I bought my Mac Pro a bit before the cheese grater. But after the amazing laptops and the max studio, you really consider this the best max ever made? I admit it’s competing, at least for it’s time. But this article seems 3 years late. Basically this had internal storage and good pci expansion. That makes it the best mac ever made? Meh. It was important at the time. And I do respect that. But im Not sure it qualifies it for the honors you are trying to give it.
You... bought your Mac Pro before the cheese grater? I don't think you did somehow.
It was the best Mac for Pros who need expansion, upgradability, power and value. Unlike the current Mac Pro, it was very respectably priced. Furthermore, It was a machine without the outcomes of Apple's undesired "courage"; the current Mac Pro seems more like a tech demo than a real machine, with the resulting price tag to go with it.
You might want to lighten up. The "OG" Mac Pro was just the Power Mac with Intel Inside. Even people at apple were calling them Power Macs for a long time after they were Intel machines.
It's also huge. If you haven't seen one in person, it's almost certainly bigger than you expect. And heavy. And the "handles" have fairly sharp edges, which make it unpleasant to move around on a regular basis.
I used to lug around a G5 to different gigs, and you’re right. Those handles were brutal. i couldn’t afford a nice road case back then I think the machine weighed about 45 pounds.
The power distribution is pretty weird. The power supply has plenty of headroom, but you only get two aux power connectors for GPUs, and they have a weird capacity (120W each, rather than the more common 75W or 150W each). Some GPUs (e.g, the Radeon RX Vega 64) draw exclusively from the aux power connectors, which can cause the system to brown out, even though it has plenty of power budget left (the 75W allocated to the slot isn't used). Wouldn't be safe to draw more over the two aux connectors, which is why there should have been more than two.
A bit late to the discussion, but I was able to put a modern GPU in mine using the Pixlas Mod (splicing another line off the PSU). As you said, the PSU has plenty of headroom it's just not exposed by the motherboard. No one really could have anticipated the amount of power modern GPUs draw back then.
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You might want to lighten up. The "OG" Mac Pro was just the Power Mac with Intel Inside. Even people at apple were calling them Power Macs for a long time after they were Intel machines.