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when we reviewed the imac pro we didn't really touch on its gaming potential in

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spite of apple's inclusion of their fastest GPU ever in an imac

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and the reason for that is let's be real here that's a 5k display

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paired with what is still a vega 56 a

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card that's optimized for half of that resolution

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but could there be a way around it

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could there be a way to game on the imac pro

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let's find out right after we find out who sponsored

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today's video ah yes thermaltake the thermaltake core

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p90 tempered glass case is an angled open frame design featuring five

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millimeter thick glass three-way placement layout options vertical GPU

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mounting with a riser cable included and more check it out at the link below

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so there were a few questions that we needed to answer before we could make

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any value comparisons one how much does a custom setup with

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the same basic spec as our base model imac pro cost

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two does that setup perform better or worse

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and perhaps most importantly three could we optimize that five thousand

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dollar budget to get better performance without sacrificing all of the features

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that make the imac pro special so this is what we ended up with based

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on pricing from pc part picker our first build adheres as rigidly as

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possible to apple's spec sheet like we couldn't find a vega 56 variant of the

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frontier edition for a true apples to apples comparison while our second build

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treats gaming as an equal priority rather than as an afterthought using a

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less expensive core i9 7900x and a much

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faster NVIDIA titan xp so we give up ecc memory Thunderbolt 3 a

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nice case and wireless peripherals but

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we still have a high resolution albeit 4k dci p3 display workstation level CPU

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performance with many cores support for up to 128 gigs of RAM and access to more

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professional code paths in the GPU driver compared to a consumer grade 1080

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ti running directly off the hardware right

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away our choices are far superior at this price point with the imac pro

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pulling worse numbers than equivalent hardware in deus ex mankind divided in

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both directx 11 and directx 12. middle

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earth shadow of war seems to be better news for apple and then cs go actually

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has it above our equivalent but then below our custom build so it should be

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noted that even for developers like valve who have made opengl a priority

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Windows is still way ahead for gaming so gaming directly on your imac pro not

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the worst experience but not a great choice especially since in our review we

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saw that the cooling isn't capable of handling full load for long as for

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productivity we've got significantly worse numbers again for CPU rendering in

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blender but we actually saw far better results with most of

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specuperf giving us a look at the pro aspect of apple's vega 56 solution

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drivers and in some cases frame buffer size can make a big difference because

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remember that these results are in spite of the throttling under sustained

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workloads that we've come to expect from the imac pro

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let us know by the way in the comments if you'd like to see a separate deeper

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dive into the imac pro's cooling for today though the focus is gaming so

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let's have a look at some of the other solutions we came up with starting with

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an external graphics card thanks to Thunderbolt 3 we can use a

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razer core or something similar to slot in a variety of aftermarket gpus from a

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very similar vega 56 all the way up to that titan xp from our build and the

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question here is how much are you going to give up by

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using an external solution with a titan xp our results are

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obviously worse than a normal internal pci express slot especially in directx

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12 but they're still quite a bit better than the stock GPU and cs go didn't seem

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to care that much anyway as you might expect our external vega 56

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results were generally disappointing providing us with bottom tier

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performance in almost every test we even lost the pro driver code path in spec

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view perf giving us much worse productivity performance so you wouldn't

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want to upgrade your imac pro with a standard vega 56 in other words but

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as new gpus arrive on the market it's good to know that a system performance

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upgrade should be possible via these means

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but bringing it back to gaming again considering the cost of an enclosure

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it's possible that you may be better off just having a second utility pc in the

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house bringing us to our next solution streaming

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steam in-home streaming lets you be like me and have a gaming pc in your closet

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or somewhere out of the way while you use your super clean setup for both work

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and for play and thankfully it actually works a treat on macOS

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and for those of you who don't want to deal with the upfront cost of building a

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separate tower there's actually a mac beta now of NVIDIA's g-force now cloud

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gaming service so when we tested g-force now over a year ago the experience was

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already pretty impressive and i would only expect it to have improved since

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then however your mileage

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quite literally may vary because the

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performance of GeForce now is highly dependent on your physical distance from

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NVIDIA's servers so let's summarize what

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we learned today first and foremost while apple's pricing is actually good

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for its choice of hardware a different

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configuration like if they were willing to use NVIDIA graphics for example

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would have the potential to achieve much better performance with our station's

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obvious trade-offs being the lack of ecc memory support and Thunderbolt

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and we also learned that thanks to third-party devices and services gaming

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on the imac pro doesn't have to be limited by its own hardware though

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like with anything on a mac that comes with an additional cost your choice

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whether it's upfront or monthly what we didn't learn

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we already knew this is that if you do plan to game on your mac you will need

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to buy better peripherals even ignoring the accidental weapon switches while

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moving the mouse due to the scroll gesture the mouse is an ergonomic

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nightmare has like has anyone but me ever noticed all those web 2.0 companies

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out there with their 800 chairs and apple mice

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sorry anyway i digress if you take anything away from this

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follow-up video on the imac pro it should be that your expectations need to

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be tempered when dealing with a form factor like this one you're getting

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beautiful and actually surprisingly powerful hardware

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but the configuration is a touch mismatched and it ends up getting choked

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by its insufficient cooling

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speaking of getting choked have you dropped your phone and broken

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your screen and are you choked well ifixit can help you because they

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linked below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it

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was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to

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buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down there is our

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merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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