When every second counts, this is a vital and totally necessary part of the Mac Pro’s design, and overall reliability. This makes sure that in a worse case scenario, your workhorse wouldn’t be down for long - just swap the faulty part and keep going. Each component can be easily removed, and conveniently replaced should they become faulty or need to be upgraded. Thankfully, they’ve gone in the absolute opposite direction when to comes to the Mac Pro. You could argue that this makes sense for laptops, but it’s frustrating when this philosophy is applied to desktops, and it would be an absolute dealbreaker if this extended to their workstation. If you know Apple, you’ll be familiar with their unbelievably thin enclosures, with proprietary screws, where almost nothing is user replaceable. Although only a single port is there, it’s possible to connect a hub to it, enabling you to have up to 12 internal USB slots that way. You’ll also find a USB port there, which we thought was a thoughtful part of the design: since the case itself can be locked, it’s a great place to connect your copy-protection dongle, so you don’t have to worry about this extremely expensive piece of equipment… disappearing. You’ll notice that everything inside the enclosure is placed in very compact and space saving ways, and yet top right is a cavity that’s usually left empty - this area is normally set aside for the installation of additional hard drives, for instance. These are designed for the Mac Pro and offer up to 500W of power.

Alternatively, Apple’s own MPX cards can be installed instead.

These can be taken up with any standard 3PP PCI cards, be they full length or double width cards.

The Mac Pro offers a 64-lane PCI system, which is composed of 8 PCI slots. Not only does this speed up processing functions between them, but by bypassing the main CPU, it takes the pressure off the system, allowing it to devote itself to other functions, speeding up performance. When two graphic cards are installed, another piece of hardware is used to connect them together, enabling them to talk to each other directly. Another thing to bear in mind with the Mac Pro, is that everybody’s needs are different, and so it can be customised to an substantial amount, from the type of Intel Xeon W processor (from 8 to 28 cores), to the amount of memory (up to 1.5TB of RAM), to the type of graphics card (you can even have two of them installed), to the storage (up to 8TB of SSD storage), and more.įor instance, if you work in video, you could add an Afterburner card (£2,000 / $2,000), which is a hardware accelerator that can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second, turning your Mac Pro into a system capable of handling 6 streams of 8K Pro Res RAW, or 23 streams of 4K, according to Apple’s own tests.

Apple mac pro tower