So I pulled the trigger on this little gem. Specs and pics to follow. I couldn't resist. Came across an article that discussed identifying Manufacturing dates. Can anyone confirm this info ? According to this, mine is a 2019. Which would be freaking awesome.
Congratuations! and Thanks for the tips.
Got mine a few weeks ago from eBay. The 4th character of the serial number is X. So it was made in 2018. I also checked the SN
from Apple and the purchase date was Jan 2019. I was happy too.
It came with 8-core CPU, 64G memory and 1TB SSD. I did open it up (very easy) and turned out both memory and SSD are genuine Apple OEM parts. That surprised a bit, honestly.
I bought a 12-core Xeon E5-2697v2 on eBay and it's yet to arrive. But after reading various web sites, I doubt it could give me any meaningful performance boost due to the lower base and boost clock.
After tried bunch of things in the last few weeks, the GPU (D500 for me) was one of the weakest points. Almost all software could only use a single GPU and it's by no means powerful at all. Any sustained load (like playing Youtube videos, playing casual games) would drive it very hard and power usage shot up. The thermal envolope was apparently too low for the design and it would throttle quite frequently.
I'm going to try an eGPU once my thunderbolt 2 cable arrives (I already have a
Razer Core X with an
AMD Vega 56 and Thunderbolt 3 to 2 adapter). The eGPU works fine with an Intel mac mini 2018. I hope that should make the mac pro more useful.
But anyway, even though it received lot of criticism for its lack of expandability and thermal headroom, its design is still iconic. I placed it together with an
iMAC G4. It's rather pleasing to my eye (not to my wife's though.
)
Not too much to tinker with, but well, just enjoy our new precious.