Unboxing the new Mac Pro

by Aaron Bertrand · February 24th, 2014

I talked at great length in January about the new computer I ordered on December 20th.

Today, it finally arrived.

Unboxing

I took a few pictures as I pulled the box apart and changed out the memory. These are all full size; feel free to click for more detail (and I do apologize for both the lens choice and my terrible shooting skills today).

The reflective surface is nothing like you’d expect based on most of the depictions Apple gives you: it was nearly impossible to take a picture of this thing without a big reflection of me in it…

It really is something, how much this looks like a droid invented by Darth Vader himself.

Here it is dwarfed by my old Mac Pro.

Swapping out the memory was pretty easy; however, you might find that they don’t all seat properly (particularly bay #2) without a little finesse. They also did a smart but annoying thing: it is impossible to remove the cover with any of the cords connected. Which is great to protect people from doing silly things while the thing is plugged in to an outlet, but it would be nice to not have to disconnect *all* of the peripherals instead of just the power cord.

About This Mac

Results for Geekbench & Blackmagic

I was surprised that both the single-core and multi-core Geekbench tests came out faster than my old machine; I thought for sure I would take a hit on the multi-core tests going from two quad-cores to a single quad-core. That does not seem to be the case.

Here is the old machine (full details online):

Single-core = 1,653
Multi-core = 10,132

And here is the new machine (full details online):

Single-core = 3,653
Multi-core = 14,850

If you go through the detailed results, you will see that the new machine obliterates the old one in multiple scenarios; the old one only fares better in a few multi-core exercises, such as SHA1/SHA2 and a couple of graphic filters. In the memory category, the new machine outperformed the old by anywhere from 2x to 6x.

As for disk speed, using Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test, here is how my Promise J4, filled with over 2.5 TB of Samsung SSDs, fared (write = 360 MB/s, read = 522 MB/s)…

…and here is the PCIe flash storage that shipped in the machine (write = 930 MB/s, read = 1005 MB/s):

Power consumption

This thing is amazingly quiet. This is probably partly why (new machine on the left, old machine on the right, neither doing much of anything):

New machine: 34.5 watts at idle
Old machine: 293.3 watts at idle

This is probably partly due to simply more efficient components, and fewer components, but also likely largely due to there being only one fan in the new Mac Pro. Here are the sensor readings, for comparison (new on the left, old on the right):

Another weird and maybe just coincidental observation: I’ve only had it a few hours, but it seems the bluetooth power suck is not as bad either. The battery strength in both my magic trackpad and wireless keyboard have barely budged, holding up much better than they did when connected to the old machine.

Conclusion

I’m digging it so far. What I’m not digging, though, is the hassle of setting everything up again. For those of you that migrate machines more often than every 5 or 6 years, how do you do it?