**The 2013 Mac Pro: A GPU-Heavy Task Machine?**

For those who are considering using their 2013 Mac Pro for GPU-heavy tasks like video editing, particularly for 4K timelines, it's essential to understand the capabilities of this machine. The 2013 Mac Pro boasts two high-end GPUs, one a D500 with 2GB of video RAM and the other an older D300 with 1GB of video RAM. While the D500 outperforms the D300 due to its newer architecture, the latter's higher clock speed can still provide impressive results.

In real-world usage, the extra video RAM on the D500 makes it a better overall performer, especially for tasks that involve more GPU-intensive workloads. However, if you're working with 4K footage and need the latest video editing software like Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve, which utilize both GPUs, the 2013 Mac Pro might not be the best choice.

The main limitation of the 2013 Mac Pro for video editing is its video RAM capacity. Conventional wisdom suggests that you need at least 8GB of video RAM to work with 4K footage, and even 16GB can be beneficial due to memory compression and fast SSD swap files. However, the 2013 Mac Pro's GPUs are not as powerful as those found in modern computers, such as the M1.

In terms of performance, an M1 MacBook or iMac might actually outperform the 2013 Mac Pro for timeline and editing tasks, particularly if you're working with modern video codecs like H.264 and HEVC. The M1's dedicated hardware encoders and decoders can handle these codecs more efficiently, reducing rendering times.

However, there are some scenarios where the 2013 Mac Pro might still be a better choice. If you're using older video editing software that doesn't utilize both GPUs or relies on slower codecs, the 2013 Mac Pro's performance might be sufficient. Additionally, if you're not planning to work with 4K footage, the machine can handle 1080p timelines with ease.

**The M1: A New Standard for Video Editing**

In contrast, the M1 chip is a game-changer for video editing and other GPU-intensive tasks. With its Metal API, the M1 provides fast and efficient rendering times for modern video editing software like Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. The M1's dedicated hardware encoders and decoders can handle H.264 and HEVC codecs with ease, reducing rendering times and making it an attractive option for 4K video editors.

However, the M1's performance might not be as high as that of a 2013 Mac Pro with D700 GPUs. The M1's GPU score in Geekbench 5 Metal is just under 22,000, which is significantly lower than the D700's score. Nevertheless, the M1's performance has been consistently praised by video editors and professionals, who appreciate its speed and efficiency.

**Who Should Consider the 2013 Mac Pro?**

While the M1 might be a better choice for many users, there are some scenarios where the 2013 Mac Pro is still worth considering. If you're looking for a machine with a more collectible design, the 2013 Mac Pro's iconic look and feel might make it an attractive option.

Additionally, if you're not planning to work with 4K footage or use modern video editing software that relies on both GPUs, the 2013 Mac Pro can still provide impressive performance. The machine is also relatively affordable compared to newer models like the M1 Max.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, while the 2013 Mac Pro might not be the best choice for every user, it's still a capable machine that can handle GPU-intensive tasks with ease. If you're looking for a more collectible design or a lower price point, the 2013 Mac Pro might be worth considering. However, if you need to work with 4K footage or use modern video editing software that relies on both GPUs, an M1-based machine is likely to provide better performance and faster rendering times.

Ultimately, the choice between a 2013 Mac Pro and an M1 comes down to your specific needs and preferences. If you're unsure, it's always worth considering other options like newer M1 models or even alternative computers that might offer similar performance at a lower price point.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso it's 2021 apple's new m1 machines exist amd has shaken up the x86 world and there are new graphics cards capable of doing things that just a few years ago we could only have dreamed of that's assuming you can buy one but it's fair to say that releases from apple amd and nvidia in 2020 really moved computing forward by a considerable leap so should anyone in their right mind be considering buying or using a 2013 mac pro in 2021 maybe the design of the 2013 mac pro is polarizing some people like me absolutely love it and others hate it but much of the hatred is not aimed at the specifics of the design it stems from what the design meant at the time of its launch so a brief recap may help the predecessor to this machine was the mac pro 5 comma 1 the original cheese grater and it was released in 2006 though that same case design had actually already been in use for three years in the form of the g5 power mac apple was slow to upgrade the five comma one with only incremental updates in the last few years of its life and i remember at the time that many professionals were asking apple look when are you going to release a more up-to-date machine new ceo at the time tim cook finally stated that they had something special in the works and then at wwdc in 2013 apple gave a sneak preview of this new cylindrical design the design of this cylindrical map pro is quite unique we've got two gpu boards here that are attached to a central triangular heatsink behind this selection of ports is the cpu and the heatsink has a fan on the top and it vents through the top of the case drawing fresh air in through the bottom a unique thermal design many professionals though they were shall we say underwhelmed there's nowhere to plug in your pci expansion cards there's no upgrade power for the gpus this computer represented a big change to that fully upgradable mac pro five comma one and in fact it didn't really represent much of an upgrade at all that earlier mac pro had the same pci express 2.0 standard so you could install a couple of gpus you could add expansion cards and hard drives the cpu tray could be swapped out and the ram was easily accessible the main thing that the six comma one introduced was thunderbolt 2. it's got six of these ports and it's something that many people had asked for on the five comma one cheese grater it seems that apple expected that upgrades to this computer would be done via thunderbolt 2 and that dual gpu computing was going to become a thing it didn't for many professionals the 2013 mac pro was the answer to a question that nobody had asked faced with this choice of this new machine or sticking with the earlier model and upgrading many chose to stay with that cheese grater in fact some professionals left the apple platform all together so with all this in mind you can probably understand the ill feeling towards this particular computer and the stigma seems to be still attached to the 2013 mac pro but if you look at this computer in isolation without that background you might draw a different conclusion and the people who are buying these computers now may be coming to it fresh and without those solely professional workflows in mind if we look at the mac pro's usefulness as a computer in 2021 factoring in the other machines that are now available what conclusions could we draw let's start with the price you might be able to find a good condition entry level model for about 800 pounds in the uk and that places it firmly in the same ballpark as the m1 mac mini and let's be clear here the m1 mini beats the entry level 2013 mac pro in pretty much every area of performance but let's consider the specs of that entry level machine it came with a quad core xeon cpu 12 gigabytes of ram a 256 gigabyte ssd and two amd fire pro d300 gpus each having two gigabytes of video ram this particular mac pro was originally that entry level specification i've upgraded it since i remember buying this one my business partner pete and i bought it new from the apple store i still got the original box here and the price sticker is still on the box which probably won't be able to see but it says 2 499 pounds after the brexit vote in 2016 the pound lost value against the dollar and apple announced that it would have to increase prices so this same machine went up by 500 pounds overnight other machines across the apple range and the mac pro range increased by even more and interestingly the exchange rate is stronger again now apple seems to have forgotten to adjust their pricing back down again i'm sure it's coming it's probably just slipped tim's mind he's very busy at the moment it does however put the pricing of professional machines today into perspective gone are the days when you can get a professional mac for two and a half grand though that's not just down to apple's profit margins the hunt for performance gains in these pro machines has meant much larger processors and so workstations are more expensive generally so a machine with pro components and error checking ram for 800 pounds or thereabouts might seem like a complete bargain and it is if it can compete with modern consumer machines and in the entry level configuration i'm afraid it can but you can upgrade and in the highest specification things aren't so black and white the original quad core xeon is a pretty hopeless cpu by modern standards but there are other options we've got 8 core 10 core and 12 core cpus available and each of these has their own merits when it comes to single core or single threaded performance none of these cpus get anywhere close to the performance of the apple m1 and that's not to say that they're slow or unpleasant to use but if you're looking for a computer primarily for things like office email web browsing and content consumption then you'll find that an m1 mac is a superior experience multi-threaded performance is a different story though and the 12 core cpu which is what i've upgraded into this particular mac pro it actually offers more performance than that of the m1 and it isn't hugely behind the eight core xeon in the 2019 mac pro so that's going to be of interest to anyone using apps that need decent multi-core performance this 2013 mac pro then is a great tool for music production it's quiet in operation it's got plenty of ports you can even add an external pcie enclosure via thunderbolt and you can make use of adding cards but of course the m1 that we keep referring to also has performance and quiet operation on its side and it can be a real powerhouse for audio work however support for third-party hardware and software on the new architecture and on newer operating systems is less widespread so an intel machine that's capable of running older versions of mac os might actually be quite desirable and likewise we could think of developers who need to run multiple virtual machines and they're going to find the 2013 mac pro to their liking the new apple silicon isn't fully ready for these workloads yet in the 2013 mac pro we can easily upgrade the ram best performance is achieved with 64 gigabytes of ram which is what i have here you can go all the way to 128 gigabytes if you want although there is a very slight hit to cpu performance but one of the benefits of older tech is that components are available relatively cheaply on the used market and since this is a professional workstation it uses professional components the same components that are abundant also in server hardware and many servers of this era are being decommissioned now and that's great news particularly if that server has spent its whole life in an air-conditioned temperature-controlled dust-free data center these used components have got plenty of life left in them it means that we can cheaply upgrade our mac pro same story with the top cpus you can find them for around 200 pounds so if you're up to doing the upgrade which admittedly isn't for the faint-hearted you can have a multi-core powerhouse with professional-grade components for a pretty fair price in fact even the ssd inside this mac pro can be upgraded either with a genuine apple generation 4 ssd or using a simple adapter you can install an nvme drive now sure you won't get maximum performance out of that drive but you can at least double the performance of the original ssd that these were shipped with one thing you can upgrade or at least not cheaply is the gpu the firepro d300 d500 and d700 cards which were available with these machines are actually not as bad as you might think if we look at geekbench 5's metal test we find that the d300 and d500 score between 22 and 23 000 and yes the d300 does out bench the d500 and i'll explain that in a moment the d700 however that scores over 30 000 in this test and remember the mac pro has two of each card so you can effectively double those scores if the software that you're using supports it and here's where apple's dual gpu idea fell short they failed to get widespread developer support so there are many apps that only use one of the gpus now the cards they're connected together with amd's crossfire x technology and if you boot into windows with one of these machines you'll see that and frustratingly windows implementation of the technology has more widespread adoption so arguably you can get better performance out of your mac pro by running windows in any case a pair of d700s in a gpu heavy app that supports both cards offers performance that something like the m1 could only dream of and those top cards have got six gigabytes of video ram each which makes them far more usable than the d500 and d300 which have three gigabytes and two gigabytes respectively now you'll remember that the d300 benches ahead of the d500 and it scores better mainly because the two gpus are different architectures the d300 is an older architecture to the 500 and 700 and it runs at a higher clock speed but in real world use the extra video ram on the d500 makes it the better overall performer so does this 2013 mac pro make sense for gpu heavy tasks i mean what about things like video editing for 1080p timelines all of these macs have got performance to spare but if you're working with 4k then you'll be wanting a mac pro with the d700s inside or you need to consider going down the egpu route which of course is possible and i've covered that plenty on the channel so we won't revisit that now if we take the gpu in the m1 that scores just under 22 000 in that geekbench 5 metal test so you might assume that any of these mac pros would outperform it for gpu heavy tasks like video editing particularly as final cut and davinci resolve will use both of the mac pro gpus but it's not actually that clear-cut due to the limitations of the video ram conventional wisdom is that you need 8 gigabytes of video ram to work with 4k footage now a 16 gigabyte m1 can certainly cover that and even the 8 gigabyte model can do a good job thanks to memory compression and the use of fast ssd swap files and the m1 and more modern intel chips have got dedicated hardware encoders and decoders for modern video codecs and the 2013 mac pro doesn't have any so that also swings the advantage away from the mac pro so an m1 in many cases will actually outperform the mac pro for timeline and editing performance though i suspect a mac pro with d700s might just have the edge but i've never had one of those models to test final render speeds may well be faster on the mac pro if you're using a gpu bound application like davinci resolve and if you're not using modern video codecs like h.264 and hevc so long story short here is that if you're a serious video editor the 2013 mac pro isn't the right machine for you and frankly nor is that m1 if you're a casual video editor then the mac pro will do the job but newer machines like that m1 offer a much better experience take the motion out of the graphics equation and it's a different story if you're a designer working with illustrator or photoshop the 2013 mac pro offers a great experience and photographers too will be happy with the performance that it offers though we have to say again in fairness the m1 max are pretty handy with these workflows too so who would consider the 2013 mac pro in 2021 there are better and cheaper options out there for some workflows but there are some areas where this old mac pro still has got something to offer and if like me you love this design then that may be enough to persuade you to spend your money on this more collectible machine arguably the 2013 mac pro has a measure of desk presence that a few other computers can match it's iconic and for that reason many people will be happy to enjoy it and overlook its flaws it's probably difficult to wholeheartedly recommend buying such a machine in 2021 unless you've got a specific need for the features that it offers but that doesn't mean that such a computer can't perform well for many years to come this is a fantastic computer it's smooth to use it feels like a quality item in a way that somehow the m1 max just don't and at the end of the day it's your money spend it however you like for me my 2013 mac pro journey is at an end not because i don't love it or because it's not good enough generally but well i'll save my reasons for another video but in the meantime whatever computer you have enjoy it there will always be a faster machine out there but that fact doesn't turn a good computer into a bad one the manufacturers they like to have us lusting after the bigger numbers and becoming dissatisfied with perfectly good equipment because it means that we might go out and buy a new one and that means bigger profits for the shareholders and that's all for this video i hope you enjoyed it if you like apple content you may enjoy our weekly podcast and we've just moved it to a new channel so we'll put links in the description if you'd like to check that out uh please consider supporting us with just one click of the subscribe button and maybe i did enough today to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your style but in any case i hope to see you next time for some more geekery youso it's 2021 apple's new m1 machines exist amd has shaken up the x86 world and there are new graphics cards capable of doing things that just a few years ago we could only have dreamed of that's assuming you can buy one but it's fair to say that releases from apple amd and nvidia in 2020 really moved computing forward by a considerable leap so should anyone in their right mind be considering buying or using a 2013 mac pro in 2021 maybe the design of the 2013 mac pro is polarizing some people like me absolutely love it and others hate it but much of the hatred is not aimed at the specifics of the design it stems from what the design meant at the time of its launch so a brief recap may help the predecessor to this machine was the mac pro 5 comma 1 the original cheese grater and it was released in 2006 though that same case design had actually already been in use for three years in the form of the g5 power mac apple was slow to upgrade the five comma one with only incremental updates in the last few years of its life and i remember at the time that many professionals were asking apple look when are you going to release a more up-to-date machine new ceo at the time tim cook finally stated that they had something special in the works and then at wwdc in 2013 apple gave a sneak preview of this new cylindrical design the design of this cylindrical map pro is quite unique we've got two gpu boards here that are attached to a central triangular heatsink behind this selection of ports is the cpu and the heatsink has a fan on the top and it vents through the top of the case drawing fresh air in through the bottom a unique thermal design many professionals though they were shall we say underwhelmed there's nowhere to plug in your pci expansion cards there's no upgrade power for the gpus this computer represented a big change to that fully upgradable mac pro five comma one and in fact it didn't really represent much of an upgrade at all that earlier mac pro had the same pci express 2.0 standard so you could install a couple of gpus you could add expansion cards and hard drives the cpu tray could be swapped out and the ram was easily accessible the main thing that the six comma one introduced was thunderbolt 2. it's got six of these ports and it's something that many people had asked for on the five comma one cheese grater it seems that apple expected that upgrades to this computer would be done via thunderbolt 2 and that dual gpu computing was going to become a thing it didn't for many professionals the 2013 mac pro was the answer to a question that nobody had asked faced with this choice of this new machine or sticking with the earlier model and upgrading many chose to stay with that cheese grater in fact some professionals left the apple platform all together so with all this in mind you can probably understand the ill feeling towards this particular computer and the stigma seems to be still attached to the 2013 mac pro but if you look at this computer in isolation without that background you might draw a different conclusion and the people who are buying these computers now may be coming to it fresh and without those solely professional workflows in mind if we look at the mac pro's usefulness as a computer in 2021 factoring in the other machines that are now available what conclusions could we draw let's start with the price you might be able to find a good condition entry level model for about 800 pounds in the uk and that places it firmly in the same ballpark as the m1 mac mini and let's be clear here the m1 mini beats the entry level 2013 mac pro in pretty much every area of performance but let's consider the specs of that entry level machine it came with a quad core xeon cpu 12 gigabytes of ram a 256 gigabyte ssd and two amd fire pro d300 gpus each having two gigabytes of video ram this particular mac pro was originally that entry level specification i've upgraded it since i remember buying this one my business partner pete and i bought it new from the apple store i still got the original box here and the price sticker is still on the box which probably won't be able to see but it says 2 499 pounds after the brexit vote in 2016 the pound lost value against the dollar and apple announced that it would have to increase prices so this same machine went up by 500 pounds overnight other machines across the apple range and the mac pro range increased by even more and interestingly the exchange rate is stronger again now apple seems to have forgotten to adjust their pricing back down again i'm sure it's coming it's probably just slipped tim's mind he's very busy at the moment it does however put the pricing of professional machines today into perspective gone are the days when you can get a professional mac for two and a half grand though that's not just down to apple's profit margins the hunt for performance gains in these pro machines has meant much larger processors and so workstations are more expensive generally so a machine with pro components and error checking ram for 800 pounds or thereabouts might seem like a complete bargain and it is if it can compete with modern consumer machines and in the entry level configuration i'm afraid it can but you can upgrade and in the highest specification things aren't so black and white the original quad core xeon is a pretty hopeless cpu by modern standards but there are other options we've got 8 core 10 core and 12 core cpus available and each of these has their own merits when it comes to single core or single threaded performance none of these cpus get anywhere close to the performance of the apple m1 and that's not to say that they're slow or unpleasant to use but if you're looking for a computer primarily for things like office email web browsing and content consumption then you'll find that an m1 mac is a superior experience multi-threaded performance is a different story though and the 12 core cpu which is what i've upgraded into this particular mac pro it actually offers more performance than that of the m1 and it isn't hugely behind the eight core xeon in the 2019 mac pro so that's going to be of interest to anyone using apps that need decent multi-core performance this 2013 mac pro then is a great tool for music production it's quiet in operation it's got plenty of ports you can even add an external pcie enclosure via thunderbolt and you can make use of adding cards but of course the m1 that we keep referring to also has performance and quiet operation on its side and it can be a real powerhouse for audio work however support for third-party hardware and software on the new architecture and on newer operating systems is less widespread so an intel machine that's capable of running older versions of mac os might actually be quite desirable and likewise we could think of developers who need to run multiple virtual machines and they're going to find the 2013 mac pro to their liking the new apple silicon isn't fully ready for these workloads yet in the 2013 mac pro we can easily upgrade the ram best performance is achieved with 64 gigabytes of ram which is what i have here you can go all the way to 128 gigabytes if you want although there is a very slight hit to cpu performance but one of the benefits of older tech is that components are available relatively cheaply on the used market and since this is a professional workstation it uses professional components the same components that are abundant also in server hardware and many servers of this era are being decommissioned now and that's great news particularly if that server has spent its whole life in an air-conditioned temperature-controlled dust-free data center these used components have got plenty of life left in them it means that we can cheaply upgrade our mac pro same story with the top cpus you can find them for around 200 pounds so if you're up to doing the upgrade which admittedly isn't for the faint-hearted you can have a multi-core powerhouse with professional-grade components for a pretty fair price in fact even the ssd inside this mac pro can be upgraded either with a genuine apple generation 4 ssd or using a simple adapter you can install an nvme drive now sure you won't get maximum performance out of that drive but you can at least double the performance of the original ssd that these were shipped with one thing you can upgrade or at least not cheaply is the gpu the firepro d300 d500 and d700 cards which were available with these machines are actually not as bad as you might think if we look at geekbench 5's metal test we find that the d300 and d500 score between 22 and 23 000 and yes the d300 does out bench the d500 and i'll explain that in a moment the d700 however that scores over 30 000 in this test and remember the mac pro has two of each card so you can effectively double those scores if the software that you're using supports it and here's where apple's dual gpu idea fell short they failed to get widespread developer support so there are many apps that only use one of the gpus now the cards they're connected together with amd's crossfire x technology and if you boot into windows with one of these machines you'll see that and frustratingly windows implementation of the technology has more widespread adoption so arguably you can get better performance out of your mac pro by running windows in any case a pair of d700s in a gpu heavy app that supports both cards offers performance that something like the m1 could only dream of and those top cards have got six gigabytes of video ram each which makes them far more usable than the d500 and d300 which have three gigabytes and two gigabytes respectively now you'll remember that the d300 benches ahead of the d500 and it scores better mainly because the two gpus are different architectures the d300 is an older architecture to the 500 and 700 and it runs at a higher clock speed but in real world use the extra video ram on the d500 makes it the better overall performer so does this 2013 mac pro make sense for gpu heavy tasks i mean what about things like video editing for 1080p timelines all of these macs have got performance to spare but if you're working with 4k then you'll be wanting a mac pro with the d700s inside or you need to consider going down the egpu route which of course is possible and i've covered that plenty on the channel so we won't revisit that now if we take the gpu in the m1 that scores just under 22 000 in that geekbench 5 metal test so you might assume that any of these mac pros would outperform it for gpu heavy tasks like video editing particularly as final cut and davinci resolve will use both of the mac pro gpus but it's not actually that clear-cut due to the limitations of the video ram conventional wisdom is that you need 8 gigabytes of video ram to work with 4k footage now a 16 gigabyte m1 can certainly cover that and even the 8 gigabyte model can do a good job thanks to memory compression and the use of fast ssd swap files and the m1 and more modern intel chips have got dedicated hardware encoders and decoders for modern video codecs and the 2013 mac pro doesn't have any so that also swings the advantage away from the mac pro so an m1 in many cases will actually outperform the mac pro for timeline and editing performance though i suspect a mac pro with d700s might just have the edge but i've never had one of those models to test final render speeds may well be faster on the mac pro if you're using a gpu bound application like davinci resolve and if you're not using modern video codecs like h.264 and hevc so long story short here is that if you're a serious video editor the 2013 mac pro isn't the right machine for you and frankly nor is that m1 if you're a casual video editor then the mac pro will do the job but newer machines like that m1 offer a much better experience take the motion out of the graphics equation and it's a different story if you're a designer working with illustrator or photoshop the 2013 mac pro offers a great experience and photographers too will be happy with the performance that it offers though we have to say again in fairness the m1 max are pretty handy with these workflows too so who would consider the 2013 mac pro in 2021 there are better and cheaper options out there for some workflows but there are some areas where this old mac pro still has got something to offer and if like me you love this design then that may be enough to persuade you to spend your money on this more collectible machine arguably the 2013 mac pro has a measure of desk presence that a few other computers can match it's iconic and for that reason many people will be happy to enjoy it and overlook its flaws it's probably difficult to wholeheartedly recommend buying such a machine in 2021 unless you've got a specific need for the features that it offers but that doesn't mean that such a computer can't perform well for many years to come this is a fantastic computer it's smooth to use it feels like a quality item in a way that somehow the m1 max just don't and at the end of the day it's your money spend it however you like for me my 2013 mac pro journey is at an end not because i don't love it or because it's not good enough generally but well i'll save my reasons for another video but in the meantime whatever computer you have enjoy it there will always be a faster machine out there but that fact doesn't turn a good computer into a bad one the manufacturers they like to have us lusting after the bigger numbers and becoming dissatisfied with perfectly good equipment because it means that we might go out and buy a new one and that means bigger profits for the shareholders and that's all for this video i hope you enjoyed it if you like apple content you may enjoy our weekly podcast and we've just moved it to a new channel so we'll put links in the description if you'd like to check that out uh please consider supporting us with just one click of the subscribe button and maybe i did enough today to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your style but in any case i hope to see you next time for some more geekery youso it's 2021 apple's new m1 machines exist amd has shaken up the x86 world and there are new graphics cards capable of doing things that just a few years ago we could only have dreamed of that's assuming you can buy one but it's fair to say that releases from apple amd and nvidia in 2020 really moved computing forward by a considerable leap so should anyone in their right mind be considering buying or using a 2013 mac pro in 2021 maybe the design of the 2013 mac pro is polarizing some people like me absolutely love it and others hate it but much of the hatred is not aimed at the specifics of the design it stems from what the design meant at the time of its launch so a brief recap may help the predecessor to this machine was the mac pro 5 comma 1 the original cheese grater and it was released in 2006 though that same case design had actually already been in use for three years in the form of the g5 power mac apple was slow to upgrade the five comma one with only incremental updates in the last few years of its life and i remember at the time that many professionals were asking apple look when are you going to release a more up-to-date machine new ceo at the time tim cook finally stated that they had something special in the works and then at wwdc in 2013 apple gave a sneak preview of this new cylindrical design the design of this cylindrical map pro is quite unique we've got two gpu boards here that are attached to a central triangular heatsink behind this selection of ports is the cpu and the heatsink has a fan on the top and it vents through the top of the case drawing fresh air in through the bottom a unique thermal design many professionals though they were shall we say underwhelmed there's nowhere to plug in your pci expansion cards there's no upgrade power for the gpus this computer represented a big change to that fully upgradable mac pro five comma one and in fact it didn't really represent much of an upgrade at all that earlier mac pro had the same pci express 2.0 standard so you could install a couple of gpus you could add expansion cards and hard drives the cpu tray could be swapped out and the ram was easily accessible the main thing that the six comma one introduced was thunderbolt 2. it's got six of these ports and it's something that many people had asked for on the five comma one cheese grater it seems that apple expected that upgrades to this computer would be done via thunderbolt 2 and that dual gpu computing was going to become a thing it didn't for many professionals the 2013 mac pro was the answer to a question that nobody had asked faced with this choice of this new machine or sticking with the earlier model and upgrading many chose to stay with that cheese grater in fact some professionals left the apple platform all together so with all this in mind you can probably understand the ill feeling towards this particular computer and the stigma seems to be still attached to the 2013 mac pro but if you look at this computer in isolation without that background you might draw a different conclusion and the people who are buying these computers now may be coming to it fresh and without those solely professional workflows in mind if we look at the mac pro's usefulness as a computer in 2021 factoring in the other machines that are now available what conclusions could we draw let's start with the price you might be able to find a good condition entry level model for about 800 pounds in the uk and that places it firmly in the same ballpark as the m1 mac mini and let's be clear here the m1 mini beats the entry level 2013 mac pro in pretty much every area of performance but let's consider the specs of that entry level machine it came with a quad core xeon cpu 12 gigabytes of ram a 256 gigabyte ssd and two amd fire pro d300 gpus each having two gigabytes of video ram this particular mac pro was originally that entry level specification i've upgraded it since i remember buying this one my business partner pete and i bought it new from the apple store i still got the original box here and the price sticker is still on the box which probably won't be able to see but it says 2 499 pounds after the brexit vote in 2016 the pound lost value against the dollar and apple announced that it would have to increase prices so this same machine went up by 500 pounds overnight other machines across the apple range and the mac pro range increased by even more and interestingly the exchange rate is stronger again now apple seems to have forgotten to adjust their pricing back down again i'm sure it's coming it's probably just slipped tim's mind he's very busy at the moment it does however put the pricing of professional machines today into perspective gone are the days when you can get a professional mac for two and a half grand though that's not just down to apple's profit margins the hunt for performance gains in these pro machines has meant much larger processors and so workstations are more expensive generally so a machine with pro components and error checking ram for 800 pounds or thereabouts might seem like a complete bargain and it is if it can compete with modern consumer machines and in the entry level configuration i'm afraid it can but you can upgrade and in the highest specification things aren't so black and white the original quad core xeon is a pretty hopeless cpu by modern standards but there are other options we've got 8 core 10 core and 12 core cpus available and each of these has their own merits when it comes to single core or single threaded performance none of these cpus get anywhere close to the performance of the apple m1 and that's not to say that they're slow or unpleasant to use but if you're looking for a computer primarily for things like office email web browsing and content consumption then you'll find that an m1 mac is a superior experience multi-threaded performance is a different story though and the 12 core cpu which is what i've upgraded into this particular mac pro it actually offers more performance than that of the m1 and it isn't hugely behind the eight core xeon in the 2019 mac pro so that's going to be of interest to anyone using apps that need decent multi-core performance this 2013 mac pro then is a great tool for music production it's quiet in operation it's got plenty of ports you can even add an external pcie enclosure via thunderbolt and you can make use of adding cards but of course the m1 that we keep referring to also has performance and quiet operation on its side and it can be a real powerhouse for audio work however support for third-party hardware and software on the new architecture and on newer operating systems is less widespread so an intel machine that's capable of running older versions of mac os might actually be quite desirable and likewise we could think of developers who need to run multiple virtual machines and they're going to find the 2013 mac pro to their liking the new apple silicon isn't fully ready for these workloads yet in the 2013 mac pro we can easily upgrade the ram best performance is achieved with 64 gigabytes of ram which is what i have here you can go all the way to 128 gigabytes if you want although there is a very slight hit to cpu performance but one of the benefits of older tech is that components are available relatively cheaply on the used market and since this is a professional workstation it uses professional components the same components that are abundant also in server hardware and many servers of this era are being decommissioned now and that's great news particularly if that server has spent its whole life in an air-conditioned temperature-controlled dust-free data center these used components have got plenty of life left in them it means that we can cheaply upgrade our mac pro same story with the top cpus you can find them for around 200 pounds so if you're up to doing the upgrade which admittedly isn't for the faint-hearted you can have a multi-core powerhouse with professional-grade components for a pretty fair price in fact even the ssd inside this mac pro can be upgraded either with a genuine apple generation 4 ssd or using a simple adapter you can install an nvme drive now sure you won't get maximum performance out of that drive but you can at least double the performance of the original ssd that these were shipped with one thing you can upgrade or at least not cheaply is the gpu the firepro d300 d500 and d700 cards which were available with these machines are actually not as bad as you might think if we look at geekbench 5's metal test we find that the d300 and d500 score between 22 and 23 000 and yes the d300 does out bench the d500 and i'll explain that in a moment the d700 however that scores over 30 000 in this test and remember the mac pro has two of each card so you can effectively double those scores if the software that you're using supports it and here's where apple's dual gpu idea fell short they failed to get widespread developer support so there are many apps that only use one of the gpus now the cards they're connected together with amd's crossfire x technology and if you boot into windows with one of these machines you'll see that and frustratingly windows implementation of the technology has more widespread adoption so arguably you can get better performance out of your mac pro by running windows in any case a pair of d700s in a gpu heavy app that supports both cards offers performance that something like the m1 could only dream of and those top cards have got six gigabytes of video ram each which makes them far more usable than the d500 and d300 which have three gigabytes and two gigabytes respectively now you'll remember that the d300 benches ahead of the d500 and it scores better mainly because the two gpus are different architectures the d300 is an older architecture to the 500 and 700 and it runs at a higher clock speed but in real world use the extra video ram on the d500 makes it the better overall performer so does this 2013 mac pro make sense for gpu heavy tasks i mean what about things like video editing for 1080p timelines all of these macs have got performance to spare but if you're working with 4k then you'll be wanting a mac pro with the d700s inside or you need to consider going down the egpu route which of course is possible and i've covered that plenty on the channel so we won't revisit that now if we take the gpu in the m1 that scores just under 22 000 in that geekbench 5 metal test so you might assume that any of these mac pros would outperform it for gpu heavy tasks like video editing particularly as final cut and davinci resolve will use both of the mac pro gpus but it's not actually that clear-cut due to the limitations of the video ram conventional wisdom is that you need 8 gigabytes of video ram to work with 4k footage now a 16 gigabyte m1 can certainly cover that and even the 8 gigabyte model can do a good job thanks to memory compression and the use of fast ssd swap files and the m1 and more modern intel chips have got dedicated hardware encoders and decoders for modern video codecs and the 2013 mac pro doesn't have any so that also swings the advantage away from the mac pro so an m1 in many cases will actually outperform the mac pro for timeline and editing performance though i suspect a mac pro with d700s might just have the edge but i've never had one of those models to test final render speeds may well be faster on the mac pro if you're using a gpu bound application like davinci resolve and if you're not using modern video codecs like h.264 and hevc so long story short here is that if you're a serious video editor the 2013 mac pro isn't the right machine for you and frankly nor is that m1 if you're a casual video editor then the mac pro will do the job but newer machines like that m1 offer a much better experience take the motion out of the graphics equation and it's a different story if you're a designer working with illustrator or photoshop the 2013 mac pro offers a great experience and photographers too will be happy with the performance that it offers though we have to say again in fairness the m1 max are pretty handy with these workflows too so who would consider the 2013 mac pro in 2021 there are better and cheaper options out there for some workflows but there are some areas where this old mac pro still has got something to offer and if like me you love this design then that may be enough to persuade you to spend your money on this more collectible machine arguably the 2013 mac pro has a measure of desk presence that a few other computers can match it's iconic and for that reason many people will be happy to enjoy it and overlook its flaws it's probably difficult to wholeheartedly recommend buying such a machine in 2021 unless you've got a specific need for the features that it offers but that doesn't mean that such a computer can't perform well for many years to come this is a fantastic computer it's smooth to use it feels like a quality item in a way that somehow the m1 max just don't and at the end of the day it's your money spend it however you like for me my 2013 mac pro journey is at an end not because i don't love it or because it's not good enough generally but well i'll save my reasons for another video but in the meantime whatever computer you have enjoy it there will always be a faster machine out there but that fact doesn't turn a good computer into a bad one the manufacturers they like to have us lusting after the bigger numbers and becoming dissatisfied with perfectly good equipment because it means that we might go out and buy a new one and that means bigger profits for the shareholders and that's all for this video i hope you enjoyed it if you like apple content you may enjoy our weekly podcast and we've just moved it to a new channel so we'll put links in the description if you'd like to check that out uh please consider supporting us with just one click of the subscribe button and maybe i did enough today to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your style but in any case i hope to see you next time for some more geekery you\n"