When we got our hands on a review model of the new Mac Pro last December, our 'first impressions' article conveyed our initial thoughts in a way that may have lacked some of our usual subtlety (although we stand by our use of words such as 'Ooooooh!' 'Aaaaaaah!' and 'Phwoaar!' as fine examples of quality journalism).

Now, however, a month has passed, the drool has been wiped from our mouths and we can bring you a more nuanced take on Apple's great white hope for 2014.

Read more: First Look: Apple Pro Display XDR monitor

Matthew Bolton from our sister title MacFormat has spent a full five days with the Mac Pro and a 4K monitor, testing it thoroughly to find out whether it's all it's cracked up to be. To see find out what he learned, check out his five-part video diary below.

And don't miss the next issue of MacFormat, on sale 29 Jan, for the full review. This quality publication is available in all good stores or you can buy the iPad version here.

01. Setting up

In this first part, we turn the Mac Pro and 4K monitor on for the first time and find ourselves having to lean wayyyy forwards to see what we're doing...

02. 4K games and light video editing

In this second part, we try out a bunch of games at 4K, and marvel all the pixels. We also have a quick look at how light video editing and export tests the hardware, and what that does to the temperature.

03. Video encoding and GPU heat tests

In part three, we use Handbrake to see if we can push the CPU to its limits and see how quickly it transcodes high-quality video. We push the GPU for nearly an hour with the Heaven benchmarking tool and talk about how hot the Mac Pro gets, and we find out for definite whether it will run with its casing open...

04. Windows and Boot Camp

In part four, we use Boot Camp to install Windows, and see what it's like on the 4K screen, what kind of benchmarks we get, and try Windows gaming at 4K.

05. More on the screen & wrapping up

In the last part of our video diary, we do a bit of score comparing in Geekbench, we take a closer look at the 4K screen's strengths and limitations, and mull over what we've learned from our time so far.

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