Section:

Apple Mac Pro review

If you were on the fence about buying Apple's new Mac Pro, look no further than our in-depth review detailing everything you need to know about their latestdesktop computer...

If you were on the fence about buying Apple's new Mac Pro, look no further than our in-depth review detailing everything you need to know about their latest
desktop computer...

Product: Mac Pro

Company: Apple

Price: from £2,499 / $ 2,999 USD

Release date: December 2013

Website: www.apple.com

Star Rating: 4.5 / 5

To say its taken a long time for Apple to launch a redesigned Mac Pro is an understatement. Aside from a minor update in 2012, the old model hadnt changed in nearly four years, lacked many modern technologies such as Thunderbolt and USB 3 and had been discontinued in the UK. People were questioning whether Apple remained committed to the product, since the lions share of the companys revenue now comes from the iPad, iPhone, and iTunes store.

However, Apples reputation was built on being a computing platform that was useful for content creation. Even though a new Mac Pro wouldn't provide the profit margins that has made Apple the wealthiest technology company, its a way for the company to say it still holds the design industry in high regard.

Aside from the rear ports, logo and power cord, the Mac Pros chassis is featureless. There is an internal speaker however,
which is more useful for diagnostic beeps than listening to music

Design

Macs are really popular in the fields of desktop publishing, graphic design, video and audio editing. But Apples position as a platform for 3D design is more tenuous. In a survey in July 2013, 3dtotal found just 10% of respondents used a Macintosh for 3D (in a survey of 176 responses), favoring Linux and Windows-based workstations. While there are plenty of reasons for this difference, the new Mac Pro brings the top-end Mac hardware right up to date.

The Mac Pros futuristic and minimal appearance is the first thing most people notice. Its nothing like the old model, or any traditional computer. The chassis is a glossy dark grey that looks almost black under a cameras flash, but near silver in bright natural light. Instead of a rectangular box, the Mac Pro is shaped as a cylinder, occupying less space than even Mini ITX PCs. Indeed, you can fit one onto the smallest of desks.

The internals are easy to access and replace should a hardware problem arise

"The Mac Pros base configuration starts at £2,499 ($2,999) including VAT, and hits £7,779 ($9,599) when fully loaded with the most high-end processor, memory, GPU configuration and storage. That may sound incredibly expensive, but is competitive with PC workstations, considering what you get"

The reason for the cylindrical design is its unique cooling system. A large portion of the Mac Pros weight comes from its heatsink; a triangular, hollowed-out chunk of metal that passively cools all the components attached to it with great efficiency. Warm air is drawn from the bottom, rises through the heatsink and is blown from the top of the Mac Pro by the only fan in the system.

This idea is superior to the design of traditional PCs, which need intake and outtake fans, a fan on the CPU, one or more on the GPU and another for the power supply. When under load, and rising temperatures, the fans in a PC often become noisy and distracting. This is often a serious problem in audio recording studios.

The six-core Mac Pro looks to be a sweet spot in terms of value

Specification

The Mac Pros base configuration starts at £2,499 ($2,999) including VAT, and hits £7,779 ($9,599) when fully loaded with the most high-end processor, memory, GPU configuration and storage. That may sound incredibly expensive, but is in fact competitive with PC workstations, considering what you get.

Every Mac Pro has an Intel Xeon E5 v2 processor, ECC DDR3 memory, PCI-Express solid-state storage and dual AMD FirePro graphics cards. The base model comes with a quad-core Xeon E5 chip, with 6, 8 and 12-core processors available. Theres also 256GB of storage, configurable up to 1TB, and 12GB memory, which can be upgraded to a maximum of 64GB.

Our preferred configuration would be adding D700 GPUs, a larger SSD, and then fitting some less expensive third-party memory

The FirePro graphics cards are reconfigured variants of desktop W-series FirePro cards. The base D300 is similar to an AMD FirePro W5000, the D500 to a W7000, and the D700 to a W9000. The Mac Pro versions are clocked slightly lower though.

Upgrading to dual D700 cards adds just £480 to the price of the Mac Pro

A trade-off between the large boxes of traditional PC workstations and the Mac Pros cylindrical design is internal expansion. Theres no space to add extra hard disks inside the Mac Pro. Instead, Apple has included six 20GB/s (per second) Thunderbolt 2 ports at the rear for high-speed networked external storage. These ports also support two 4K displays. There are also four USB 3 ports and dual-linked Gigabit ethernet ports for wired networking and an HDMI 1.4 connector that allows for an extra 4K display.

Although you cant add extra internal storage to the Mac Pro, its internals are easily accessible. Undoing a lock at the back lets you lift off the lid. The storage and memory are user serviceable and Mac repair site iFixit has confirmed the CPU is not soldered in and can be removed and replaced with an off-the-shelf Xeon processor. Similarly, Apple has also confirmed that the GPUs can be replaced if they fail.

UThe ports illuminate whenever the Mac Pro is rotated. You can connect dozens of Thunderbolt 2 devices,
four USB 3 drives and a display via HDMI

In depth processor options

Intels new Ivy Bridge-based Xeon processors are not cheap. Theyre responsible for a large part of the cost of the Mac Pro, and upgrading from the base model to the 12-core variant adds £2,800 ($3,000) alone. Xeon E5 processors arent particularly faster than desktop Core i7 processors though.

Indeed, in single-threaded rendering software, a desktop processor can outperform a Xeon that runs at a lower clock speed.

But with a Xeon, you get additional technology that supports more cores, dual-CPU systems and ECC memory, which makes them expensive, but also the processor of choice in workstations.

The Mac Pro only comes with a single CPU socket, so there are no dual-CPU configurations, but the E5 is still necessary for ECC memory and the option of 12 cores offered in the highest-spec model.

The 12-core Xeon processor runs at 2.7GHz, while the base models quad-core runs at 3.7 GHz. Thats a big difference, and will certainly be evident in single-threaded software that relies more on raw power than multi-threaded software that splits a computing task evenly between CPU cores. However, most 3D software has been written to use multiple CPU cores, dividing rendering jobs across a workstations processor.

In depth storage

Solid-state storage is one of the most significant improvements in computer technology in the last decade. With no moving parts and data accessed electronically rather than from a spinning disk, much faster speeds can be achieved, reducing installation and boot times.

But with desktop computers, SSDs rely on the SATA bus for data transfer, which has a hard theoretical limit of 6Gbit/s and a practical limit of around 500MB/s. While thats fast, much higher speeds are possible by switching from SATA to PCI-Express.

There are a few models of PCI-Express SSD cards for PCs, notably the OCZ Revodrive line. But these cards are much too big to fit inside the Mac Pro. Apple has designed a custom storage module which squeezes the flash chips into a small area, in a similar way to how it does with the iMac and MacBook SSDs.

Apple says the super-fast PCI-Express storage is necessary for 4K video editing. Indeed, with the large bit rates of uncompressed 4K video, a hard disk or even a low-end SSD simply cannot feed the system fast enough for smooth playback. But when running the BlackMagic Disk Speed Test software, we recorded 952MB/sec read speeds and 903MB/sec write speeds from the Mac Pros 512GB SSD, almost double what you get from a desktop drive.

We tested this further with some 4K sample videos from Blackmagic Design.

When playing the videos on our desktop workstation, with a Core i7 processor, 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD and 16GB memory, the video playback was choppy, pausing after a second since it was starved of data. On the Mac Pro, the video played in its entirety without a frame missed.

However, for 3D design, superfast storage is not the biggest performance bottleneck. Its lovely to have the system boot up in seconds, and software loading lightning quick, but it doesn't do much for rendering.

In depth graphics

Apples decision to include dual FirePro GPUs across the entire Mac Pro range is interesting, since Crossfire, the AMD technology that allows 3D applications to address both cards, only works in Windows.

In OS X, by default one card is used for the display graphics, while the other is used for Open CL computing. For both cards to be used together, software must be rewritten and updated to take advantage of the second GPU. Given the inclusivity of Apples platform, its highly likely that 3D software firms will update their products if they take the Macintosh design market seriously.

Apples own video-editing package, Final Cut Pro X, has been updated prior to the Mac Pros launch, along with its Motion 3D effects software. During a demonstration, Apple showed off the Mac Pro seamlessly editing multiple 4K video streams in Final Cut.

The use of AMD graphics cards over NVIDIA means only OpenCL is supported for general-purpose GPU processing tasks, not Cuda. If you heavily use Cuda-accelerated tools this will be a severe handicap. The Foundrys NUKE, for example, relies on Cuda exclusively, as does Adobes After Effects application.

Given that the Mac Pros graphics cards are roughly comparable to AMDs FirePro cards in PC workstations, based off the Pitcairn and Tahiti design, theyre powerful. The D300 has 1280 shader processors, 2GB of memory, 80 texture units and 160 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The D500 has 1536 shader processors, 3GB of memory, 96 texture units and 240 GB/sec of bandwidth, while the D700 has 2048 shader processors, 6GB of memory, 128 texture units and 264 GB/sec of memory bandwidth.

One difference between the Mac Pros FirePro GPUs and their desktop equivalent is a lack of ECC memory on the Mac Pro cards. ECC memory carries a performance hit, and would add to the Mac Pros cost, but it seems an odd omission, given its presence as main system memory.

But the most interesting aspect of the Mac Pros graphics cards is the low price. A single W9000 FirePro graphics card for PC workstations costs almost £3,000 ($3,269). But in the high-end Mac Pro, you get two cards that are very similar. Upgrading from D500 cards to D700 cards adds only £480 ($600) to the cost of the Mac Pro. Superb value!

In depth software

The Mac Pro comes with OS X 10.9.1, better known as 'Mavericks'. This is effectively identical to the software that comes with any other Mac.

As with any other Apple computer, you can install Windows on the Mac Pro to run alongside OS X, with a downloadable driver package provided by Apple. But with the Mac Pro, Apple does not support Windows 7 and even Windows 8.1 refuses to install. An older Windows 8 ISO was the only Microsoft OS that worked.

Nearly all Windows 3D editing software is available for OS X. Maya, CINEMA 4D and Blender all work in a similar way. Network rendering works the same way too, with the possibility that long rendering jobs can be dispatched to other computers, including Mac Pros, on the network.

Performance

We tested the 12-core Mac Pro, with 32GB of memory and dual D700 cards with a variety of tools, from rendering software and design packages to video encoding tools and standard benchmarks such as Cinebench.

For comparison we used a PC workstation we had to hand, running Windows 8.1, with a Core i7 3770K processor running at 3.5 GHz and an AMD FirePro W5000 graphics card.

In Windows, a single desktop FirePro W5000 card achieves 91 fps in the OpenGL test in Cinebench 11.5, but on the Mac Pro with its vastly more powerful D700 cards, the result was only 74.1 fps under OS X. We partly blame this on the difference in OpenGL implementation on OS X and Windows, not to mention the second GPU going unused.

The Cinebench CPU score was more reassuring. On the Core i7, we measured 615 points, but on the Mac Pro this jumped to 1536, almost three times the score, which makes sense given there are three times as many cores in the processor. That said, its not quite three times, which is explained by the difference in clock speeds.

Luxmark, a tool to measure OpenCL performance, saw more substantial differences. On a PC workstation, the most detailed scene render scored 463. The Mac Pro scores 2153.

In Smart Converter 2, a popular OS X video encoding tool, videos encoded approximately five times faster than on the desktop PC, with the Activity Monitor showing all 12 cores being used.

Geekbench 3, a popular synthetic benchmark, showed the biggest speed hike of the Mac Pro of any tool we used. This benchmark has been ported to most platforms, allowing for (rough) comparison of Android, iOS, OS X and Windows. The Mac Pro scored 33150 in the multi-core test. A 2011 iMac scored 4757.

"What Apple has achieved is creating a desktop computer thats undeniably powerful, but the company focused on reducing its footprint considerably instead of raw performance, an approach that may well pay off"

Conclusion

These results are really impressive, given the Mac Pros small size and quiet operation. Its not the absolute fastest 3D workstation in the world though, nor is Apple seeking that title. Modern dual-processor systems will outpace the Mac Pro in software that relies on CPU performance.

But in a way, those workstatios are a throwback to the past, when thermal and acoustic properties were hampered by the need to adhere to ancient ATX standards for PCs, dreamt up in the 20th Century. The Mac Pro does away with all that, and its mostly for the best.

What Apple has achieved is creating a desktop computer thats undeniably powerful, but the company focused on reducing its footprint considerably instead of raw performance, an approach that may well pay off.

Although its too early for a final judgment on its reliability, the Mac Pros efficient cooling system should hopefully reduce component failure rates too.

Internal storage expandability is a casualty of Apples new approach, but professional 3D environments are more likely to rely on network storage anyway, rather than keeping files on local storage. The included PCI-Express SSD is amazingly fast, and thats all you need for OS X and applications.

There are a few minor irritations. The Mac Pros small size makes it an easy target for theft. Theres no way to attach a Kensington Lock, so its easy to just pop one in a rucksack and quickly steal thousands of pounds worth of equipment from a college or university.

If youre looking to build a render farm, the Mac Pros shape means it can't be used in a rack, which could be a deal breaker for some.

Finally, the HDMI port only supports 4K resolutions at 30Hz (24Hz at 4,096x2160) and the Mac Pro cant output 10-bit color, which may put some people off.

Some of the problems are likely to ironed out in time, or whenever the next iteration comes. As the Mac Pro currently stands, its still a brilliant workstation and a magnificent piece of engineering.

For those artists who currently use OS X for 3D, the new Mac Pro, it will likely be a no-brainer purchase at some point in the future. Artists who were previously on the fence about using a Mac for rendering now have a good reason to consider switching, since there is no big performance bottleneck in the same way as before.

But were not certain a Mac Pro is the first choice for everybody who works with 3D modeling. When more applications make use of both GPUs, the Mac Pro will really flex its muscle, but for now, a clunky old-style tower workstation might be a better buy.

Key features:

Dual AMD graphics cards
Intel Ivy Bridge V2 Xeon processor
PC-Express SSD
Silent operation
Reduced desktop footprint

System specifications - model as reviewed:

12-core Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2
32GB ECC DDR3 memory
512GB PCI-Express SSD
Dual AMD D700 cards
OSX Mavericks 10.9.1

CPU benchmarks:

Cinebench R15: 1534
Geekbench 3 Single Core: 3232
Geekbench 3 Multi Core: 33150

Graphics benchmarks:

OpenCL Luxmark (room render): 2153

Related links

Check out Apple's store to order your Mac Pro
For more info on the FirePro graphics cards, click here
Get the benchmark for your current desktop with cinebench

Fetching comments...

Post a comment