Can This Decade-Old Mac Pro Compete With Apple Silicon? 

Not ten years old. Came out in 2013 it’s only 2022

@@HistoryandReviews almost 10 years, pretty insane to think abt tbh

don't worry, somewhere, someone was probably still joking about it yesterday :P

@@umran89 I Love mine

i never in my life ever knew this thing ever existed

Thats what I thought... I am old...

Nowhere. ‘Time’ is not a property that ‘ flows’ from one place to another.

@@Mindsi metaphor

yeah I mean the world was suppose to end at 21 december 2012! Remember that 🤣

@@socialhostage8534 pepperidge farm remembers…

I had to replace the SSD in one that had been running 24/7 since 2013 and the inside of that was like a tumble dryer lint trap. I blasted it with canned air and made a bigger mess than I would have thought possible for such a small device.

Every computer requires dusting annually or you will get that kind of accumulation. The only real problem with the design is the lack of a dust filter that can be easily removed and cleaned without disassembly. All Mac's have that problem.

​@@OldMan_PJ There are a lot of nook and cranny inside that bin where dust can settles in.

My stepdad spilled tea on one of these and they implemented a no drink on table policy since

Still more upgradeable than recent macs :D

Holy hell that’s a big W there 😳👍 good job on finding one

Thats so fkn cap 😂

Sounds fun, great buy!

Not too long ago, a neighbor was putting things out for bulk trash pick up or something. He put one out with similar specs with a 27-inch cinema display. I asked him if I could have them. He gave them to me. He was looking at me weird for being so happy.

gives veracity to that old saying "one man's trash is another man's treasure"

Ram, 4 channels, and more cores go a long way in highly threaded application.

The editing bays at my community college use a mix of these and the more recent cheese grater Mac pros. I don't use them myself but one of these days I want to do a side by side export between one of these and my base 14 inch MacBook Pro.

I have a maxed out late 2012 21.5” iMac, and it definitely isn’t slow at all. People have just started to think that old technology is really slow lol

Fans that are actually able to move heaps of air help alot too. Intel MBPs have loud fans, but they move a fraction of the air that a Mac Pro or iMac can.

@@hyphinx I feel like it's mostly due to software outpacing hardware, and obsolescence being forced on consumers

I agree. I love the design of the Mac Pros. Even the later cheese grater design was stunning.

agreed, if it did end up being a dead end design wise.

It’s breathtaking. I love it.

Crazy it can accomplish that over Thunderbolt2

@@IgnoreSolutions TB2 is still fast enough for most people, and used gear is cheaper by the day.

@Joel Kalsi not really, remember that those Mac Pros just have PCIe 2.0 and that Thnuderbolt 3 is PCIe 3.0. Which makes them very close eachothers bandwidth. Also those old CPUs are certainly slower than modern ones, so for tasks that require both (such as gaming), a newer Mac with an eGPU may beat a Mac Pro 5,1. Not to mention that you don’t need much bandwidth for GPU-only tasks if you have a lot of VRAM.

The performance per watt doesn’t equate given the fact that how low power modern Macs take.

@@kumarcgowda assuming someone was actually trying a setup like this for work or something, I think price performance is probably a more important metric than efficiency

Yep, on the SSD it has Manufacturer Date of Nov, 2021

Yeah I have one, and I get why they sold it. While it's a great drive, when you write more than a couple of tens of gb in one go, it slows down to slower than spinning rust speeds. And before you say, "who writes tens of gbs in one go", I will tell you that a) I'm a developer who does imports of large databases, and b) some steam games rewrite the entire game when there's a patch, so that's an easy 80GB to rewrite.

@@dentjoener anyone who says that doesn’t really use the machines for storage but rather cpu and GPU. I have a Plex server and I’ll copy over 10s of GB no problem for a season

@@AlwaysBolttheBird over the network? Because gigabit ethernet they handle fine. More like local stuff. That gb/s drops down fast in my experience. But for most people it's probably fine. Doesn't really bother me either. Was cheap as hell for 2TB 3 years ago

@@dentjoener no I meant local. I have a virtual machine that is behind VPN and so on that gets shows and then I move it to the right drive after download. So it’s local stuff

Those synthetic benchmarks don't take into account a lot of things modern software takes advantage of such as new instruction sets and much much faster memory. I would have been interested to see render and compiler benchmarks.

Keep in mind that when the SSD (or almost anything else) fails on the M series, it's lights out and upgrades are not possible.

I thought only the G5 Power Macs had water cooling

@@bycuritiba You're right, it was the G5s. But the mistake is understandable, apple geniuses don't know anything about computers. Their only real job is to tell people with a broken USB port that they need to pay $1000 for a new motherboard, rather than just soldering it back on.

@@kyle8952 Isn't that the truth. A bit like, our software states your iPhone battery is perfectly fine, you need to upgrade to a new iPhone if you find it running slow after the latest update......

No Mac Pro had liquid cooling. The 5,1 mac pro is a much better computer than the 6,1 once it has been slightly upgraded. Better drive capacity, better graphics, better usb 3.1/3.2. To a lesser extent the 4,1 and 3,1 are not bad either, but the abundance of 5,1 machines out there makes them the pick of the bunch.

@@macguru9999 Actually the G4 dual Pro had liquid cooling as standard.

Y 0:55

I’m still using mine, which I picked up secondhand 5 years ago for 2 grand. Having the D700s make a big difference on the GPU side. My plan is to keep it until the M3 Max Studio comes out sometime next year.

Clean it out and reapply thermal paste before you decide to ditch it! ...(if you haven't already)

@@DavidJBradshaw I added an, eGPU a Vega 64, I have 2 D500. If put those D300-700 under constant duress they die, trashcan. The Vega destroys those D series graphic cards. I bought It for my Macbook Pro, but use It mostly on the Mac Pro. Investing now in an eGPU is maybe a little late, you can't use It on the M mac.

I’m still rockin my 12-core, mid-2010 cheese grater… LOVE this tower. Have it spec’d just like I like it.

Agreed. I'd love to have one on the mantle feeding the TV. Still looks absolutely futuristic.

Buy one with D700s, as you can not upgrade to low spec graphics due to lack of parts.

@@DavidJBradshawthat’s what I’d get too when/if I get a 2013 MP.

How do we get the mac os if we decide to change the ssd

@@stormbreaker82 These is a You Tube video entitled "How to Install Mac OS using CD or USB" by Trackpad Productions.

😊

Yup Apple losing its enthusiast customer base, getting more generic

@@hhkk6155 it's probably going to, eventually, alienate the last of their professional customers. i doubt any of that apple sillicon stuff is going to get the job done for audio production professionals.

@@BabyFawnLegs yes, and also the backdoor that they installed in latest OS, I don't want non of the big tech/big gobberment BS in my computer, what next?)

it is the true successor to the cube - also at the cusp of intel -> M1 just as the cube was at the cusp of G4 -> intel.

@@johnpenner5182 This thing launched right in the middle of Apple's Intel period - eight years after the last PowerMac, and seven years before the first M1 machines - and it had an Intel-based successor, so no, not really.

The 2013 mac pro is still a solid machine and they're getting cheaper.

@@johnpenner5182 The Cube wasn't at the cusp of G4 > Intel. The G5 came afterwards FFS!

I just bought one for $500 and it's a marvelous machine. I'm using mine daily w/ the last gen mechanical Mac peripherals for the sake of nostalgia. It's lovely!

I've got a 2010 that I tried to rock as long as I could, but I just kept running into barriers. Lack of OS support limited what software I could run, and even the most up-to-date (supported) graphics couldn't drive a modern ultrawide display. I ended up replacing it with a 2018 Mini that is more capable in every single way, except sheer volume.

Same. If I were buying a 2013 for actual use, I’d go with a higher clock speed 8 core, and probably an eGPU.

@@nickwallette6201 more modern Minis-especially Apple Silicon-are certainly no joke! It is a sad reality, though, that the older girls don’t remain viable forever and indeed need to be put out to pasture. Just out of curiosity-did you play around with OpenCore Legacy Patcher at all? It mostly solves the OS support issue (with some caveats, of course), though ultimately the barriers won’t cease anytime soon on the older hardware. I’m fortunate that I can relegate my writer workflow to really any device that powers on, and I can keep the old Pro on Mojave without suffering any loss of crucial software (most of my work is done in Scrivener). That’s certainly not the reality for everyone, though.

@@BrianJones-wk8cx Nah, I did the firmware update to squeeze a few later releases of compatibility (maybe it was the 2009 to 2010 model patch?) But I never tried patching the OS. I used to play with Hackintosh a little bit, but the care and feeding of making an OS run on hardware it didn't want to run on wasn't for me. I'm relatively new to Mac OS, so I don't have the deep experience of troubleshooting boot problems, and when a box I wanted to use for something productive wouldn't boot because of ???, that's just not fun. And you always had to be careful to not update this, or don't enable that because it'll crash... Plus, I had intended to use that Mac Pro for audio and video editing, and every time I solved one problem, I ran into another one. It just became clear after a while that I was putting in a lot of time, effort, and money to do something a newer computer could do with far less trouble, less power, and in a smaller footprint. So now, it's just a collector's piece, which is totally fine.

I pulled that trigger. I've found it to be sluggish compared to any M1 machine, and even worse with a modern Linux installed. I would advise against buying it for any serious application.

Open Core Legacy Patcher is a godsend for older Macs of all kinds. Right now, for example, I have an old 2009 Mac Mini running Big Sur as a media server. While I wouldn’t load it up with a bunch of processes like Dropbox, Google Drive, and other background apps, mind you, but keeping it close to stock while sort of uni-tasking provides a surprisingly serviceable experience. Good enough for my media server needs, especially.

I bought a "mid-grade" 43" 4K TV to use as a monitor.....with a little tweaking, the display is just phenomenal for the price....and it works great as a Video streaming "hub".

And fascinatingly, 4k monitors slow down Apple Silicon to basically sludge.

@@stewie3128 I can say after 2 years of using a base M1 Mini that my 43" 4K TV, used at full resolution as a Monitor @ 60Hz, certainly DOES NOT slow the Mini in any way, shape or form.

@@goobfilmcast4239 thanks for the update. Looking at TV or monitors around 24" after holidays

Parralels? Why not use bootcamp

Quite right. Too bad Apple does not agree with you.

if they would have gone a little further with the cooler design to be more like the XBOX Series X I think it would have held up

Yeah, this is basically a Mac Studio before such a thing existed. It's a pretty great design, it just isn't suitable for those who want to evolve their computer over time. It's really more of a buy, use, retire machine. Which, to be fair, is probably exactly what _most_ people do -- even professionals -- and the outrage over lack of upgradability is mostly theoretical.

@@nickwallette6201 except for being able to upgrade the GPU, which is completely real-world. If it were a tower, you could be sticking an RX6900XT in there even now. Plus, it meant Apple couldn’t be bothered to bring out newer versions, as they realised it was a dead end.

@@axi0matic I dunno. I don't keep track of Xeons, but I would imagine there were a few later processes that would've put more clocks and/or more cores in the same TDP. This is just speculation, but I think they lost their motivation. They got caught up in their form-over-function euphoria and expected the world to gasp in awe. And when that didn't happen, I think it was a bitter pill. They probably waited for people to "come around" for a while, then again, took a cold shower of reality and had to accept that it was a mistake. There's absolutely no reason they couldn't have either incrementally improved the specs of the current design, or moved away from that platform in favor of something else with more headroom. The fact that it took so long seems like there were some internal struggles that resulted in a stalemate for a while. The engineers vs. the design engineers, or whatever. Regardless, I'm actually most fond of their failures. I LOVE the G4 Cube, and the Trashcan. (Well, and the iMac G3 and iMac G4 -- which weren't failures, and the G3 actually brought them back from the brink. But whatever.) I don't (and didn't) have to depend on them, though. I can just admire them as sculptures that happen to run Mac OS. Not nearly so much fun for those trying to do actual work at the time.

@@nickwallette6201 That's what I meant when I said Apple couldn't be bothered - it would certainly have been possible. I'm sure that over 6 years, there would have been newer Xeon models that fitted the TDP and provided a reasonable uplift in performance. Same with the GPUs - even something like Vega 56 may have worked if slightly down-clocked. Plus faster NVMe, RAM, TB3 etc. Apple seem reluctant in general to build Mac Pros, likely because they a) represent tiny numbers of sales, and b) are fundamentally unlike all their other products. They tried with the 2013 MP, then with the iMac Pro, to make a compact pro machine with no internal expansion, before eventually conceding defeat and going back to a tower. Apple's 'vision' though was fundamentally about saving costs and warehouse space, not giving pros the machine they wanted. They likely hoped they could wait out pro Mac users, who would eventually accept the tower wasn't coming back and just accept what they were given. And as with the Touch Bar MBP, they probably also wanted to recoup tooling costs before moving on, plus avoid the image of failure that comes from reversing course too soon. They likely started to see an exodus of high end users to Windows towers, forcing the very uncharacteristic move of publicly admitting they messed up, and pleading with pro users to keep the faith and wait for the new tower (the design of which probably started from scratch that morning). In general, the problem with Apple in the pro space is a total lack of roadmap. No one knows what form their future pro desktops will take - or even whether they will exist. The Apple Silicon MP is currently in this limbo. People, including Colin, talk about the dual-GPU concept in the MP6,1 as 'betting on a future that didn't work out', but this is bullshit. No-one was predicting that future. Fundamentally, Apple just wanted to build a compact cylinder (so they could use one big fan), and arranged the hardware to suit. It was a pure exercise in form over function. As a Cube owner myself, I love these stylish follies from a collector's point of view. The iMac G4 (which I also own) is arguably in a similar category, as its design required a heavy lead-alloy base to allow for the floating screen (the later 'fat LCD monitor' approach is a lot more practical). But as you say, they are not fit for purpose as work tools, and sell accordingly.

Flawlessly?.need solid evidence to believe that.

Thing is, the only difference in hardware between the HD 7970 6GB and the W9000 is the 6 mDP ports, SDI out, a slightly different heatsink shroud, ECC VRAM, and different firmware. (And moving some resistors around on the PCB) otherwise they’re the same hardware. Most of the extra cost comes from the software certifications that the industry the FirePro was targeting required.

what do you mean 'still has yet to replace'..? you don't consider the newer Mac Pro as a replacement?

@@lexacutable or the Studio.

A very very poor replacement.

Technically yes, it is the next iteration, but the 2013 Mac Pro is a special device.

Probably, very use case specific machine.

And you can have windows and mac os on it

@@HistoryandReviews Yay Windows 😀

They still have some of the best I/O of any Mac, and you can get old Thunderbolt accessories super cheap these days. It's not as bad of an idea as it seems like at first.

I bought new in box off ebay in 2020. Wrapping, tape, and everything still in ties

do you edit 4K using proxies? How does it work with Davinci Resolve?

@@devhowto Hello, i use Premiere, and usually the files i edit are pro Res 4k.

Nice to see that one is still in use today from brand new (unless you’ve upgraded in the year since your comment). Have/had you done any upgrades to it?

That’s a ridiculous price, obviously didn’t know what they were selling

you're getting old :)

got a 2tb 16gb m1 mac mini for about $1000 used a few months ago. was looking at the trashcan, but dropped the idea due to price concerns. didn't know there was an upgrade path for the cpu though.

@@GeirEivindMork the NVME, GPU, and CPU can be upgraded

the mac pro 2013 has thunderbolt 2. egpu‘s need thunderbolt 3. but thanx to apple adding metal support to blender, cycles can now render on the firepros.

@@m13v2 you are half right. Using a version of Open Core, you can enable eGPU, which I have done. Works very well. You’ll get about 80% of the potential though, so mileage may vary.

They're a buy! Upgrade the CPU to the 8 core instead of the 12 if you're going to be using it as a desktop though.

@@nambrosch I thought about it, but I think my 2019 Intel MBP would probably get me more of what I want. Super tempting though!

Ooooooo. That would be interesting to see!

I thought it was the dumbest thing ever when it came out, but now it actually looks kinda cute, like a little designer wastepaper basket for post it notes, 😆 If I come across one I'll add it to my computer hoard.

Still, 500 Dollars for a 10 year old computer (we're a month a half from 2023) is just WAY too much money. The Ridiculous policy of obsoleting a computer via software is another problem.

@@tarstarkusz It's an incredibly capable machine, depending on what you're doing with it. For me, Apple has yet to release a suitable replacement.

​@@tarstarkusz For me $500 is good enough for the trash can Mac Pro. Why? Cuz it can do everything a new Macs can do. Heck, even with the latest Mac Pro Apple currently selling. It can't out perform them but it can still do the job. Those Trash Can Mac Pro might be ugly but the power it can get is incredible. I have a friend with an 6-Core variant of the Mac Pro and he upgraded everything. RAM to it Max Limit and SSD. The only thing he didn't upgrade is the CPU. With the power of OCLP he managed to install macOS Ventura there and the performance is still good. Not that fast but when doing basic task on it, it runs super smooth.

@@005MDS3 Yeah, today. But being locked out of the mac os is a major problem for such a computer.

Yep, I run Pop!_OS on mine. I love the little beast.

Trash can also runs at 150W idle

If you find one with D700s then they are ok. Otherwise the BlackMagic Vega 56 looks really good next to it and runs just as quite.

That was called the Angelshark by Amfeltec. Bought mine new from them in June and ever since have had an issue with one of the NVME slots not wanting to read my NVMEs. A blue light stays on under my Mac and Amfeltec wont respond on how to fix it and their manual doesnt even mention the light s coming from the board

How are you getting on with the limited RAM of the M1 Mini? I was looking at getting one, but I'm the kind of guy that likes to open a bazillion windows and reboot once a season. My Intel Mini has 32GB and I think it's just about enough.

@@nickwallette6201 I had the M1 Mini with 16GB of unified memory (aka RAM) and 512GB of storage. It was doing fine but I moved up to the M1 Studio Max when it released (base model, 32GB memory and 512GB of storage --- I have a 2TB NAS for additional storage). The Intel Mini is a great device (had one of those too), and I miss the ability to run BootCamp. Needless to say, I was all over the map until I landed on the Studio, which more than meets my needs now.

@@bryans8656 what do you use bootcamp for? I have windows 11 arm installed under UTM VM and find it perfectly acceptable for when I just needed one thing from windows for 5 minutes

@@harrytsang1501 I have a couple of old Windows applications that I still like to use but they won't install properly when I use Windows 11 via Parallels. I haven't tried installing Windows 11 under UTM VM. We have Windows computers in the house so I use one of them for running those old apps.