The return of the TRASHCAN [Episode 1, video]

Buying a Mac Pro 2013 in 2023 and installing the Sintech m.2 adapter with a NVME SSD, with Blackmagic test.

Hello, here’s the invitation to watch the latest video on J-D / “tech.Minodesign” YT channel, the first of a playlist that will revisit the famous black Apple cylinder.

With this one it’s the return of another Mac Pro to my house after a few years. We are in mid 2023, just after the transition to Apple Silicon “M” chips — and in the middle of the AI bandwagon — so the purchase was made knowing that we were making a choice with an “early-vintage” flavour, like a computer that is starting to become historic, but still usable for contemporary software.

Part of the challenge was to find one of the cheapest Mac Pro 6.1s on ebay — in order to have more room for upgrades — and actually this Quadcore / D300 costs around $300 (to which, unfortunately, a little too many Fedex management charges have been added, I recommend opting for other faster couriers such as DHL and UPS) plus import for a final 400 eur.

Hopefully it has a 1TB Samsung blade which was one of the top choices, the one with a 4x PCI lane instead of 2x lanes (so it has the higher speed).

I did an inspection of the mac and it was so clean, probably professionally before the dispatch.

In the video there’s a SSD swap, with the test of the Sintech 2013–2015 Apple blades to m.2 adapter, which actually showed a strange result, highlighting a sort of performance limit due to the bus or more probably due to the slow CPU.

You can live in peace with one of these now — finally — cheap Mac Pros “trashcan”, with only the reminder that the CPU is quite old and is 22nm: temperatures will rise during workloads like exports and i Final Cut renders. But I have to say that the fan is very pro in this machine, it will get cool so fastly (to be more precise, slightly warm is the idle temperature).

There wil be soon a next episode where with some tuning of this Mac Pro, and then the testing of the possibility of those Thunderbolt ports.

Thanks for watching this video!

Giovanni

J-D

// Links //

Mac Pro 6.1 https://ebay.us/zHJuKz

Mac Pro 2013 https://ebay.us/n5DZKF

Sintech adapter m.2 for Mac Pro https://ebay.us/JKu6z5

WD Black 550 1TB https://ebay.us/vzcG1z

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