Apple's Mac Pro Now Available With Super Expensive AMD Graphics Cards

Apple’s Mac Pro desktop from 2019 can now be purchased with the latest graphics technology from AMD. But the new GPUs are far from affordable. 

On Tuesday, Apple began offering the Mac Pro with AMD’s Radeon Pro W6000X series graphics cards. Depending on the configuration, the pricing for the GPUs can start at $2,400 and scale all the way up to an eye-popping $11,600. 

The pricing is also hundreds of dollars more than the earlier GPU options involving the Vega II graphics cards. AMD is replacing the components with the W6000X series, which will span three models: the W6800X, W6900X and the X6800X Duo. 

"The new AMD Radeon Pro W6000X series is packed with remarkable energy efficiency, enhanced compute units and a new visual pipeline, enabling Mac Pro users to do more in less time across a broad range of pro applications," says Scott Herkleman, AMD’s corporate VP.

The GPUs are so expensive because they’ve been designed to handle much larger workloads over a typical gaming graphics card. This could include running video composing and editing at 8K or creating 3D animation for films.  

Like Vega II, AMD used a 7-nanometer manufacturing process to build the W6000X series. However, the newer GPUs feature AMD’s latest RDNA 2 architecture and 32GBs or 64GBs of GDDR6 video memory, which should be an improvement over the HBM2 memory found in the Vega II line. However, the company didn’t offer any benchmarks, so the exact performance increase remains unclear. 

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Still, you can expect the graphics cards to super-charge a Mac Pro, which starts at $5,999. Apple’s website lets you configure the desktop with not just one W6000X card, but two of the same model. 

A fully maxed-out Mac Pro will now cost you $55,247, which is a $2,000 increase from the top-end configuration for the original 2019 unit.