Tech —

You can spend $9,599 on a Mac Pro, but should you?

We max out the CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage to find the best value for the money.

This unassuming black cylinder can cost you a pretty penny. Nearly a million pretty pennies, in fact.
This unassuming black cylinder can cost you a pretty penny. Nearly a million pretty pennies, in fact.
Apple

Apple's new Mac Pro has gone live on Apple's online store, and the first orders will begin to arrive on December 30—just barely sliding, Indiana Jones-style, under the door of the company's self-imposed December deadline. We knew the starting prices for the two base Mac Pro configurations, but we weren't sure how much the various CPU, GPU, and other component upgrades would run. Now we know.

Unlike most of the other Macs, your upgrade options for the "low-end" $2,999 Mac Pro aren't artificially limited to encourage upgrades to the higher-end $3,999 model (for example, you can't upgrade the CPU in the $1,299 or $1,799 iMac base models—those upgrades are only available to the $1,499 and $1,999 SKUs). So, starting from $2,999, how much does each individual component upgrade cost? Let's break it down.

CPU

GPU

  • Two AMD FirePro D300 GPUs, 2GB of GDDR5 each (base)
  • Two AMD FirePro D500 GPUs, 3GB of GDDR5 each (add $400)
  • Two AMD FirePro D700 GPUs, 6GB of GDDR5 each (add $1,000)

RAM

  • 12GB of 1866MHz ECC DDR3 (base)
  • 16GB of same (add $100)
  • 32GB (add $500)
  • 64GB (add $1,300)

SSD

  • 256GB PCIe SSD (base)
  • 512GB PCIe SSD (add $300)
  • 1TB PCIe SSD (add $800)

The upgrades add up to a whopping $9,599 if you max out each one, though Apple Education and Apple Business customers will be able to get it for less than this—the Apple Education pricing for the same machine is a mere $8,739. This is the pricing for the tower only, and you can spend quite a bit more on peripherals if you have a mind to. Adding an AppleCare three-year warranty to the machine (recommended if you're going to drop multiple thousands of dollars on a workstation) costs another $249. You might also consider a keyboard ($49 wired, $69 wireless), a mouse ($49 wired, $69 for either a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad), and a display or three while you're at it ($999 for an Apple Thunderbolt display, $3,595 for that Sharp 4K display we noticed last week). External Thunderbolt 2 storage is another pricey add-on if you need it—Apple will sell you Promise Pegasus2 storage arrays starting at $1,499 for 8TB.

Of all the upgrades here, the CPU is the one that is most likely to break the bank, and this becomes more true the more cores you add. Stepping up from the quad-core to the six-core Xeon costs only $500 (or $250 per core), but stepping up to the eight-core and 12-core CPUs will cost you $500 per core and $437.50 per core, respectively. If you're just buying a CPU by itself, Newegg lists that same Xeon E5-2697 v2 for about $2,750, making Apple's markup a not-insubstantial $750.

Compared to the CPU, all the other upgrades are less outlandishly priced. The SSD pricing is actually not too far removed from market rates, at least if you're using 2.5-inch SATA drives as a point of comparison (it's difficult to find PCI Express SSDs on component sites right now, and you can be sure that Apple is using a proprietary connector here, just as it does in all its other desktops and laptops). The RAM is also marked up, but depending on the amount you're buying, it's not too bad. Populating each of the Mac Pro's four RAM slots with 8GB sticks of RAM from Crucial, for example, would run you $483.96, not much less than what Apple charges (though upgrading your own would leave you with 12GB to reuse or sell). If you're looking to max out your RAM, though, buying Crucial's stuff will run you just $879.96, a savings of $400 compared to Apple's memory. The 16GB option adds one 4GB stick of RAM to the 12GB configuration, and here Apple charges $100 for RAM you can buy for about $70. It might be worth it if you don't want to open the Mac Pro up, but you could just as easily throw an 8GB or 16GB stick into that empty slot to get the most out of it.

Finally, there's the GPU. It's a little more difficult to make direct comparisons to aftermarket parts here since the AMD FirePro GPUs that Apple is using are integrated into the system board and not available for purchase anywhere. Based on this Architosh breakdown of the key specs, the top-end D700 GPUs are each roughly comparable to one of the FirePro W9000 cards that AMD sells for desktop workstations, and those have an MSRP of $3,999. Considering that Apple will sell you two for $1,000, it actually seems like a pretty good value.

What should you buy?

The RAM is the only component in the new Mac Pro that users will be able to upgrade easily (or at all).
The RAM is the only component in the new Mac Pro that users will be able to upgrade easily (or at all).
Apple

Only you know what kind of work you do and what kind of processing power that you need. That being said, we can look at the upgrade costs for individual components and try to figure out what the best system is for your money.

When it comes to the CPU, the six-core Xeon E5-1650 v2 delivers the most bang for your upgrade buck, and the eight-core chip offers the worst. You won't be able to upgrade the CPU later on, so buy as much processor as you think you need, but the six-core part is a good general recommendation and will offer a decent step-up in CPU performance over a quad-core iMac or Mac mini.

As our own Dave Girard pointed out in his Mac Pro analysis, the non-upgradeable GPU is one of the bigger sticking points with professionals stepping up from the old Mac Pro. Unlike the missing internal storage bays, you can't really replace a proper PCI Express GPU slot with a Thunderbolt peripheral. With both of those things in mind, spring for the maxed-out FirePro D700 unless you know for a fact that your workload isn't going to be heavily GPU dependent (and even in that case, stepping up to the D500 for the sake of future-proofing isn't a bad idea). It's a $1,000 upgrade, but considered in the context of price-inflated workstation GPUs, it actually seems eminently reasonable.

Storage is more tricky—you might not even need a gob of internal, local storage if you keep most of your data on an external Thunderbolt array or a network share somewhere. Apple is given to using proprietary SSDs, but there's at least a reasonably good chance that someone like OWC will offer aftermarket upgrade options in the future. We'll go ahead and tell you to buy the 512GB SSD as our default recommendation to leave some room for future growth (or for a sizable Boot Camp partition if that's your thing), but stick with 256GB if you're buying a storage array or go for 1TB if you know you need a ton of fast internal storage.

Finally, we come to the RAM. As the only truly user-upgradeable part in the box, we feel comfortable saying that you should buy what you need now, comfortable in the knowledge that you can add more in later. If you're upgrading your memory at purchase, Apple's 16GB and 32GB options are priced pretty reasonably, but if you need 64GB and you're comfortable cracking the case yourself you should definitely consider saving $400 and going the aftermarket route. We'll go for the 16GB option, just to populate all of our RAM slots.

Going with these upgrade options, the Mac Pro with an AppleCare service plan comes to $5,148, about half the cost of the most-expensive computer you can configure. This is unquestionably an expensive workstation, though considered in the context of competing products like those from HP or Dell, you'll see that similarly specced PC workstations are in the same ballpark (though these dual-socket workstations make true apples-to-Apple comparisons more difficult, and it's harder to quantify the value of real drive bays and PCI Express slots). The possibility of building your own workstation might also save some money (you can always go with standard GeForce or Radeon-branded GPUs to avoid paying the Quadro or FirePro tax), but going that route will cost you the hardware warranty and support you get from going with an OEM.

Ars workstation guru Dave Girard will be giving the Mac Pro the full review treatment in the coming weeks, and he'll have more to say about the new Mac Pro's performance and value proposition then.

Channel Ars Technica