The new Macbook Pro – which looks very much like a can of soda, albeit bigger – is a tall 9.9 inch cylindrical frame, about one-eighth the size of the Mac Pro Tower. The new design is unique in providing a “unified thermal core,” says Schiller. The top of the Mac Pro is for carrying purposes, and is constructed out of aluminum with an anodized finish.
Graphics
The only downside in this new offering by Apple is in its design. Despite the easy slide in its lock switch, it is difficult to twist the Mac Pro around to see the ports at the back especially if one has a lot of accessories plugged into it. Also, the graphics card allotted to it is proprietary, implying the difficulty one will face in updating it. However, the two graphics cards aren’t identical; one GPU is from China and its twin from Taiwan, thus allowing for expansion in the future, in this regard.
CPU
The SSD pen sits in front of one of the graphics cards which can easily be removed by just a screw. According to iFixit’s teardown the board features a Samsung S4LN053X01-8030 (ARM) Flash Controller; Samsung K9HFGY8S5C-XCK0 Flash Storage; and Samsung K4P4G324EB 512 MB RAM. This SSD is similar to the latest MacBook Pro Retina and MacBook Air. The new Mac Pro features PCIe flash storage, with a data transfer rate of 1,250MBps.
RAM
The RAM is easily accessible and user upgradeable.
Fan and cooling
There is only one fan in the Mac Pro but the way the components are placed, one fan seems enough.
The competition
Earlier in 2013 another system with a single 8-core, 3.4GHz Xeon E5-2687W processor – the Windows-based workstation came out; this, and the MacPro, were pitted against each other using the Cinebench benchmark –based on Maxon’s Cinema 4D 3D animation suite.
Running Cinebench’s 3D rendering test –a measure of CPU performance – a score of 14.04 points was acquired. This is actually 6.8% slower than the 12-core Mac Pro reviewed back in 2010. It’s also 47.5% slower than the 26.78 score that the same Windows workstation with two Xeon E5-2687W chips installed scored.
The new Mac Pro is definitely the best Apple has to offer so far for your desktop. Up until the launch of the new Mac Pro, the fastest Mac was the 27-inch iMac quad-core/3.5GHz CTO from late 2013, which scored 288, according to Speedmark 9 scores. The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro quad-core/2.3GHz from late 2013 wasn’t far behind, scoring 252.
