I Built A Mac Pro For Under $300 And It

Key Takeaways

Upgrading an old Intel Mac Pro can be affordable, with display support for 6 monitors, easy storage swaps, and cheap memory upgrades.
Early Intel Macs can outshine Apple silicon Macs in terms of upgradeability, with SSD, RAM, and CPU upgrades for better performance.
While newer Apple silicon Macs offer better everyday experience, there are still areas where older Intel Macs shine, despite slower boot times.

Sometimes you come across an opportunity that’s just too good to pass up. That’s what happened when I stumbled on a Mac Pro on eBay for just $155, and saw plenty of potential for upgrades. When I bought this computer, it wasn’t anything special. This 2013 model had a measly quad-core Xeon processor, only 16GB of memory, and it didn’t even come with an SSD or an operating system. Unlike the best Macs today, the beauty of old Intel-based systems is that they can be upgraded with ease. For under $300, I turned an 11-year-old Mac Pro into a much better machine that rivals Apple silicon Macs in four crucial ways.

Before we break all that down, let’s review how I hit that sub-$300 price point. For starters, Intel Mac prices on the resale market have absolutely cratered now that we’re four years into the Apple Silicon era. I saw a base-model Mac Pro on eBay for $190, and haggled the seller down to $155 to get a great deal. Then, I purchased a 10-core Xeon processor for $15, a genuine Apple SSD for $16, thermal paste for $8, and a 64GB memory set for $80. With everything included, I spent about $274 on this new and improved Mac Pro. Surprisingly, there are situations where this cheap Mac Pro beat out my M2 MacBook Air and M3 iMac.

4 Display support

It’s still costly to get an Apple silicon Mac supporting six screens

The about Mac menu on an upgraded Mac Pro.

Apple is all over the place with external display support on new Macs. Some computers support as many as eight displays at once, including the highest-end configurations of the Mac Studio and Mac Pro. Others only support five, like the standard M2 Max version of the Mac Studio. And base-model Macs with Apple Silicon might only support two external displays (Mac Mini) or just one (M1/M2 MacBook Air). There are ways around these limitations, but generally speaking, the experience of using a bunch of monitors with Apple silicon Macs is inconsistent at best or impossible at worse.

This is how DisplayLink virtualizes external displays on base Macs

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With the Mac Pro, it’s easy. You get six Thunderbolt 2 ports, as well as another HDMI port, that can power six external monitors at once. Somehow, you have to spend thousands of dollars on an Apple silicon Mac to get the same experience in 2024 as an 11-year-old Mac Pro.

3 Storage

You should be able to swap out the SSD on a desktop PC

You can swap out the SSD in a Mac Pro for a new one in under a minute, and that’s a key advantage over Apple silicon Macs. All you need to do is unlock the cover, remove it, and unscrew the SSD that’s in your system already. Plus, with an adapter, this Mac Pro will work with a standard M.2 SSD — making it easy to find a new storage drive for a quick and cheap upgrade. In this case, my Mac Pro didn’t come with an SSD at all, so I bought a cheap and genuine Apple SSD for $16. If you want more storage, you can always grab an adapter and an aftermarket SSD for an affordable price, too. This kind of upgrade makes sense, because storage requirements are always increasing over time. Unfortunately, you can’t do the same on a new Mac.

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2 Memory

I put 64GB of RAM in this Mac Pro for just $80, and could’ve gone higher

The memory sticks on a trash can Mac Pro.

Four memory sticks installed on the Mac Pro logic board.

It’s frustrating to not be able to upgrade your modern Mac’s SSD, but you can get around that with an external drive pretty easily. It’s not as easy to overcome memory limitations. Apple still ships base-model Apple silicon Macs with just 8GB of unified memory in 2024, and that is shared between the CPU and GPU cores. Upgrades are impossible after you purchase your computer, and if you want to upgrade the configuration before you buy it, it’ll cost you. Each storage tier costs hundreds of dollars, with some bumps starting at $200 and others reaching $800. For example, the 192GB of memory in the Mac Studio will cost you $5,600 — that’s $3,600 more than the standard configuration costs.

For people that need a lot of RAM for cheap, this Intel Mac Pro is a better option. I bought a set of 64GB of memory for $80 and installed it in the Mac Pro in just a few minutes. If you need even more memory, this model of Mac Pro can be equipped with up to 128GB of RAM. That’s not as much as the top Apple silicon machines, but it’s the clear winner in the price-per-gigabyte ratio. Plus, I’m able to quadruple the RAM in my Mac Pro more than a decade after it was released. It’s impossible to upgrade the memory in an Apple silicon Mac a day after it has been purchased.

Featured image showing multiple sticks of RAM

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1 Overall upgradeability

Forget upgrading an Apple silicon Mac after you buy it

By this point, you’ve probably sensed a theme. Old Macs are far more upgradeable than current ones, and that’s what makes these kinds of upgrades possible. To top things off, I swapped the quad-core processor in this Mac Pro for a 10-core Xeon that I picked up for $15. The entire upgrade took about an hour. When you buy an Apple silicon Mac, you get what you get and there’s no way to upgrade it down the road. This puts users in unfortunate situations, like the one I was in last year, when I realized my M1 Max Mac Studio was now being crushed by the base M3 iMac.

We’ve mostly accepted that CPU and GPU upgrades are a thing of the past on laptops, but it’s a really disappointing trend on desktops. This kind of quick and cheap upgrade could get you an extra year of using your computer before you need to buy a new one, and they’re no more for Mac users. That means people will notice their computers are becoming obsolete quicker, they’ll spend more money on early upgrades, and eventually more E-waste will be produced. It was easy to upgrade the SSD, RAM, and CPU on this 2013 Mac Pro — and that’s the biggest way this $300 computer outshines the latest Macs.

No, you shouldn’t buy an Intel Mac for these reasons

Two things can be true at the same time. There are still ways that Intel Macs will be superior to Apple silicon Macs, and the newest Apple silicon Macs are still better than Intel Macs for most people. Even after upgrading the Mac Pro for this article, I was taken aback by how long it took the computer to boot up. My newer desktop Macs and MacBooks with Apple silicon take seconds to turn on, and Intel Macs take forever by comparison. That’s just one anecdote of how modern Macs provide a better everyday experience, and we can’t forget about the performance and efficiency improvements as well.

A Mac Mini on a desk with cables connected.

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If anything, this only goes to show that Apple still has room to improve. It needs to fix external display support and add some level of consistency to Apple silicon Macs, eliminating the arbitrary limitations. I’d love for these devices to become upgradeable again, however unlikely that may be. If upgradeability isn’t an option, memory and storage upgrades need to get cheaper at the time of purchase. There’s no reason why an additional 8GB of RAM should cost buyers an extra $200. When Apple fixes these persistent issues, I’ll joyfully forget about the Intel days for good.