2-year-old chip? 5-year-old design? Here’s why the Mac Pro still reigns supreme

The Mac Pro has drawn a lot of criticism from people who typically buy it – and in most cases, justifiably so. Mac Studio scary good and much cheaper.

I too agreed with the criticism that the Mac Pro was a bad buy. But the Mac Pro does have value—a lot. How 2019 Intel Mac Pro fanI tried the M2 Max MacBook Pro and Mac Studio, but found that the Mac Pro has advantages that should not be overlooked.

Hidden costs of other Macs

When I tried to switch to a MacBook Pro as my primary Mac, problems started almost immediately when I tried to emulate the massive storage and port capabilities I had on my 2019 Mac Pro. I need more than three Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports on my MacBook Pro, so I needed Thunderbolt Docking Station. Mac Studio has more ports so I got better at it, but I still needed a Sonnet Thunderbolt 4 dock to support all the external devices I use.

The cost savings on Mac Studio quickly begin to diminish when you factor in the costs of the required external devices. There’s the hub, all the cables needed to connect to the hub, and the cases I had to buy to house the items that were installed inside my Mac Pro. If the case was out of stock, I had to buy external replacements.

These external replacements really take a toll on your wallet, and the economic benefit of Mac Studio is greatly reduced. More affordable USB-C external drives don’t work well with Macs: USB performance is limited at lower speeds because Macs don’t support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 speeds. You’ll be limited to USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds of around 10Gbps, which is about half the theoretical speed on a PC with the same drive.

This means that if you need faster performance, you should opt for more expensive Thunderbolt 4 external drives, which can deliver speeds of up to 40 Gbps. (I’ll cover performance issues later in this article.)

Of course, if you haven’t used a Mac Pro before and are upgrading from an old MacBook Pro or desktop Mac and you already have an external device setup, your setup costs may be limited.

Free of clutter and noise (mostly)

Mac Studio and MacBook Pro may not take up much space, but they need a symphony of devices to replicate the capabilities of a Mac Pro on a desk. The required horizontal space is multiplied by heavy use of RAID arrays, docking stations, and external PCIe enclosures.

In addition to all the space taken up by external devices, there’s also the cable management – even if you’re a pro, it’s hard to manage. You can daisy chain Thunderbolt devices to each other, but you’ll always have a large cacophony of cables – most external devices require at least a power cable and their own Thunderbolt connection. Think of the Mac Pro as a large skyscraper that can fit most of these devices indoors and vertically—without cable clutter.

Mac Studio and MacBook Pro are silent machines, but the external devices that come with them can take away that magic with their noisy cooling fans. Most external Thunderbolt cases come with fans. night fans to replace the stock fans in some external enclosures, resulting in increased costs and wasted time trying to make a quieter workstation setup.

The Mac Pro has large fans keeping PCIe cards cool, and you’ll rarely hear a whine from this elegant, cheese-grater-like masterpiece.

We value PCIe

You don’t have to be an audio engineer or YouTuber to take advantage of the Mac Pro’s PCIe slots. You can skip a lot of external Thunderbolt devices and use the internal PCIe-compatible option instead. The Mac Pro has six PCIe Gen 4 slots, enough to free up the Mac Pro’s external ports and suddenly there’s no need for an expensive Thunderbolt 4 dock.

A small advantage of the Mac Pro is that its internal Apple SSDs are upgradeable, whereas the Mac Studio is not. If you bought 1TB and later want 8TB, you can get it. You may want to add PCIe cards for better price/performance, but the option is there.

If you need to connect external devices, the Mac Pro has eight Thunderbolt 4 ports and two USB-A ports. It also has two HDMI ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack. You won’t need to buy a docking station.

If you only need a few terabytes of storage, which can be provided with a simple external SSD and no PCIe cards, then the Mac Pro won’t do you any real good. If you need more storage space, using the Mac Pro’s PCIe slots can make a lot of sense.

Mac Pro PCIe Performance

While cost, noise and clutter are important to many, the real bread and butter lies in the performance of the equipment. Although the Mac Pro is limited in PCIe lane bandwidth, it still outperforms external devices.

With a fast Thunderbolt 4 external drive like the SanDisk Pro G40, you’ll achieve rated read speeds of around 3,000 MB/s and 2,500 MB/s write. Even when using an external RAID 0 NVMe like the SanDisk Pro-Blade Station, Thunderbolt restrictions limit the speed.

You also don’t have to rely on Apple’s PCIe offerings. You can get 800 dollars Sonnet M.2 8×4 Silent Gen4 PCIe Card and then add 32TB of very fast NVMe storage and it’s about the same price as $2,800. Apple 8TB SSD Upgrade Kit which fits into the PCIe slot. Spend more on NVMe storage and you can fit 64TB on the Sonnet card.

A Sonnet card in one of the Mac Pro’s 16x PCIe slots can theoretically achieve a whopping 30,000 MB/s read and 18,000 MB/s write speeds. It all comes in a silent package that gives Mac Pro fans peace of mind.

Even the more conventional PCIe Gen 3 RAID 0 of four Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs delivers impressive write speeds of 12,632 MB/s and read speeds of 9,634 MB/s.

An VNK Accelsior 4M2 An NVMe RAID 0 array with four Samsung 980 Pro processors mounted on an 8-lane lane on a Mac Pro still achieved 6,622 MB/s write speeds and 5,558 MB/s read speeds.

Do you need SSD and HDD RAID arrays for backup? You can have them, but you’ll pay more per terabyte for external Thunderbolt enclosures designed for MacBook Pro and Mac Studio users. They are also typically much slower than internal PCIe cards.

Of course, the PCIe bandwidth of the 2023 Mac Pro has limitations. Even taking that into account, the overall utility and performance can make this cheese grater a powerful sleeper workstation.

PCIe nuances on Mac Pro

While the numbers are impressive, there are some very important caveats to how the Mac Pro handles its PCIe lanes.

Here’s a list of PCIe hardware I migrated from a 2019 Mac Pro to a 2023 model. Everything below works and appears on macOS after installation. I just transferred it from my new Mac Pro and it worked – a big bonus.

This includes:

1. Sonnet 4×4 NVME PCIe Card on 16x Bottom Lane
2. Sonnet 8×4 NVME PCIe Card on 16x Top Lane
3. OWC Accelsior 4M2 NVME PCIe Card on 8x Lane
4. Sonnet Fusion SSD PCIe Card 8 Lanes, Number 6
5. Apple-supplied I/O card in top slot

PCIe lanes are shared and limited, so you can’t use them all at once and expect uncompromised performance. I use several large arrays for sequential backups (using Time Machine, for example), so the speed reduction is theoretically acceptable. They are still faster than any external Thunderbolt drive.

The built-in expansion slot utility in macOS shows that my allocation to pool A is a whopping 181 percent, and pool B is 59 percent. It dynamically adjusts the bandwidth between each pool to achieve the best performance. You can also manually assign different PCIe cards to different pools, but I’ve found that using “Automatic Bandwidth Configuration” works best.

It may look scary, but everything works fine, only the speed decreases if you try to use more than one lane at a time. The 2019 Intel Mac Pro had more generous bandwidth, but it also had to accommodate bandwidth-hungry GPUs like the Radeon W6800X Duo in its 16x slots.

The 2019 Mac Pro also only supported PCIe Gen 3; The 2023 Mac Pro supports Gen 4 speeds. This helps balance out some of the differences in throughput, but the limitations of Apple silicon remain.

In this Apple Silicon Mac Pro, the Thunderbolt connection is now independent, whereas in the 2019 Mac Pro, Thunderbolt also shared the available bandwidth. That’s why I keep at least one Thunderbolt SanDisk Pro-Blade station with four NVMe drives to balance the throughput of the internal PCIe slots.

You can even add 2.5-inch SSDs to the Mac Pro. WITH Sonnet J3i or Promise Pegasus J2ithis is a simple update. Hard drives with more storage are also easy to add.

A Sonnet Fusion Dual 2.5″ SSD RAID Card works, but only in number 6 8x PCIe in the 2023 Mac Pro. (This is noted by Sonnet, which recommends that users install it in that specific slot for this Fusion card only.) It worked fine with other installed NVMe PCIe cards in both the 16x and 8x slots.

Don’t overlook the Mac Pro

On paper, the Mac Pro seems like a bad deal. But for users who need huge amounts of memory, this is the best choice. Adding PCIe cards is still cheaper per terabyte than adding external Thunderbolt solutions. You’ll experience noise-cancelling, practicality, and powerful performance that fit perfectly into Mac Pro. Mac Pro is the perfect combination of power and beautiful design.