The last time Apple refreshed its Mac Pro was nearly three years ago. Even back then, the components Apple used to build its halo Mac were not the latest and greatest. As longtime fans and pro users, you and I know this is the typical offering from Cupertino.

For many years, this wasn’t a big deal because you could simply upgrade the internal components as faster hard drives, newer graphics cards and more powerful processors became available. That was the appeal of the Mac Pro for hardcore Mac users. That upgradability ended with the Mac Pro trashcan design. Almost every component is proprietary and was outdated the second it left the factory. Even minor modifications are impossible in the trashcan Mac Pro.

So how do you go about building a custom Mac Pro to get professional work done? The tower shape Mac Pro is still the answer.

Custom Mac Pro tower

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti Graphics Card, Samsung SM0512GB SSD with 4x PCIe Adapter sat on Mac Pro Processor Tray

With a traditional tower form factor, you can easily swap parts in and out. Been thinking about adding the latest and greatest GPU on the market such as the Nvidia GTX 980 Ti? Done. What about those insanely fast PCIe stick SSDs with 1,500MB/s read and write speed? Done. Octo-core processing power not cutting it and a 12-core setup is in order? Done. These nearly limitless possibilities led me to build a powerful, custom Mac Pro. And get this, being 6 years old, this custom Mac Pro outperforms the newer and much more expensive trashcan Mac Pro.

Apple 512GB Stick SSD which is a Samsung SM0512G, and a 4x PCIe Adapter

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti Graphics Card

Custom Mac Pro running with Stick SSD and GTX 980 Ti Upgrades

I built this custom Mac Pro for a video editor in Saint Paul earlier this year. He was curios about taking advantage of Mercury Playback Engine GPU Accelerator in Adobe Premier. In order to make this possible, we needed a much newer GPU with CUDA. The Nvidia 980 Ti was the perfect candidate with its 2816 CUDA cores, 6GB of dedicated memory and a reasonable power requirement. The end results blew him away!

1500MB/s Read and Write SSD Speed on Mac Pro 5,1