It is also similar in iMovie, where the older model can render video faster and has better performance per core compared to the new Mac Pro. The power of the new machine can only be seen when more processor cores are involved.
Experience with 4K and a Sharp monitor
Support for 4K output is one of the other attractions of the new Mac Pro, which is why I also ordered a new 32-inch 4K monitor as part of my order Sharp 32" PN-K321, which Apple offers in its online store for 107 crowns, i.e. for a price that exceeds even a higher computer configuration. I expected it to be better than any monitor I've ever worked with.
But alas, it turned out that it is actually an ordinary LCD with LED backlighting, i.e. not an IPS panel, which you can find in, for example, Apple Cinema monitors or Thunderbolt monitors. Although it has the aforementioned LED backlight, which is an improvement over CCFL technology, on the other hand, for the price that Sharp comes at, I wouldn't expect anything other than an IPS panel.
However, even if the monitor was the best, it would unfortunately not be very valid for the Mac Pro. As it turned out, 4K support is quite poor in Mac Pro, or rather in OS X. In practice, this means that Apple, for example, does not scale fonts adequately for high resolution. All elements were incredibly responsive, including top bar items and icons, and I'm not even sitting half a meter away from the monitor. No option to set a working resolution in the system, no help from Apple. I would definitely expect more for such an expensive device. Paradoxically, better 4K support is offered by Windows 8 in BootCamp.
I also had the opportunity to compare the monitor with the previous Dell UltraSharp U3011 LED-backlit monitor with a resolution of 2560 x 1600. The sharpness of the 4K display was not any better, in fact it was difficult to notice any difference, except that the text was unpleasantly blurry on the Sharp. Lowering the resolution to enlarge the elements resulted in an even worse display and reduced sharpness, so nothing unexpected. So currently, the Mac Pro is definitely not 4K ready even with the latest OS X 10.9.1 beta, and Apple isn't exactly doing itself a good name by offering unsuspecting customers this overpriced LCD display as an optional item in their order.
záver
The name Mac Pro already suggests that it is a device for professionals. The price also suggests that. This is not a classic desktop computer, but rather a workstation used by production and recording studios, developers, animators, graphic artists and other professionals for whom computing and graphics performance is the alpha and omega of their work. The Mac Pro would undoubtedly be an excellent gaming machine as well, although few games would be able to fully exploit the potential of the graphics cards due to the lack of optimization for this particular hardware so far.
It is without a doubt the most powerful computer that Apple has ever made, especially in higher configurations, and quite possibly one of the most powerful computers on the consumer market in general with 7 TFLOPS. Although the Mac Pro offers uncompromising computing power, it is not without some shortcomings. Probably the biggest one is the crappy support for 4K monitors, but Apple can fix that with an OS X update, so nothing is lost. Owners of older models will probably not be happy about the lack of slots for drives and PCI peripherals, instead many cables will run from the Mac to external devices.
In many applications, you probably won't even notice a performance boost, at least until they're optimized specifically for the Mac Pro. While Final Cut Pro X will make the most of both the CPU and GPU, there will be little, if any, performance change in Adobe products.
On the hardware side, the Mac Pro is the pinnacle of hardware engineering, and Apple is one of the few companies that can put so much resources into a product for a very specific (and not so large) market. However, Apple has always been very close to professionals and artists, and the Mac Pro is a testament to the dedication to those who kept the company afloat during its worst crisis. Professional creatives and Macs go hand-in-hand, and the new workstation is another great link wrapped in a sleek, compact oval chassis.
The naysayers say that since the introduction of the iPad, Apple hasn't come up with a truly revolutionary product, but the Mac Pro is every bit as revolutionary, at least among desktop computers, if only for a select group of people. The three years of waiting were truly worth it.
[one_half last="no"]
advantages:
[Checklist]
- Uncompromising performance
- Dimensions
- Can be upgraded
- Silent operation
[/checklist][/one_half]
[one_half last="yes"]
Disadvantages:
[bad list]
- Poor 4K support
- No expansion slots
- Lower performance per core
[/badlist][/one_half]
Update: added more accurate information about editing 4K video and edited the section about the Sharp monitor with regard to display technology.
I would be interested, for example, in what temperature the component was when rendering the 4K video
Peak was around 95 degrees.
quite enough, I thought the maximum would be 90°, but there is nothing to be surprised about since it is a 12-core and two top GPUs. I would also like to know what software you used to measure it?
Temperature Gauge
I must have missed something, but how should I explain this sentence?
… is not actually an LED monitor, but an ordinary LCD with LED backlighting…
Is she some new LED technology?
The image is probably formed by the LEDs themselves with an observation distance of at least 15 meters :D
It has already been fixed, of course it should have been IPS technology, all monitors only have LED backlighting.
Michal, panel technology has nothing to do with backlighting. I haven't studied the parameters of this model, but it can still be an IPS panel and an LED backlight.
Yes, I'm not denying that. The point is that there is simply no LED monitor, only with LED backlighting. The complaint is about it not being an IPS panel, there was a mistake.
And what panel is it? TN?
I saw it yesterday and it was difficult. Small compact … from the top
parts are getting hotter. It will be quite a bit hotter under load, I have no doubt.
I would put the poor 4K support in the software no? The Mac Pro itself is not to blame, right? This is OS X's fault.
However, it is mentioned at the end of the article that the problem can be solved with an update in the future.
With the poor support, I would see it more due to the ignorance of the author, when in the case of some 4K monitors it is possible to manually turn on the scaling support.
This is not possible with 4K monitors in OS X.
So I have to admit that the article disappointed me a lot. I've only had the Mac Pro in the company for a few days, but the inaccuracies in the article are still striking. What kind of power adapter on the cable? Perhaps the author is confusing this with some generation of Mac mini, isn't it? As well as the data transfer section from one Mac to another: didn't the author think of using a migration assistant over the network? And the 4K video rendering, I laughed outright there... 4K video rendering in what and for what? TIFFs or H264? Totally different formats also have completely different requirements for computing performance. While in uncompressed form you need a data flow of 1250 MB/s to play one 4K stream, in H264 70 Mbit can be enough.
The upgrade passage is also quite misleading. I can already see someone changing graphics cards. The fact is that only RAM and SSD are user replaceable.
I'm not saying that the article doesn't have its value, but a lot of inaccurate or downright meaningless information devalues and discredits even the small percentage of usable information :(
So one by one. True, I actually mistook the adapter for a Mac mini. Migration assistant over the network is mentioned in the article, and it was useless anyway. As for the formats, I worded it wrong, it is an uncompressed recording, namely RED RAW. As for the graphics, it is actually replaceable and it would be inaccurate not to mention it. Otherwise, you forgot to mention the processor, it is replaceable as well.
Thanks for the clarification. I think it would be nice to edit the article in this spirit. The processor and graphics are replaceable, but not user-replaceable, it gave birth to RAM. I think that's a pretty significant difference.
Yes to a 4K monitor. Such a monitor is not used to display the GUI, but primarily to display image data. That is, whether it is a photograph that needs to be worked on, or a picture that is being digitally restored, or videos, so that the operator can see even single-pixel errors, for example a line from a digital camera.
The situation of 4K monitors and displaying data on them is now one big mess. There is no "common standard" connector or protocol that would work without problems. I tested four 4k TVs and most of them had a big problem displaying a 4K signal via HDMI 1.4 or 2.0 or even DisplayPort 1.2.
I agree, I added the paragraph that sets the upgrade straight.
2560x1600 resolution support isn't great on OSX either. Here, too, the letters are small. I can enlarge them in the windows, but not elsewhere and I often have to look closely. In Win, I adjust everything beautifully according to the viewing distance. So I feel sorry for 4K users.
I just recently made a table of resolutions and their calculations per pixel. Due to such private analysis what type Apple will use for their Retina Thunderbolt Display. And I found out that they don't have it very easy.
I was based on several known resolutions. And of course, I took into account the most famous computer retina Macbook Pro 15. I also used the resolution of Wallpaper Mavericks in the table, which has a higher resolution than 4K.
If apple used classic 4K, the scaling would be quite acceptable. The "Best For Retina" resolution would be set to 1920×1080 and thus one pixel would be equal to 4. The subsequent increase to 2560×1440 resolution would give a result of 3 pixels, which is relatively the same as my classic retina on 15 inches.
The problem arises with their 27-inch Thunderbolt Panel, which has a resolution of 2560×1440, and it would be adequate for such a resolution to be "Best For Retina". For such a resolution, apple needed an even higher resolution (in the Apple Super 4K table). The problem would arise in scaling to 1920×1080 resolution or to the "standard" 4K format. Personally, I don't know how a panel with such a resolution and graphics would cope if it had to calculate pixels to such decimal places.
It is not clear to me what the purpose of such a computer is for developers, when a brutal part of the price is made up of extra expensive graphics cards. Can it be clarified somehow? Or can there be a cheaper variant of the graphics?
As mentioned in the article, because of three 4K monitors in the future. The basic version for 75 has the FirePro D000.
That doesn't make sense to me. There will definitely be a graph in the "future". cards that will enable this and will not cost such senseless money (from the developer's point of view). As a developer, I would also consider this computer, but the graphics cards are completely out of the question. Besides, I don't use three monitors as a developer anyway
But this configuration will serve for the next X years. The developer who bought this Mac Pro uses three monitors and bought exactly the model he saw fit.
I miss the comparison with other platforms.
I still don't understand why APPLE is trying to do something else. iPhones. No they can't put android there. He must have his own. Mac. They can't have Windows it's embarrassing. If Apple computers had Windows and iPhones had Androids, I wouldn't want anything else. This is ruining it for me
I'm not a supporter of Apple, but OSX and iOS are what make an iPhone an iPhone :-). if I can't install iOS with the Galaxy S5, I'll do it right away. But if you want a tuned machine, buy it from Apple and you can also install Windows, but that will be a big downgrade :-)
I don't know how 2560×1600 was meant, but I have this resolution on a 13″ MBPr and everything is displayed normally, maybe even a little bigger than 1680×1050 (external DELL 2209wa).