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 explains 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 "Six Core" 3.5 (Late 2013) -- features a single 3.5 GHz Six Core 22-nm Xeon E5-1650v2 processor with a dedicated 256k of L2 cache for each core and 12MB of level 3 "Smart Cache." By default, this model was configured with 16GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 256 GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D500 graphics processors with 3GB 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 higher-end standard configuration of the Late 2013 Mac Pro, this 6-core model offered a distinct step up from its quad-core sibling. The 6-core Xeon E5 processor and more powerful dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs delivered superior performance in more demanding tasks such as 4K video editing and 3D modeling. [2] This model was highly praised for achieving significant processing power while maintaining the remarkable quietness of its innovative cooling system. [14] However, like the quad-core model, its lack of internal expandability remained its most significant drawback. [14] Many professionals, while acknowledging its performance, found themselves longing for the flexibility that the traditional tower form factor had offered.