so here's the thing 18 cores if you're a performance fiend
is pretty darn good in spite of the imac
pro's woefully inadequate cooling
but come on apple
is this really the fastest mac that money can buy
the imac pro i'm glad i asked
because in fact no no it is not
how do we know because we and by we i mean
mostly that guy built the real
fastest mac on the planet for ourselves
and it's time for us to take it for a little
spin get it
that was bad i don't want to move it that much i don't want to break it
speaking of things i don't want to break this transition to our sponsor private
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okay so let's begin by going over what
we've done here this is our ASUS dominus extreme motherboard
and hanging off of it we actually have uh
wait Anthony is that two power supplies yeah even though the thousand watts
sonic prime that's on my bench right now has more than enough wattage
to handle all of this yeah the actual load of all these vrms during power up
it's just way too much for it it trips the protection and
i had to put the second power supply on there speaking of things we needed to do
we needed to go with RGB memory of course right well of course yeah so it's
not ecc but it does support it if we wanted it okay instead it's just six
matching sticks of ddr4 3000 which is
faster than the 2666 we have in our imac pro
we could go faster but we don't have that many matching sets lying around so
he mentioned that we could go with ecc memory and that's because the cuda grass
is that underneath this Noctua u14s
cooler here is the biggest baddest xeon w workstation processor on
the market the 28 core 56 thread 3175x
which means that we've actually got a solid
20 more threads on our system than we do
on our upgraded imac pro and what's more not only do we have more
RAM slots than our imac pro by a factor of two
we can also add more modern graphics cards like our Radeon 7 here
so just to be clear guys we have crushed
the imac pro in every possible
performance metric but that Radeon 7 does mean that we
needed to get the latest version of macOS working
yeah that was a pain to get running and before i talk about it i just want to
stress that this is not a tutorial so first i used foxlet's new macOS
simple kvm as a jumping off point after
trying a couple of different approaches including running Linux logical volume
arrays with optane acceleration which didn't work i eventually settled on the
current setup 27 cores 54 threads 42
gigabytes of RAM and two one terabyte samsung 970 pros in apple
raid mirror because apparently this wasn't complicated enough for me as it
was
now unfortunately while i wanted to set up optane the reason that didn't work is
because the macOS installer straight up refused to boot with opting in it even
our SSD 800ps that i tried to use so so just with octane anywhere in the system
the macOS installer is just like no no all right okay then other than
that it was pretty much a standard install yeah basically
there's some extra setup and some pitfalls with running apple rate on
mojave but i worked through them and got the latest
beta installed and ended up doing direct pass-through of not only the two 970
pros but also the quantia 10 gigabit nick that's in here and our Radeon 7
and all of it just worked because it's all got drivers in mojave
all right so i think we've teased you guys enough at
this point let's do some benchmarks so why don't we
start with a staple apple benchmark geekbench 4
okay so our imac pro got a very
respectable multi-threaded score of over 53 000
but our hackintosh creamed it by over 20 000
points to put that in perspective that's almost as much as adding an entire
core i9 macbook pro to the mix
and when we look at opencl and metal performance
okay so that's interesting here our
Radeon 7 actually managed worse performance than the vega 56 in our imac
pro now given that when we threw the Radeon
7 on the imac pro we got similar numbers it looks like aside from yes losing some
of our performance thanks to overhead from our hypervisor the Radeon 7's
driver just isn't optimized for whatever
geekbench is throwing at it here i mean i guess that's why this version
of mojave is in beta to further investigate then we wanted to fire up
another GPU test so let's hit it with luxmark now that's not
bad now we've at least doubled our
performance over the vega 56 which is quite impressive considering that the
Radeon 7 is a 64cu part
and considering that our imac pro gets the same level of performance out of a
Radeon 7 when connected via an external enclosure so again this seems to point
to driver optimization rather than raw
performance now let's change gears here and go ahead
and hit our CPU with some good old-fashioned cinebench
three two one go this is not even going to be a
fair fight not really no
i mean there are so many extra threads
on this thing so to be clear we actually gave up a full
hyper-threaded core for our host Linux operating system but that still leaves
us with a very significant performance
advantage compared to the 18 core imac pro not to mention that our base clock
is actually much higher which for a heavily threaded workload like this one
makes a huge difference okay we're done
nearly 11 000 in cinebench r20 and are you even
done yeah just finished 6 800.
we're over a third faster than the fastest computer that apple sells with
macOS with that said though if we look at
single threaded performance in cinebench the achilles heel of our xeon shows up
because it's got so many cores Intel had to do some
careful tuning of the power profiles of this thing and our fastest boost clocks
are much lower than the imac pros which
means that without overclocking we'll always be at a disadvantage in these
kinds of single threaded workloads that's a bit of a bummer but uh
hey overclocking on this platform does
actually happen to be a thing for now though
let's move on to some more testing let's fire up blender and give that a go
all right ready set
it's so funny so you have to be the one that actually does all the work to build
this thing but then when we're like drag racing i get to
drive it well i got to drive the faster one last time so that's true you did
actually i noticed that it's not actually a competition we're
just we're just thrilled this thing works at all
it's interesting there's actually not a whole lot of air coming out back here like there is but it's like not super
high you say that as though you don't know that's just imac things
yeah but this cooler is a lot better than the imac
yeah but like is it a Noctua
okay then that would be a fun video oh
cutting open the back of an imac and just going like full like
you know muscle car hood scoop like yep yep
is that a video do you guys want to see that anyway in the meantime let's get back to
this um blender was not a good time for our poor
imac pro we are just over 40 percent
faster with our hackintosh on both the bmw and classroom test which is actually
what's weird is this is better than you'd expect looking at the thread count
alone and again that's our higher base clock in action here
finally let's round out our testing with a little bit of handbrake so we fired up
a Floatplane video here and we're going to go ahead and use our LTT fast preset
let's face it the small head start i had isn't going to make a difference at the
end of this nope so here's the thing even though
there's diminishing returns when it comes to h.264 transcoding and adding
more course our hackintosh still pulls off a very respectable 40 second lead
over the imac pro bringing us then to our final test
final cut pro
now that is the only actual clear loss for our
hackintosh today as it turns out final
cut's background renderer is not highly threaded and is very
bursty that is to say it results in regular spikes of CPU utilization which
means then that our imac pro's higher boost clock wins the day by a wide
margin and it only adds up as more and more of those spikes have to happen on
our xeon w3170x again something we could potentially
overcome with some overclocking before we go any further though we need to do
something to validate our approach here because in theory you're not losing a
ton of performance using virtualization at most you know
one to three percent but we don't have any real world
validation of this so what we need to do
is shut this down and compare the results that we just got in macOS
to our bare metal hardware running in Windows in as many cross-platform
benchmarks as we can find to see how big the difference is
unfortunately when we did this testing it was all over
the place even with the two extra threads that our
bare metal machine has available so on Windows occasionally we're
eclipsing our macOS score in CPU tests
like our handbrake transcode and in cinebench
but then our Windows machine drops off significantly in blender and v-ray which
you would think would be very similar benchmarks to cinebench
as for our more GPU-focused tests like luxmark
well that shows that there is a bit of
performance left on the table even with direct pass-through although
this again could be down to driver optimization
yeah it kind of smells to me like it's a little bit of a scheduler issue in
Windows it's something we've seen before so ironically
that means our real world performance is actually better
in the vm now to be clear we're not saying that
there's magic performance that you get by running your operating system in a
virtualized environment in fact quite the contrary it's just that
what we've discovered is that unless we run this bare metal hardware as a
hackintosh we're not going to be able to quantify the difference
in macOS now i'm not saying that's impossible it's just that part of the
reason that we had wanted to do it this way with a vm in the first place was we
wanted to avoid the fragmentation of hardware and
the way that apple is constantly updating macOS in ways that can brick
compatibility now a vm could still have the
compatibility bricked but at the very least it's just
one set of things to maintain instead of every motherboard on the planet
anyway bottom line is this is very experimental right now this is not
something that we're recommending that you go do for yourselves unless you've got a ton of time to kill i mean
this motherboard has a market segment composed of a few
dozen people at best and when Anthony said this was a
complicated setup he wasn't kidding i'm just going to let this list of pitfalls
and problems scroll by wow
but there is still even more potential here
because unlike our imac pro we can overclock we can add more memory and
uh well if this GPU slot wasn't dead we
could even add more than one graphics card to our hackintosh
but since support for the Radeon 7 is still as a filming in beta we're not
going to press our luck any further than this besides i think um
we've got enough future plans for this that there's
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