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Is the Mac Pro 2013 Worth It?

2014-01-26
hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with the new Mac Pro the question is though is it worth it so let's just get this out of the way first yes the Mac Pro does kind of look like a trash can unlike basically every desktop ever the design is entirely rounded with the only break in the appearance being the ports around back in pictures it looks black but in person it's actually just dark polished metal and it's quite reflective thankfully though it's not too much of a fingerprint magnet what a lot of the pictures don't quite get across is just how small this thing is set it next to a mini ITX system and there's no comparison the Mac Pro is just tiny put it alongside a more standard computer capable of handling a couple beefy graphics cards and you'll see the difference is really substantial now whether the size really matters is something that's up to you now personally I prefer having a little bit more desk space but regardless it is impressive that they were able to fit this much hardware into such a small package and a very uh napple like move cracking open the Mac Pro is actually simple just flip the switch on the back and the entire aluminum housing will slide right off giving you access to all the parts inside one look around and the nerd in me is very very happy while everything is basically custom it's nicely laid out with the to fire pro graphics cards on display front and center you can also easily swap in and out the 32 gigabytes of ECC Ram which while expensive to replace is standard workstation grade stuff the SSD is PCIe based and is just held in by a single Torx screw unfortunately the downside is that there's no room for any hard drives inside the Mac Pro you're going to have to make do with whatever size SSD you choose instead you're meant to use one of the Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 ports on back for storage an external hard drive enclosure will take care of that but that's going to cost extra and clutter your set up however the good news is you can actually work on the mac pro as most of the parts are fully upgradable iFixit has a great teardown on their site and with a little work not only can you swap the memory and SSD but you can also upgrade the processor the graphics cards are technically replaceable however they're custom so you can't just throw in any card on the bottom is the own we fan in the system which pulls air in and up through the giant heatsink everything is attached to hot air comes out up top which is where you'll find the handle for moving the MacPro concerns this has a full Xeon processor and a pair of fire pro cards which are essentially Radeon r9 280x --is the fact that it's cool by a single fan seems like a very very bad idea but it works in normal use you just can't hear it even while cutting together video the fan doesn't spin up in fact the only time it's ever really audible is when rendering out video and even then it's not that bad so while sure the design is pretty cool for a full workstation grade system however the real question is how does it perform and is it worth the three thousand dollars plus the configuration I have here is sporting a six core Intel Xeon processor at 3.5 gigahertz dual AMD FirePro d500 graphics cards 32 gigabytes of 1866 ECC memory and a 512 gigabyte SSD as far as the benchmarks go on Geekbench the Mac Pro scored 3606 on a single core and 20 1072 on all cores in senha bench on the CPU side it scored 962 and 4 graphics it pulled in seventy six point eight frames per second one of the most impressive numbers comes from the SSD where it consistently pulls in just under 1 gigabyte a second in both reads and writes performance inside Adobe Premiere is solid partially thanks to that superfast SSD however it doesn't seem to be taking full advantage of the mac pro hardware just yet the price is a bit harder to nail down so not everyone needs expensive hardware like Zeon's fire pros and ECC Ram however if you compare it to Windows workstations that do have all that kind of stuff it's actually really not too far off in the end while it has sacrificed expandability and is definitely expensive it really is an impressively designed desktop so what do you guys think is the Mac Pro worth it let me know in the comments below and I am looking forward to these comments anyway if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more like this absolutely be sure to subscribe to the channel for lots more tech videos well just like this anyway guys thanks for watching and I will catch you in the next one
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