UPDATE: The video is here! Scroll down for the OWC unboxing of the 2019 Mac Pro.
We are hard at work filming the unboxing of the New Mac Pro, but I thought we could at least start posting a few pictures to hold you over. Keep your eyes on this page – we’ll continue to update this post with photos as Alex and Brady enjoy their new toy, and when finished, the video will find it’s home here as well.
Expect a complete teardown in the next few days!
It made sense for them to go back to the original Mac Pro design. The only thing I found about it to criticised was the handles made my hands hurt when I needed to move my machine. Will I ever get one of the new Mac Pros? Well, when I finally managed to get one of the previous Mac Pros it was getting on, though the previous owner (a photographer) could have kept it going quite a lot longer if he’d only installed at least one SSD.
I’m afraid iFixit beat you to the teardown. But maybe you can outdo them and show the actual CPU in the machine instead of like how they left it attached to the heatsink. ;)
As for the NVMe being in RAID, if they were they’d reach roughly 5.5 GB/sec to 6.4 GB/sec if the SSDs are top notch, but this assumes RAID 0. I suspect they ship as JBOD since by default modern OS X post-10.12 won’t install to a RAID volume anymore. They’ll run from one, but not directly install to one. Either way, still miffed that they are tied to the T2 chip, meaning no end user upgradeability here and there’s no way in hell I’d pay Apple’s prices on an 8 TB future upgrade.
Don’t forget to take the CPU off of the heatsink so we can all see it. it’d be nice to see someone actually one-up iFixit for a change. :)
Thanks for the input, I’ll be passing this along to our demolition team!
There are several PCIe cards that support M.2 including from OWC (and more) that allow 2 or 4 cards to be installed and are fully MacOS supported to allow high-speed storage to be added – and can be configured in various RAID configurations with the OS support, or 3rd party support – depending on what the user needs out of it.
(even gives you choice of what kind of M.2 modules – cheaper with possibly less endurance – Intel 660p 4x 2TB modules is about the same as 4TB from Apple which are still pretty fast, or more expensive faster higher endurance)
I’d seriously look at smaller internal storage direct from apple (1-2 TB maybe), then add cards like these for actual working space.
This is, sadly, really the only option users have. Not sure why SATA ports are even in the machine when there is nowhere to put SATA devices (like an optical drive). At least there’s enough PCIe lanes for cards cnsumers would put in there, unlike non-Xeon mainstream systems.
Still wish Apple would put out a two CPU version of this machine. Unless the CPUs Apple is getting have changes in the architecture from Intel’s other Xeon lineup for this generation, putting more than six DIMMs in the machine will slow the RAM to 800 MHz as full speed with DIMMs populating the alternate slot of primary slot (interleaved in multi-channel configurations) will trigger the slowdown.
Edit: That last line is meant to read “as full speed with DIMMs populating the alternate slot of primary slot (interlaved in multi-channel configurations) will required two CPUs”.
Need coffee. Still asleep. :D
Amfeltec has a card that allows 6 M.2 slots.
I prefer photos, not a video.
Two SSD modules in RAID?
Yes it is – by the T2 chipset, like in the iMac Pro.
If it’s RAID, then it would use 8 PCIe lanes and be faster than 4000 MB/s. Did someone do a benchmark?
Or maybe it’s a RAID that isn’t any better than a single NVMe that can do 3500 MB/s.