MP All Models Basic 2013 MacPro expandability

[Giuanniello]

Hello,

never considered a MacPro since I put my old and beloved DualG4 in a storage, thought of getting a Mini to host my photo archive and other stuff but saw a base (I suppose) 2013 MacPro for the like of 1.6K and thought to give it a spin, dunno how expandable, powerful and reliable it is and if worth these money, I wanna use my old CinemaDisplay HD 23" through an adapter be it the Mini or whatever else and make, as above said, LightRoom basic editing primarily and, if powerful enough, my old passion being it Flight Simulation, is such a machine easy to add an extra drive, is it reliable?

Thank you

 

[flyingmanatee]

Probably better off getting a Mac Mini 2018 with the i7 as it handedly aces all but the Mac Pro 2013 12 (but its damn close in multicore benches and aces it in single core)

Granted the 2013 can have more RAM and you can easily hack in NVMe, the internal GPUs have a high failure rate, and you'd almost undoubtedly be using an external GPU if you like to game. Not only is Thunderbolt 3 faster, there's a lot more case options on the market now, making Thunderbolt 3 enclosures cheaper, a huge win for the Mini.

It's hard to recommend the 2013 when you can either go the route of Mac Pro 5,1 which gives you PCIe and all the glories it brings, or a Mac Mini 2018 which is smaller, faster (for most things) and has the benefit of not being failure prone.

 

[Giuanniello]

Ok, got it, better stay away off the fancy trash bin like 2013 MacPro and keep looking at a Mini, won't spend next to a grand for a 2018 by the way, I rather keep it lower and look for a machine with at least 8GB RAM and a decent CPU to handle my photo archive and be able to edit 36MP photographs.

Thank you for your input

 

[kfscoll]

You can use any TB3 enclosure with the 2013 Mac Pro with a $50 TB2-to-TB3 adapter. If you’re interested in running an eGPU, take a look at the benchmarks over on BareFeats.com...there’s virtually no performance penalty in using a TB2 connection to the external box. As for being “failure prone,” the dodgy nMP graphics cards were confined to a run of machines manufactured between certain dates.

People are spring-loaded to hate on the nMP. Indeed, for your use case, a Mac mini might make more sense. But if your workflow can leverage multi-core processing and you need stability and the ability to run your CPU at full load for long periods without throttling, I wouldn’t be looking at anything but a Mac Pro.

Finally, with Apple abandoning support for the MP 5.1 with Catalina, the suggestion that it’s a superior solution than a nMP (assuming you don’t specifically need multiple PCIe slots) is disingenuous at best.