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When Apple launched its redesigned Mac Pro in late 2022, it alienated a meaning percentage of its professional person user base of operations. The then-new systems emphasized multi-GPU configurations and offered a large number of Thunderbolt ports, but the diminutive form gene limited users to a single CPU socket and very little internal storage. While the new design and capabilities worked for some professional users, it failed to accost the needs of others. Five years later, third-party firms take taken it on themselves to offer the upgrades and capabilities Apple hasn't added, and they're using Apple's older chassis to practice it. The question is, will this meaningfully benefit professional users — and can a third-party vendor beat out the 2022 Mac Pro or the newer iMac Pro using Apple'due south Mac Pro v.1 from back in 2022?

It'southward not hard to encounter why some users would adopt to upgrade the old "cheese grater" Macs rather than ownership a 2022 system, and there's even a Danish vendor, Big Trivial Frank, dedicated to reselling machines built effectually the older CPU platform. At that place'due south no incertitude the classic Mac Pro tower tin offer sure capabilities that the new iMac Pro and 2022 Mac Pro trash can both lack — like multiple internal drive bays, and the (unsupported) option to use modernistic GPUs in a multi-GPU configuration, equally opposed to being express to AMD'southward ancient GCN 1.0 engineering science. If you know your workloads are entirely GPU-express, information technology might be worth investing in a belfry Mac Pro with a pair of modern graphics cards. Merely this is far from a certain thing and we'd more often than not recommend against it.

BigLittleFrank

Big Lilliputian Frank's custom "cheese grater" Mac Pro

While information technology'due south admittedly true that CPU performance improvements have slowed in recent years, 2022's Sandy Span was a meaning improvement over Westmere. The fastest CPU configuration officially supported by a 2022-era Mac Pro is a pair of Xeon X5690'southward, a six-core chip with a iii.46GHz base of operations and 3.73GHz turbo clock. Equally this comparing from Anandtech shows, SNB was ~15 pct faster than Westmere at the same clock speed. Even if we assume that Haswell and Skylake added simply 5 percent on average on top of that, a modern Xeon CPU would notwithstanding be 1.27x faster than Westmere, clock-for-clock.

That's before we factor in any performance improvements from AVX, AVX2, or AVX-512 support. It also ignores the fact that modern CPUs offering essentially more cores. A 12-core Mac Pro is still respectable, but a modern dual-socket workstation organization could contain as many equally 56 CPU cores in a height-stop configuration.

Here's how the Xeon X5690 (2012 Mac Pro), Xeon E5-2697 v2 (2013 Mac Pro) and a Xeon Gold 6146 compare against each other. These are the top-finish chips you can buy for their respective platforms and the highest-end 12-core CPU Intel currently sells:

Xeon-Comparison

There's no universe in which even a pair of X5690's are competition for a modern Xeon. Even at equivalent core count, the modernistic CPU has a significant efficiency advantage and more clock headroom, to say cipher of maximum retentivity bandwidth (the 6146 supports six memory channels, compared to three on Westmere and four on Ivy Bridge).

Then there are the features and support you aren't getting, from Thunderbolt to USB three.one. Some of these can exist added via aftermarket cards or Hackintosh configurations. Just professionals that desire an out-of-the-box solution that 'just works' are going to exist stuck paying a company similar Big Little Frank to perform the integration themselves.

The existence of companies like BLF and the hunger for a new Mac Pro solution are a symptom of how badly Apple tree screwed up with the 2022 Mac Pro. The company failed to pin to a GPU-centric ecosystem. Information technology didn't fifty-fifty carp to deliver upgrades for its own "cutting-border" form cistron. But while we sympathise with professional person Macintosh users who desire the company to offer an official solution to their woes, we can't actually recommend an alternative that's so firmly anchored to out-of-engagement hardware and the platform limitations, increased power consumption, and lack of official support that comes along with it. The idea of buying a "new" Mac tower in a vi-year-old form factor may appeal, but Mac professionals will be amend served past waiting or ownership a PC than buying into an obsolete system design.

Tiptop epitome credit: Uadro/Wikimedia Commons