Mac Pro Late 2013

There is no mistaking the "Late 2013" Mac Pro models for earlier ones as they present an Apple described "radical" departure from the large, highly expandable tower case design of yore and instead feature a compact dark gray, glossy cylinder design that is approximately one eighth of the mass but has limited internal expansion.

Apple explained that these "Space Gray" cylinder Mac Pro models are "designed around an innovative unified thermal core" and have not only faster processors than earlier models but also dual workstation class graphics processors, faster memory, and faster PCIe 2.0 x4 flash storage. Instead of internal expansion, the system provides extensive high speed ports for external connectivity options.

This particular model -- the Mac Pro "Quad Core" 3.7 (Late 2013) -- features a single 3.7 GHz Quad Core 22-nm Xeon E5-1620v2 processor with a dedicated 256k of L2 cache for each core and 10MB of level 3 "Smart Cache." The standard configuration featured 12GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 256 GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics processors with 2GB of GDDR5 memory each.

Connectivity includes six Thunderbolt 2 ports, one HDMI 1.4 UltraHD port, 4 USB 3.0 ports, and Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports along with 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0.

Originally, this model reportedly supported as many as three 4K displays or six Thunderbolt displays. However, on June 16, 2015, without updating the graphics cards themselves, Apple quietly increased the official support to as many as three 5K displays (5120x2880) -- two using Thunderbolt 2 ports and one using the HDMI port. The support for as many as six 2560x1600 displays using all six Thunderbolt 2 ports remained unchanged.

As the base configuration for the Late 2013 Mac Pro, this model astonished the world with its futuristic and compact cylindrical design. [9, 17] The 3.7 GHz quad-core Xeon processor and dual FirePro D300 graphics provided ample power for many professional tasks. [2, 14] Particularly innovative was its quiet cooling system, which arranged components around a triangular thermal core and used a single large fan to cool the entire system. [2, 23] However, this beautiful design came at the cost of nearly all internal expandability. [2, 14] Users were limited to upgrading only the memory and SSD, forcing heavy reliance on the six Thunderbolt 2 ports for peripheral connectivity, a point that sparked a major debate within the professional community. [9, 14]