Looking better and better.

The best desktop computer from Apple. Ever.

The new Mac Pro:

With the new Mac Pro (the small, cylindrical one) due out very soon, the 2009-2012 models will become even better bargains. There are very few performance metrics yet available for the nMP and while it’s reasonable to guess that CPU and GPU performance will be fine, there remains a big question over cooling efficiency. Apple has gone from 7 (or 8, if your GPU has two) large fans to one small one to cool the nMP and having had three iBooks and two iMacs literally melt their GPU chips in my household, owing to Apple’s compromised heat engineering, you can understand my sensitivity about proper thermal design.

Further, quite why Apple has relegated storage to external devices with the nMP and focused on making a professional machine as small as possible quite defeats me. The small size is a solution in search of a problem (do you hear production pros complaining that their computers are too big?) but early adopters of the nMP will only do photographers a favor by flooding the market with the older machines and driving prices down in the process. Right now supply of the old 2009 Mac Pros appears tight as the word gets out just how special these Mac Pros are, but I expect that situation to change markedly in favor of abundant supplies in the near future.

The new machine will start at $3,000 (4 core) to $4,000 (6 core) and I would be prepared to wager that a loaded 6 core machine will easily hit 5 figures.

The old MacPro:

A mint 2009 can currently be had for $700 (one CPU) or $1,100 (two CPUs) and as I have illustrated at length on my blog these machines can be easily and cheaply enhanced with better CPUs, SATA III drives, SSDs, USB3, RAM, Blu-Ray DVD drives, etc. It would be hard to spend a total of much more than $2,000 on a loaded dual CPU machine which comes with more internal storage and expandability than you can shake a stick at. There is no point in getting anything other than an absolutely mint machine. The thought of waking up to a beater for the next 2,000 or so days of ownership and heavy use makes no sense for the insignificant amount saved. $100 off for scratches and bruises? Are you kidding me?

Earlier models of the Mac Pro are not a good investment at any price. The 2008 is marginal as additional RAM is costly, being of a special design, though it will at least run 64-bit applications using its slow CPUs. 2007 and prior are obsolete owing to their 32 bit designs which deny the best performance in the latest applications. The 2009 Mac Pro, single or dual CPU, is very much in the sweet spot for price/performance/upgradability. The 2010 and 2012 later models added faster CPUs and better graphics cards at significant increases in cost. Otherwise they are identical to the 2009, with the sole exception of the unique CPU socket design in the 2009 dual CPU model.

CPU upgrades:

The most cost effective CPU upgrades are currently the (non-Xeon) Core i7-980 6-core for the single CPU Mac Pro ($330 used – a far better bargain than the $600+ used Xeon W3680 with the same functionality and speed) and the Xeon W5590 3.33GHz 8-core for the dual CPU Mac Pro ($400 for a used pair). Either option increases CPU speed by 50%.

We can expect to see prices on 12-core paired X5680 (3.33GHz) and X5690 (3.46GHz) CPUs to come down quickly as these CPUs are discontinued and server room upgrades see a flood coming to the market. Google alone probably has a million awaiting sale …. Currently, for dual CPU machines the 12-core CPU pairs run $1,200 and up, making the modest performance boost over the W5590 a poor return on investment. I see no significant risk to buying used, with the better bulk recyclers offering money back guarantees. I lose count of how many used CPUs I have purchased and have yet to get a bad one.

While CPU upgrades in the 2009 dual CPU machines are tricky owing to the unique design of the CPU sockets, you can pay experts (like me – click here for details of my upgrade service) to do it right on a turnkey basis and take out risk from the equation.

Alternatively, for the DIY set, buy faster CPUs from my colleague Paul Opsahl who modifies CPUs for the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pros for very modest outlay using costly lab tools, making for a drop-in replacement.

Either approach is cost-effective for a machine which easily has a 5 year life expectancy with no excuses necessary for performance.

USB3 built in?

Adding powered USB3 through a PCIe card is simple, as I illustrate, but Paul is also working on a custom modification to the front panel USB2 sockets to make them USB3 and I hope to showcase his work here down the road.

Equalling Thunderbolt speed in the old Mac Pro:

About the only modification you cannot currently make to the ‘old’ Mac Pro is the addition of Thunderbolt connectivity for external devices. The technology seems to be centered on the motherboard and no cards are available for use in PCIe slots.

However, once you break through all the hype surrounding Thunderbolt (cost is high – reckon on $1,100 for a TB disk enclosure and cables compared with $200 for USB3), you realize that you can easily approach or exceed TB speeds through the simple expedient of pairing two SATAIII drives using an Apricorn card and striping them in RAID0 using Apple’s Disk Utility. Bingo! TB speeds at USB3 prices. So the non-availability of TB is hardly a deal breaker here.

Two old RAID0 120GB SATAII SSDs running in my Mac Pro.

The above shows speed test results for two RAID0 SATAII ancient SSDs inside my 2009 Mac Pro. Were these SATAIII drives attached to an internal Apricorn card ($50) then Read and Write speeds would double, with the results comparable to or superior to Thunderbolt.

Airport wi-fi upgrades:

A Broadcomm (Airport) card installed on the motherboard in a Mac Pro.
PCs use the same 802.11n card.

As regards wi-fi, the newest 802.11ac protocol found in the latest laptops, iMacs and the new Mac Pro should become readily available using plug-in USB ‘dongles’ before long. There are one or two out there already but early reports suggest some problems remain to be resolved. But I believe it’s just a matter of time before aftermarket solutions become available. Whether we will ever see a plug-in card for use in the motherboard of the old Mac Pro (and PCs for that matter, the socket being a standard PCMCIA one shared with PCs) remains to be seen. Now that would be nice as the user would get an integrated Airport-style solution, rather than having to use an auxiliary utility application.

Performance and life expectancy:

For even the most demanding users, I expect that the performance of a suitably modified 2009 Mac Pro will remain satisfactory for photographers of all kinds over the next five years. Maybe longer.

PCs have very much hit the wall of technological progress with innovation increasingly focused on mobile devices and applications. With PC sales and demand falling and with performance improvements stalling, the ‘old’ Mac Pro may have a very long life indeed ahead of it.

Parts supplies are not an issue. So many of these machines were made (I would guess production numbers in the low hundreds of thousands) that both used and new parts are easily found with the most common wear items – those with moving parts like fans, DVD drives, power supplies and disk drives – abundantly available.

Except for the 2009 dual CPU motherboard with its unique CPU sockets, parts for the 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pros are identical, though the single CPU versions use unique heat sinks and motherboards (‘backplane’ boards in Applespeak).

The 2009/2010/2012 Mac Pro – a machine of (very) few parts.

The best way to describe the fit and finish of these machines is to compare them with the 1959 Nikon F film SLR. Both are made to survive combat and neither should be dropped on your toe.