Back in June, when Apple, the company said it would ship “later this year.” Here we are, just a few days shy of 2014,. Apple calls it the Mac Pro (Late 2013); a snarky reviewer might call it the Mac Pro (Almost 2014). Whatever you call it, it’s the company’s new flagship computer—its, if you will—and we’ve been putting it through its paces. Does it live up to its name as a professional’s Mac? The short answer is, “It depends.” When the new Mac Pro was announced this past summer, the initial reactions were, to put it mildly, polarized. Some people thought the new computer was a brilliant design that embraced current trends in high-end computing.

Furthermore, latest features added to the MAC OS like Force Touch, Split View, A tool to check grammar and Voice over has made it extremely easy to move documents from one device to another. The latest version is highly appreciated by the users.

Others thought it was a slap in the face of “real” pro users. Both sides can make a good case: Depending on your particular uses and needs, the new Mac Pro may be exactly what you want (a state-of-the-art, multi-core-processor, workstation-GPU computer that doesn’t waste space and resources on expandability you may never use), or nothing like what you need (a workhorse tower with tons of bays and slots for expansion). Thanks to its diminutive profile and attractive design, the Mac Pro is clearly meant to be a computer for your desk, rather than something you hide under your desk I’m not here to tell you which view is right or wrong, because real people with real jobs and real needs hold each. The best I can do is tell you what the new Mac Pro is, what it does, and how well it does those things.

CPU Raiser Card 3.7GHz 4-Core Mac Pro ME253LL A1481 Late 2013 661-7544 Apple CPU Riser Card with 3.7GHz 4-Core E5-1620v2 for MacPro6,1 2013 A1481 EEE Code - FNN2,FWC2. Currently I'm rocking base level 4 core, 3.7 ghz mac pro 6,1. I tried a 10 core ES processor a while ago, but ran into some issues with the processor lacking h.264 embedded instructions, so I had some crashes when I would push multiple video streams.

You’ll have to decide if Apple’s new approach is right for you. Small and Space Gray If you’re reading this, chances are you know all about the new Mac Pro’s design, but here’s a refresher. Apple has done away with the massive enclosure of the 2012-and-earlier Mac Pro: The new Mac Pro is instead a small cylinder with a beautiful, unibody exterior made from a single block of aluminum. As we noted in our, while Apple’s PR videos and images make the new Mac Pro look like a dark, metallic gray—almost black—it’s really closer in color to the new Space Gray finish of Apple’s current iPhone and iPad models. It even looks somewhat silvery in bright light. The cylinder is just 9.9 inches tall and just 6.6 inches in diameter. Apple says the new model is about 1/8 the size of the 2012 Mac Pro, but that number doesn’t really hit home until you see the new Mac Pro sitting next to one of its predecessors,.

Photo: Roman Loyola New Mac Pro, old Mac Pro. It truly is a tiny computer given its capabilities. Apple achieved this size reduction in part by doing away with many things professional-level computers have traditionally reserved internal space for: multiple bays for hard drives, multiple slots for graphics and expansion cards, and space for an optical-drive (or two). Instead, the 2013 Mac Pro offers most of its expansion options on the outside: Turn the cylinder around, and you’ll find a compact panel that: four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports (two each on three independent controllers), two gigabit ethernet ports, an HDMI 1.4 (audio+video) port,. But Apple also reduced the Mac Pro’s size with some clever engineering.

Traditionally, each heat-producing component in a desktop computer—CPU(s), graphics chips, memory, and so on—has had its own heat sink, and sometimes even its own fan. Fitting all these components into a case, and creating good airflows to make sure each can adequately cool, requires a relatively large enclosure.

It’s also an inefficient use of materials, because each heat sink is only cooling its respective component(s) part of the time. The Mac Pro's unified thermal core. Of course, not having traditional hard drives, PCI expansion cards, honkin’-big PCI-card GPUs (graphics processing units—a.k.a., “video cards”), and the like inside does wonders for internal temperatures. But the new Mac Pro also incorporates what Apple calls a unified thermal core.

This is essentially a large, triangular, extruded-aluminum frame in the middle of the new Mac Pro that acts as both the structure for the computer and a central heat sink. The inside of the triangle looks like a traditional heat sink, with thin slats to increase surface area. Coupled directly to each of the three sides of the triangle are, respectively, the Mac Pro’s CPU and each of its two GPUs. The result is a single heat sink that services the entire computer. Apple says the design allows the components to share the core’s thermal efficiency, as it pulls heat away from each of those components and distributes it evenly across the core. Even when working hard, the outside of the Mac Pro’s aluminum case feels only warm, not hot—it won’t heat your office like older models. The new Mac Pro also contains only a single fan.