Nu-Grater - A Look at the Apple Mac Pro 7,1

Even though I'm a PC guy, I have a strong appreciation for the Mac Pro, having cycled through many of them in the not so distant past. However, Apple recently discontinued the latest model of the tower, this time seemingly for good. I figured now was a fitting time to check one out for myself.

How this machine came to be is equal parts hilarious and unfortunate. 

When Apple made the transition to Intel processors in the 2000s, the Mac Pro superseded the Power Mac G5 as the company's high end workstation offering. Sharing the bulk of its design with the old PowerPC equipped tower, this was one of the longest running designs in the history of Apple - and for good reason. It was incredibly modular with PCIe support, upgradeable memory and CPUs in a chassis that wasn't actively trying to punish users for making changes to their hardware configuration.

I rebuilt the 4,1 and 5,1 versions of these machines for years and even though I am primarily a PC user, Apple really did generally nail this thing. It was mostly tool-less by design, so replacing any components short of the dual CPUs was an absolute breeze, and it supported a very wide range of standard PC hardware such as discrete GPUs and expansion cards that would've otherwise been a pipe dream anywhere else in the Mac ecosystem.

So, in Apple's infinite wisdom, they decided to replace it with a machine that completely abandoned every ounce of that appeal.

When Tim Cook took the reins of the company after Steve Jobs passed, Apple introduced a new Mac Pro that was much smaller than the old silver 'Cheesegrater' tower, yet apparently more powerful. Indeed on paper the 2013 6,1 Mac Pro looked like an incredible step up with native SSD storage, faster DDR3 memory, and a range of beefier Xeon E5-series CPUs and dual AMD FirePro GPUs all bundled into that comparatively tiny cylindrical package. 

People started calling it the 'Trashcan' - and unfortunately it quickly started living up to that nickname.

Once you look deeper into what the 6,1 gave up to achieve it's delightfully small form factor, it all starts looking a whole lot less rosy. The new tower was not marketed as user upgradeable outside of memory and even though that was soon proven to be false, it was still nowhere near as easy of a machine to work on as the old G5-era tower. Apple also dumped PCIe in favor of Thunderbolt 2, which left hordes of workstation users without a clean way of using their existing hardware.

Oh, and it gets so much worse.

The machine's design utilized a single giant heat sink which the CPU and both GPUs bolted into, cooled by a single fan that pulls air from the bottom of the case and exhausts out the top. This was a clever solution for making the machine as small and quiet as possible, but the shared thermal contact meant that each component would dump heat into one another, making the machine run hot under combined loads. Apple's penchant for setting extremely lax fan curves didn't really help much in this regard either.

And since Apple designed the heatsink specifically to accommodate the Xeon E5 and GCN 1-era AMD FirePro chips, they gave themselves zero room to adjust the design for newer, more thermally demanding silicon. That's how the 6,1 went for six whole-ass years without a single hardware update. 

It was all so problematic that 4,1s and 5,1s remained highly desirable machines for years due to their far greater versatility and legacy support compared to the 6,1. That's not only embarrassing - that's an indictment on just how badly Apple failed to read the room regarding the 'Trashcan' design.

The 6,1's thermal core is genuinely impressive - it was just a solution in search of a problem.

Apple later issued an apology for the machine's lack of updates and admitted it was because they had engineered themselves into a "thermal corner" with the compact shared heatsink design. Of all the things Cook-era Apple has fucked up over the years - the keyboard, the headphone jack, USB-C... you know they had to have REALLY pissed people off for the company to actually admit they were wrong about something.

Eventually in 2019, Apple finally, mercifully made that apology materialize in anodized aluminum form. My first impressions upon taking my 7,1 Mac Pro out of its mammoth sized shipping box? I felt like I was getting shades of de ja vu as I released the computer from its packing foam prison - because Apple really did not fuck around this time.

Talk about a glow-up.

This thing is frighteningly close to the Mac Pro towers of yesteryear in terms of overall vibe, as if Apple ran the old G5-era design through a late-2010s Jony Ive tinted filter. You could have never seen a high-performance Mac tower since the PowerPC days, but you would know exactly what this machine was once you laid eyes upon it. Everything - down to the monolithic silver chassis, the carrying handle placement and elevated feet - is a very deliberate callback.

And just to drive the point home, Apple even doubled down on the old 'Cheesegrater' aesthetic with a uniquely machined front and rear panel. And I do mean machined. the front and back panel of this case are solid pieces of 2/3" thick aluminum with dozens of hemispherical cuts front and back. The front and back cuts are arranged in a staggered honeycomb pattern, creating the distinctive airflow holes. It's not just some cheap aesthetic gimmick either. Apple actually did design this thing with proper airflow in mind, and it is very porous - even more than the old G5-era tower's finely perforated front and back panels.

It all looks and feels extremely expensive - and that's before you pull the shroud off.

Apple didn't completely discard all of the 6,1's innovations with the 7,1 and in fact; they actually kept - and improved upon its best feature. That of course is the single piece aluminum shroud that covers and provides easy access to the computer's internals. In the case of the 'Trashcan', that was only the parts Apple cared for you to have direct access to without a Torx driver. 

With the 7,1? Apple basically said; "Fuck it. Have it all, and then some."

There's a big fold down handle that's integrated into the top of the shroud. You just flip the handle up, grab it, twist it 90-degrees to unlock the shroud from the case, and pull up. This is such a ludicrously overengineered way to open a case that Dell is probably pissed they didn't come up with it first - but it's so damn cool. It's not quite as smooth or effortless as the 6,1 but considering how much bigger and heavier this shroud is; that's not the end of the world - because it's what's underneath it that really matters.

I think the first words out of my mouth when I saw the inside of this computer in the flesh for the first time was along the lines of "god damn!"

This is a very sexy, but also very smartly designed chassis and it's far more like a traditional PC than the previous Mac Pro models were. Instead of components being split across a backplane and one or more daughterboards buried under a mountain of aluminum like the old models, the 7,1 switches to just one massive mainboard bolted into a fully open frame. That doesn't just mean a return to basic modularity. Rather, it means every single part of the computer is easily accessible with minimal tool use or finagling around the nooks and crannies of the case - including those that Apple doesn't explicitly say are user serviceable.

And speaking of Dell, Apple totally took a page out of their playbook by labeling all the basic user serviceable parts with numbered blue markers. That makes it extremely clear which order components should be removed, even to someone who has never serviced a computer before. They even put diagrams on the back of the RAM covers so you know exactly what positions to install the sticks depending on how many you have. 

Clearly the group of engineers that were put in charge of this machine are banned in every other part of the company.

The entire computer is cooled by three large fans in the front of the chassis along with an auxiliary blower on the backside. These main fans take full advantage of the flow through design of the tower, taking cool ambient air from the front panel and directly shunting it through the passive fin stacks of the CPU and GPU coolers in a manner that's not dissimilar to a rack system.

Apple famously obscures exactly how these fans are controlled from the factory but if you use fan controller software like TG Pro on macOS, you can control each of these fans independently, meaning they're not all just chained off one header. That's handy if you want further optimize cooling performance against noise level, such as driving only the top fan hard during CPU heavy workloads or the bottom and middle when the GPU is called upon.

Having proper per component cooling again is such a massive upgrade from the infamously constrained single fan and heatsink 6,1, but thankfully Apple didn't sacrifice idle and low load volume to pull this off. The 7,1 is still a very quiet system when it isn't being pushed and Apple even states that it sits around 11 dB idle, while the 6,1 is at 14 dB. That's not massive, but it's funny seeing the system you would rightfully assume sounds like a jet turbine under load outperform it's far smaller, very acoustics focused predecessor at just being quiet under normal everyday workloads.

Of course, being a Mac Pro, Apple gave you a gazillion options on how to configure it for your exact needs. The base spec came with an 8-core Intel Xeon W-3223 at 3.5 GHz, 32 GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, a Radeon Pro 580X with 8 GB GDDR5 (or a W5500X with 8 GB GDDR6 on later refreshes), and 256 GB of SSD storage (later revised to 512 GB). This configuration retailed at $6000 when new, which is more than enough to you a comfortably ludicrous PC, even in the hardware pricing hellscape of today.

The maximum factory spec though? It's properly nutty. You could configure this computer with up to a 28-core Intel Xeon W-3275 at 2.5 GHz, 1.5-freaking-TB of DDR4-2933 RAM, 8TB of SSD storage, and up to two linked Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPUs (later refreshed to the W6800X) with a combined VRAM pool of 128 GB. Apple also had an optional Afterburner FPGA card that takes some of the load off the CPU when processing ProRes workflows in supported apps. The cost of admission for this machine was in the ballpark of $50,000. That is fucking insanity.

My configuration is smack roughly in the middle; packing a 16-core W-3245 CPU at 3.2 GHz, 96GB of DDR4-2933 RAM, 4TB of SSD storage, an Afterburner FPGA card, and a single W6800X Duo GPU. My configuration retailed at $17,000 before tax and delivery, which is still stupid money for just one computer. Even with how genuinely capable this hardware may be, it still feels like Apple was charging you out the ass just for the privilege.

As for what it cost me now? $2450 before tax and shipping, or a nearly 86-percent loss in value. That's used Maserati levels of depreciation, and nearly just as embarrassing. Though I strongly suspect the Mac isn't going to immediately have running costs that outweigh the value of the hardware.

The GPU is particularly interesting piece of kit since Apple built these cards into what's called MPX modules. As I hinted at briefly, these are passively cooled GPUs that span the entire length of the case and have power fed directly into them from specialized slots on the motherboard. This eliminates the need for any power cabling and keeps the inside of the case nice and neat, allowing for as big of a heatsink as possible to be fitted within the case dimensions.

But fear not; MPX modules are still PCIe based and the Mac Pro 7,1 does come with auxiliary power headers. This means you can run damn near any standard PCIe card in the machine so long as the relevant drivers are available. That might prove to be little tricky on macOS - especially if you plan on using GPUs other than what's on Apple's approved list - but remember; this is x86 hardware. You can easily run Windows natively on this thing, and at that point hardware upgrades are very much like a standard PC.

And I do mean that in almost the absolute sense. You can purchase and load this machine up with DDR4 ECC LDIMMs and the CPU is back to a socketed design, meaning it can be replaced with any of the other Xeon W-32XX series chips, should you choose to do so down the road. Like the older machines, all this presents a great opportunity to save some money if you go with a lower-spec model and decide to gradually upgrade it down the road.

Not everything about the design is perfect though. There are a couple of genuinely weird things about this computer that I would say are less genuine ingenuity, and more like Apple relapsing into their worst tendencies.

The amount of fine machining - even in just the frame, is pretty absurd.

One weird quirk is how the power button is integrated into the shroud, so you have no way of turning on the computer with it removed. The 7,1 Mac Pro will also warn you with a flashing orange status light before shutting itself down if the shroud is unlocked while the computer is running. That might be a little annoying, especially if you have to keep the case open in order to troubleshoot, but the official service manual thankfully outlines workarounds in order to do this.

This also occurred with the 6,1, and the reason being is once again: airflow. The thermal design of this tower relies solely on the front fans shunting air from the front of the case to the rear in one clean flow path and the case does help with the routing of that air. Since everything in the tower is otherwise passively cooled, it's one of those things where it's better to be safe than sorry, though I personally wouldn't mind a little less hand-holding.

The two SSD modules located in the bottom front area of the tower look an awful lot like M.2 modules, but you can't simply just stick whatever 2230s you find on Amazon in their place because the key is completely different. You might think, "okay, Apple is gonna be Apple, but I can just buy an aftermarket adaptor or drive right?" Wrong, because of Apple's T2 security chip. 

Apple will have a whole plethora of reasons why this chip exists - it does perform a valid security function but to the average user; the T2 is functionally just DRM for onboard storage. It's fucking insulting, especially when Apple did something like equip the base spec machine with a paltry 256 GB of storage whilst selling upgrades for three-to-four hundred dollars a terabyte. You guys couldn't come up with a less blatantly terrible upselling scheme than that?

Still, being a machine equipped with PCIe slots; you have a whole lot of third party options at your disposal for equipping the 7,1 Mac Pro with SSD storage such as OWC's Accelsior series of PCIe M.2 adaptor cards. For internal large capacity HDD storage though? Things get a little weird.

Unlike its classic tower predecessors, the 7,1 completely lacks HDD bays despite being big enough to theoretically house them, and also evidenced by the fact there are two SATA headers and a ten-pin power plug located on the main board. Apple however, never made a solution for this or even the auxiliary PCIe power headers, instead electing to just let the aftermarket hopefully sort it out while they steer users towards overpriced first party modules. 

Source: Sonnettech

And for a machine as expensive as this, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that not much of aftermarket came of this. As far as I can tell, there's only one solution for mounting HDD inside the Mac Pro that's actually on the market: the Sonnecttech Fusion Flex J3i. It's a complete wiring and aluminum mounting bracket solution for up to two 3.5" HDDs and one 2.5" drive - for $230.

I'm sorry, but just blow me. Sonnettech knows damn well they're the only game in town at that price, and that people who willingly part with tens thousands of dollars for a computer probably lack the judgment to turn their noses up at it. 

Source: Techeblog.com

Case in point, Apple infamously sold a set of $700 caster wheels for the 7,1 Mac Pro. Yeah, let that sink in. SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR FUCKING WHEELS. At least the $1000 ProDisplay XDR stand did something important, as stupid as it was! What does wheels on a Mac Pro accomplish? Make a normally a stationary computer that's likely plugged into expensive things like speakers, drive bays, and $5000 monitors more susceptible to yanking those things off a desk when something bumps into it?

Regardless of what I think about the parts themselves, this all just shows that despite how much this machine has in common with a standard x86 PC and how accessible the actual hardware is, the supplemental parts market for it is still the stereotypical Apple clown show.

You'd hope then, that with the amount of money sank into it, that the machine actually delivers, and for the most part? It does.

Now, for me personally, I am not going to be using this computer as a production machine so this is more just to satisfy my curiosity about just how hard it kicks the snot out of the 6,1 - but also how it stacks up to either of my high-end Windows PC builds that cost nowhere near what this thing did when new. I ran my usual suite: Cinebench R23 and 3DMark Time Spy, both in Windows 11 and I used HWiNFO to monitor temps during the benchmarks.

My result for the 16-core W3245 in Cinebench R23 was a score of 18389 with peak CPU package temperatures of 98 - 100 degrees C. The CPU did not throw any throttling flags according to HWiNFO, but those thermals are just dreadful. It predictably kills the 6,1's 12-core E5-2697v2 that put out a score of 8218. Respectable enough for silicon as ancient as it is, but the W3245 squarely beats it.

This goes back to a point I made in regards to the 6,1 that Apple's stock fan curves tend to aggressively target noise over cooling performance and that certainly seems to be the case here. Other user experiences do generally appear to back up what I'm seeing here. If it works - it works, but I don't think it would have killed Apple to give the stock curve a little more ramp even when it's under this kind of load.

That said, the 8-core AMD R7-7800X3D in my gaming PC comes just within sniffing distance of the W3245 with a score of 17199, and it got completely slaughtered by my main PC's 16-core AMD R9-7950X with a score of 36822. There are some obvious advantages the server class Intel silicon has over the consumer AMD silicon, namely the much larger potential RAM pool and PCIe lane count, but the Ryzen chips school the Xeon in performance-per-dollar for multi-core workloads alone.

The Mac Pro did rather well in Time Spy however, carried largely on the back of the W6800X Duo. This GPU put up a graphics score of 24963, with the 11051 CPU score dragging the final combined score down to 20997. That still outperformed my RTX 3090 and 7950X equipped main PC, which scored GFX 21180, CPU 16022 and a combined 20204. It even came within spitting distance of the 26833 graphics score my gaming PC's RTX 4080 FE laid down, so this passively cooled dual die GPU is a real monster.

That being said, I can't actually tell if both dies are actively being utilized in Time Spy. The report seems to indicate that only one GPU was used as only one card and 32 GB of VRAM are reported, however the performance implies that the test was actively leveraging both dies. Hard to say what's really going on here, but I certainly wouldn't feel comfortable assuming this GPU will perform the same across applications without explicit support for it's multi-GPU technology.

And let's be real: the vast majority of people buying this computer for the GPU aren't going to be using it for gaming - even an RTX 5090 at its presently stupid, inflated price makes more sense in terms of value than a W6800X Duo for the performance and workload capabilities. But this is still the most powerful discrete GPU that works natively in macOS on Intel. For people who base their entire workloads around Apple's ecosystem, it's no joke.

The M2 Ultra is an impressively big chip - it's also effectively all you got.
Source: Appleinsider

In 2023, Apple did actually give this computer one last update in the form of the M2 Ultra Mac Pro which was by all accounts a much faster and more efficient machine in many supported workloads than the Intel model it replaced, but it eschewed all forms of traditional upgradeability apart from PCIe; albeit in a much more limited capacity. This computer was effectively just a more expensive Mac Studio with support only for increasingly niche cards that Apple bothered to support. No MPX modules, no discrete GPUs, and no other native x86 shenanigans like loading up Windows or Linux alongside macOS.

To me, that makes it a whole lot less useful - and special. It really cemented the idea that the real PC-like Mac tower truly died with the 7,1. This was just modern unified ARM platform wearing its skin.

Unsurprisingly, the M2 Ultra Mac Pro was not a sales hit, with the smaller, less expensive yet equally powerful Mac Studio giving it little reason to continue existing. And so - after no hardware updates since the initial release, Apple finally put the Mac Pro out to pasture earlier this year, confirming what almost everyone already knew: it's best days were solidly behind it.

For users like me though? It's just a new beginning.

Ultimately, this computer is going to go into service as my new home server, replacing my trusty 6,1 in the line of duty. Eventually, once hardware prices hopefully exit the realm of stupidity I want to further build it out into a homelab style system with a high VRAM enterprise GPU, of which passively cooled models might pair well with the factory cooling solution. Obviously, there are far better suited systems for this role, but none of them really strike a chord with me anywhere near as much as the 'Nu-grater'.

It's still absolutely weird and annoying a few ways that only Apple would dare come up with, but generally speaking, the 7,1 Mac Pro a fabulously well executed and practical final evolution of the classic Power Macintosh tower. Apple fixed nearly everything that made the 6,1 a total flop while still incorporating its best elements, tying them all back into a design that echoes the old silver towers of yore. A fitting way to cap off my long relationship with this series of machines.

What's Good

• A return to full modularity.
• Gorgeous and functional throwback design.
• Properly monstrous performing workstation parts.
• Retains native support for Windows and Linux.

What's Crap

• Proprietary SSDs. 
• No internal drive bays from the factory.
• Extremely conservative stock fan curve - if you can even say it has one.
• Parts market is an absolute joke.

Verdict

The ultimate Intel Mac desktop, somehow now a halfway compelling value considering where it started.