There is no mistaking the “Late 2013” Mac Pro models for earlier ones as they present an Apple described “radical” departure from the large, highly expandable tower case design of yore and instead feature a compact dark gray, glossy cylinder design that is approximately one eighth of the mass but has limited internal expansion.

Apple explains that these “Space Gray” cylinder Mac Pro models are “designed around an innovative unified thermal core” and have not only faster processors than earlier models but also dual workstation class graphics processors, faster memory, and faster PCIe 2.0 x4 flash storage. Instead of internal expansion, the system provides extensive high speed ports for external connectivity options.

The Mac Pro “Eight Core” 3.0 (Late 2013) is powered by a single 3.0 GHz Eight Core 22-nm Xeon E5-1680v2 processor with a dedicated 256k of level 2 cache for each core and 25 MB of level 3 “Smart Cache.” If otherwise equipped as the default models, the original configurations of this model have either 12 GB or 16 GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 256 GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D300 or D500 graphics processors with 2 GB or 3 GB of GDDR5 memory each, respectively. The standard configuration quietly released on April 4, 2017, has 16 GB of 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM, a 256 GB SSD, and dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics processors with 6 GB of GDDR5 memory each.