And so the launch models of the 2013 Mac Pro remained on sale completely unchanged for six years. In 2017 Apple discontinued the basic four-core model and cut the machine's price, simultaneously announcing that they were working on a replacement model, but they didn't upgrade the hardware. A twelve-core Mac Pro bought in 2013 was exactly the same as a twelve-core Mac Pro bought in early 2019, by which time it very a very poor deal.
The new Mac Pro finally came out in June 2019. It reverted back to the tower case design that had been used for the
2006-2012 models. On the upside it was state-of-the-art, but on the downside it was very expensive. And so the 2013 model had a second life on the used market as a relatively cheap video editing machine, especially when combined with an external GPU enclosure.
As of 2022 the 2013 Mac Pro is available cheaply second-hand. It's totally obsolete, but it's cute, and just as importantly it's feasible to send it through the post, so it has a certain amount of liquidity. At
£2999 it was obnoxious, but for £199 it has charm. It doesn't make a lot of
rational sense in 2026, but if you want a cheap all-in-one gaming PC that can run XCOM: Enemy Within and Fallout: New Vegas at max settings, comma, and you're prepared to fiddle with Bootcamp or hacky Windows installers, comma, it's an interesting choice. It's decent as a kind of left-field Mac mini as well. The humblest Apple Silicon-powered Mac mini is much more
powerful, but the Mac Pro has ports, lots of ports.
The 2013 Mac Pro has a lot of ports. Ten ports. That's a lot of ports. The 2013 Mac Pro embodied two bold ideas. Firstly it did away with internal
expansion in favour of a lot of high-speed ports. 4xUSB3, 6xThunderbolt
2, plus dual Ethernet and a HDMI port. It will drive six external monitors at 1080p without breaking a sweat, or alternatively three monitors at 5K.
On the downside it did away with PCI card support. Users who had hardware that connected to a PCI card were left in the cold,
unless they bought an external PCI enclosure. A related problem is that the 2013 Mac Pro inevitably ended up with a spaghetti
morass of cables coming out the back. The mass of
cables took up less space than a 2005-2012 Mac Pro case, but it looked awful. And it didn't have FireWire, but that wasn't specific to the 2013 Mac Pro. Apple generally dropped FireWire with their 2012 models, and they did sell an adapter dongle.
The Pro came with a pair of graphics cards. That was its second big idea. One of the cards worked as a regular graphics card and the other was used as a general-purpose maths accelerator. The regular GPU is pictured on the right, with the maths accelerator on the left:
Sadly the dual-GPU idea was a disaster. Almost no software used the accelerator card. Final Cut apparently used it to speed up the preview
display of some effects, but not video rendering. Civilization 5, the video game,
apparently used it to speed up terrain generation. Despite the passage of
thirteen years I can't find any other concrete examples of an
application that used the card. Apple has a long history of coming up with
technical solutions that fail to attract developers, such as the DSP
chip in some of the Macintosh Quadra AV models, or the 64-bit processor in the PowerPC G5 range, or the Afterburner accelerator card that was an option for the 2019 Mac Pro. All of those things were great on paper, but almost nothing used them, so they were pointless.
The irony is that Windows actually can use
the Mac Pro's second card to speed up graphics. AMD has a technology called
CrossFireX that gangs the two cards together, SLI-style, but it only works with Windows. In my
experience the aforementioned Civilization 5 - one of the few
games I own that runs on Windows and MacOS - is smoother under Windows.
The dual GPU setup had some unfortunate side-effects. The two cards have to be
arranged in a certain configuration - GPU on the right, maths accelerator on
the left, as pictured above - and they both have to be present, so in practice if one card fails the other card can't be used as a spare. There were only three options (2gb-per-card D300, 3gb D500, 6gb D700),
and they weren't sold separately. If you wanted to upgrade your D300 model to a D700 model you couldn't simply buy replacement cards from Apple, you either had to find them on the used market, or buy a complete new Mac Pro.
Both the form
factor and the connector are unique to the Mac Pro, and no-one in China or
anywhere else ever reverse engineered the design, so there were no alternatives. As of 2026, if one or other card
fails the only practical solution is to replace the entire Mac Pro. In a twist of fate the base-level D300s are popular nowadays because they generate the least amount of heat and thus last longer. They're unimpressive, but the same is true of the other two cards. "They are all equal now."
But isn't that true of people? Aren't we similarly fragile? No, it is not true of people. If one of my lungs fails, I could
survive with the other lung. Ditto my kidneys and testicles. God intended for the human animal to dominate this planet. Apple should have paid attention. Instead Apple strayed. Apple strayed from God's light.
About the one part of the 2013 Mac Pro that can be upgraded easily, beyond the RAM, is the CPU.
I bought my Mac Pro purely so I could run Logic. I have an old FireWire audio
interface, which connects seamlessly to the Mac Pro with a Thunderbolt-FireWire adapter
cable. When I bought the cable it was £29, which seemed
exorbitant. But then Apple discontinued it, at which point the price
quintupled. It seems that there are still FireWire hold-outs in the
world. FireWire gives me a warm, pleasant feeling.
My Mac Pro is the basic, D300 model. It has a quad-core Intel Xeon
E5-1620 v2, running at 3.7ghz, with 16gb of RAM, and the original 512gb SSD. With Open Core Legacy Patcher it
runs MacOS Sequoia, and it does pretty much everything I want, but in a fit of
boredom I decided to upgrade it.
The machine will take a maximum of 128gb of RAM, although beyond 64gb the RAM
slows down from 1866mhz to 1066mhz, so 64gb is the sweet spot. Given the price of RAM nowadays I
decided to stick with 16gb. My machine has 4x4gb memory sticks, taking up all four slots, so an upgrade to 64gb would
involve throwing the original memory away and buying 4x16gb sticks instead, which as of mid-2026 would cost around £80. Would I notice a difference? Probably not.
This is how it benchmarks in Geekbench 6:
Before doing all of this I really should have rendered a video. Then I would have a real-world example. But alas I didn't.
The 2013 Mac Pro is compatible with the E5 16XX and 26XX V2 Xeons, so I
popped over to eBay and picked up a 10-core, 3ghz Xeon E5-2690 V2 for £13.06.
It's clocked slower than the original CPU, but it has more cores. Apparently
the 8-core model had the best balance between high-speed single-core execution
and parallel multi-core execution, but £13.06 has a quality all its own.
The 2690 looks like this, on the right, next to the original 1620:
As you can see it has more capacitors. Because it's better. Here's what it
looks like when photographed with an infrared camera, because I had an
infrared camera lying around. Do you remember when this blog was about
photography? It still is, but it used to too.
It was packaged in Malaysia. Where was it actually made? I have no idea.
Upgrading the 2013 is frustrating. The machine can be stripped down to its
component parts with a set of Torx screwdriver bits, and all the components
can be replaced. But there were never any third-party options, so the only
replacements were direct from Apple, at great expense. I've said it before,
but the 2013 Mac Pro is like those LEGO kits that use masses of custom parts and custom
stickers. You can replace them, but only with the same thing, and only by
purchasing the exact same LEGO kit. The CPU is however one of the few parts
that can be upgraded with a non-standard replacement. I mention this because Apple never sold a ten-core Mac Pro,
only four, six, eight, and twelve-core.
I followed iFixIt's
handy guide. The mightiest shall be the first to fall. Where did that come
from? The mightiest shall be the first to fall. It's
from Zoids. That's where it's from. Why did that come to me. Why.
You'll need a T5, a T8, and a T10 Torx screwdriver, plus some thermal paste.
And ideally a soft brush and a blower to get rid of thirteen years of dust. As
you brush away the dust, think of all the life choices that brought you to
this point. Brushing away thirteen years of dust from an obsolete old computer,
instead of sitting at a cafe in Venice sipping a lemonade, or resting your
head on the firm buttocks of a thirty-five-year-old fitness instructor. There
are some things that money can't buy. A sincere smile. And perhaps money can
buy even that. I hope not.
Step one is to take off the fan. Technically step one is to accept that you
can't always get what you want, and the best you can hope for is to
salvage some happiness from what remains of this world. And then you have to
take off the fan. The fan is held on with five Torx screws. The central
heatsink resembles Darth Vader's mask. Some of the screws have anti-tamper blue paint, but the 2013 Mac Pro's warranty expired long ago
and Apple no longer services it. I intend to tamper.
Look at all that dust. The central heat tunnel was the 2013 Mac Pro's other big idea. The
designers attempted to cool the CPU, the two GPUs, and the SSD with a single heatsink that had one fan sitting on top of it. Air flowed up through the Mac Pro's central heat tunnel, and also between the metal case and the outside-facing parts of the machine, thus making two thermal zones. The heatsink was an
elegant solution that worked well in 2013, but it doomed the machine's
long-term prospects.
Think of a modern high-end graphics card. They're huge, chunky
things with their own fans and separate power connectors. You can't fit
anything like that into a 2013 Mac Pro, which is why the machine remained on sale unchanged for so long. Apple
quickly realised that the design was a dead end. Towards the end of its life
some users took to attaching external graphics cards - eGPUs - to the Mac Pro
with a PCI enclosure, but it wasn't cheap. As of 2026 there's no point.
After cleaning up the fan, here's what it looks like in infrared:
The next to come off is the base, also held on with Torx screws:
The interconnect board pops out of the bottom:
The board slots into the motherboard. It acts as a bridge between the two graphics cards, the ports, and the motherboard.
The next thing to come off is the power supply cage, at which point I realised
that I didn't have a T5 Torx bit. So I ordered one from the internet, and while it was in transit I took
the opportunity to do some other work. I have in my
possession a Doepfer A-112 sampler module. It's a simple 8-bit Eurorack
sampler:
It has 128kb of memory arranged in two banks of 64kb. Each bank can store a sample, for a total of two samples. The memory is backed up with a rechargeable battery that tends to corrode after a while. Mine was corroding a little bit so I bought a replacement. It's the little green thing pictured here:
Fitting the new battery involves a little bit of soldering, but it's not particularly hard. You have to unsolder the three legs here:
Then pop out the old battery and insert the replacement. In practice I melted the
solder a bit, popped off the old battery, popped in the new battery, and let
the solder resolidify. Here's what the PCB looks like in infrared. Infrared
tends to penetrate the surface a little bit, which makes the PCB traces stand
out:
The end result isn't pretty, but it works. The battery is only used to store samples in memory, but in practice unless you use it as a wavetable synthesiser the A-112 is only really useful for short, bassy notes, which are easy to re-sample if the memory fails.
It also has a MIDI sample import function, albeit that this relies on arcane
knowledge of MIDI SYSEX, or
a DOS / Windows 3.1/95 utility
that was written in 1999 and hasn't been updated since. A bit of tinkering with DOSBox actually got this working, almost, but it was flaky.
Back to the Mac Pro. After carefully pulling off the power supply brick the
next thing to go was the port enclosure:
To be fair, it was nice of Apple to make the ports replaceable. Most
PC motherboards have the ports soldered directly to the motherboard. After years of plugging and unplugging things the solder can
break, which either requires some work to fix the motherboard, or a completely
new board.
Taking out the port enclosure reveals the brackets that keep the CPU
clamped to the motherboard:
Firstly you must unscrew the outermost four screws, at which point the
motherboard separates from the heatsink. This revealed thirteen-year-old
thermal paste, which was starting to solidify and flake off:
Apple didn't spare the paste. That's real Apple paste, right there. The next step is to unscrew the innermost quartet of screws. At this point the CPU brackets, plus the CPU itself, may or may not fall off the motherboard. Actually replacing the CPU is easy, although you have to make sure that the little round hole in the corner is opposite the edge connector.
Reassembling the CPU bracket is by far the hardest part of the process. The problem is that you have to do it upside down, with the CPU facing downwards, screwing the screws through the motherboard from the back. You have to hold the CPU in place otherwise it just falls out. My suggestion is that you reassemble it all before you add fresh thermal paste, and rest the upside-down motherboard against something smooth, with a bit of give - such as the book pictured above - while you screw in the screws.
The
first time I tried the result didn't look right, and after dismantling it I
realised that the CPU was misaligned slightly. It's a good job I didn't screw the
screws in tightly. The second time looked perfect, so I screwed the screws all
the way in. Then I applied thermal paste. I have to admit that I just washed my finger with warm soapy water, dried it off, then used my finger rather than a spudger.
Reassembly goes in reverse. Thankfully the process is designed so
that it's difficult to mix up the screws. Off the top of my head the Mac Pro uses
2x5xT10 (top and bottom), 4xT10 (wide, for the CPU bracket), 2xT5, 2xT8
(black), and 4xT8 (silver), and it's obvious from the context which goes where. Putting the top back on was surprisingly hard, though. Every screw except one fit neatly into place. I had to squeeze the case to make the last screw
fit, but perhaps it was designed that way, in order to keep the heatsink
firmly pressed against the CPU.
After reassembling the machine I was expecting it to fail. I was expecting a
string of angry beeps followed by nothing. Or a screen of text telling me that
there was an error in subsystem X. But no, it booted first time.
The Macintosh recognised the new CPU. Activity Monitor showed twenty cores, because the Xeon uses hyperthreading, so each core can run two processes. After using it for an hour in order to give the thermal paste some time to settle, I ran Geekbench 6 again:
The original score was 801/2666, so the ten-core upgrade is about 6% slower at
single core-tasks but around 85% faster at multi-core tasks. Does this help me
on a practical level? After using the machine a bit more it didn't feel any
faster, but I haven't edited any video with it. The temperatures seem lower, but whether that's because I cleaned out all the dust, or because the machine isn't pushing as hard, I don't know.
In terms of benchmarks the 2013 Mac Pro was overtaken even before the switch to Apple Silicon. Purely in terms of CPU power my souped-up Mac Pro is almost, but not quite, as powerful as one of the last-generation of Intel-powered i5 and i7 Mac minis. The Silicon-powered Macintoshes trounce it. The hot-off-the-presses MacBook Neo is around twice to four times more powerful. The performance differential is even more impressive when you consider power consumption. At idle the 2013 Mac Pro draws 43w, whereas the Neo draws around 9w, topping out at around 33w while under load.
The new CPU works just as well with Bootcamp-ed Windows 10, although I learn that CrossFireX is now called MGPU. I have no idea if it actually does anything to make games run faster, but as mentioned previously Civ 5 felt smoother under Windows. That might be because Windows has better drivers in general. Furthermore XCOM: Enemy Within and Fallout: New Vegas are smoother under Windows by default, because they don't work on MacOS at all. At the very least Windows appears to be doing something with the second GPU:
Can you make money from this? No. There might have been a small window of time when you could buy a four-core Mac Pro, upgrade the CPU cheaply, then sell it
on for a profit. The problem is that Ivy Bridge Xeons were overpriced for much of
their life, and now their time has been and gone.
There's a famous internet porn star called Mistress T (not her real name). Imagine Mistress T wearing latex stockings, standing over an Ivy Bridge Xeon, laughing at it, while poking it with high-heel boots. It's a powerful mental image. Powerful and distracting. If you plan to make money fixing old Mac Pros by
replacing the CPU, the problem is that the CPU generally doesn't break.
It's the GPUs that break, and they're worth more than the Mac Pro.
Still, that is how I upgraded my 2013 Mac Pro in the Year of Our Lord, 2026. At first it was a four-core
machine that was thirteen years out of date. Now it's a ten-core machine that
is about eight years out of date, saddled to a graphics card that's thirteen years out of date. On the other hand the work only cost me £13.06
(for the CPU) plus £9.99 (for a new set of Torx bits) and a couple of
afternoons. Conceptually the process just involves unscrewing things, blowing
out dust, and applying thermal paste. Then you screw it all together again, although some of the screws, particularly the CPU bracket, are
quite tough the end.
