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so here's the thing 18 cores if you're a performance fiend

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is pretty darn good in spite of the imac

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pro's woefully inadequate cooling

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but come on apple

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is this really the fastest mac that money can buy

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the imac pro i'm glad i asked

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because in fact no no it is not

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how do we know because we and by we i mean

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mostly that guy built the real

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fastest mac on the planet for ourselves

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and it's time for us to take it for a little

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spin get it

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that was bad i don't want to move it that much i don't want to break it

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speaking of things i don't want to break this transition to our sponsor private

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internet access that's exactly what you'll get with pia a safe and protected

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ip and it's got loads of other features as well check it out at the link in the

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video description

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okay so let's begin by going over what

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we've done here this is our ASUS dominus extreme motherboard

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and hanging off of it we actually have uh

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wait Anthony is that two power supplies yeah even though the thousand watts

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sonic prime that's on my bench right now has more than enough wattage

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to handle all of this yeah the actual load of all these vrms during power up

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it's just way too much for it it trips the protection and

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i had to put the second power supply on there speaking of things we needed to do

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we needed to go with RGB memory of course right well of course yeah so it's

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not ecc but it does support it if we wanted it okay instead it's just six

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matching sticks of ddr4 3000 which is

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faster than the 2666 we have in our imac pro

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we could go faster but we don't have that many matching sets lying around so

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he mentioned that we could go with ecc memory and that's because the cuda grass

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is that underneath this Noctua u14s

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cooler here is the biggest baddest xeon w workstation processor on

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the market the 28 core 56 thread 3175x

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which means that we've actually got a solid

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20 more threads on our system than we do

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on our upgraded imac pro and what's more not only do we have more

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RAM slots than our imac pro by a factor of two

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we can also add more modern graphics cards like our Radeon 7 here

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so just to be clear guys we have crushed

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the imac pro in every possible

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performance metric but that Radeon 7 does mean that we

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needed to get the latest version of macOS working

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yeah that was a pain to get running and before i talk about it i just want to

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stress that this is not a tutorial so first i used foxlet's new macOS

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simple kvm as a jumping off point after

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trying a couple of different approaches including running Linux logical volume

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arrays with optane acceleration which didn't work i eventually settled on the

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current setup 27 cores 54 threads 42

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gigabytes of RAM and two one terabyte samsung 970 pros in apple

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raid mirror because apparently this wasn't complicated enough for me as it

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was

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now unfortunately while i wanted to set up optane the reason that didn't work is

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because the macOS installer straight up refused to boot with opting in it even

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our SSD 800ps that i tried to use so so just with octane anywhere in the system

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the macOS installer is just like no no all right okay then other than

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that it was pretty much a standard install yeah basically

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there's some extra setup and some pitfalls with running apple rate on

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mojave but i worked through them and got the latest

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beta installed and ended up doing direct pass-through of not only the two 970

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pros but also the quantia 10 gigabit nick that's in here and our Radeon 7

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and all of it just worked because it's all got drivers in mojave

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all right so i think we've teased you guys enough at

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this point let's do some benchmarks so why don't we

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start with a staple apple benchmark geekbench 4

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okay so our imac pro got a very

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respectable multi-threaded score of over 53 000

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but our hackintosh creamed it by over 20 000

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points to put that in perspective that's almost as much as adding an entire

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core i9 macbook pro to the mix

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and when we look at opencl and metal performance

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okay so that's interesting here our

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Radeon 7 actually managed worse performance than the vega 56 in our imac

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pro now given that when we threw the Radeon

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7 on the imac pro we got similar numbers it looks like aside from yes losing some

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of our performance thanks to overhead from our hypervisor the Radeon 7's

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driver just isn't optimized for whatever

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geekbench is throwing at it here i mean i guess that's why this version

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of mojave is in beta to further investigate then we wanted to fire up

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another GPU test so let's hit it with luxmark now that's not

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bad now we've at least doubled our

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performance over the vega 56 which is quite impressive considering that the

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Radeon 7 is a 64cu part

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and considering that our imac pro gets the same level of performance out of a

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Radeon 7 when connected via an external enclosure so again this seems to point

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to driver optimization rather than raw

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performance now let's change gears here and go ahead

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and hit our CPU with some good old-fashioned cinebench

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three two one go this is not even going to be a

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fair fight not really no

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i mean there are so many extra threads

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on this thing so to be clear we actually gave up a full

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hyper-threaded core for our host Linux operating system but that still leaves

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us with a very significant performance

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advantage compared to the 18 core imac pro not to mention that our base clock

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is actually much higher which for a heavily threaded workload like this one

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makes a huge difference okay we're done

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nearly 11 000 in cinebench r20 and are you even

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done yeah just finished 6 800.

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we're over a third faster than the fastest computer that apple sells with

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macOS with that said though if we look at

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single threaded performance in cinebench the achilles heel of our xeon shows up

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because it's got so many cores Intel had to do some

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careful tuning of the power profiles of this thing and our fastest boost clocks

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are much lower than the imac pros which

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means that without overclocking we'll always be at a disadvantage in these

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kinds of single threaded workloads that's a bit of a bummer but uh

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hey overclocking on this platform does

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actually happen to be a thing for now though

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let's move on to some more testing let's fire up blender and give that a go

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all right ready set

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it's so funny so you have to be the one that actually does all the work to build

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this thing but then when we're like drag racing i get to

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drive it well i got to drive the faster one last time so that's true you did

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actually i noticed that it's not actually a competition we're

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just we're just thrilled this thing works at all

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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

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high you say that as though you don't know that's just imac things

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yeah but this cooler is a lot better than the imac

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yeah but like is it a Noctua

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okay then that would be a fun video oh

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cutting open the back of an imac and just going like full like

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you know muscle car hood scoop like yep yep

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is that a video do you guys want to see that anyway in the meantime let's get back to

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this um blender was not a good time for our poor

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imac pro we are just over 40 percent

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faster with our hackintosh on both the bmw and classroom test which is actually

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what's weird is this is better than you'd expect looking at the thread count

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alone and again that's our higher base clock in action here

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finally let's round out our testing with a little bit of handbrake so we fired up

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a Floatplane video here and we're going to go ahead and use our LTT fast preset

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let's face it the small head start i had isn't going to make a difference at the

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end of this nope so here's the thing even though

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there's diminishing returns when it comes to h.264 transcoding and adding

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more course our hackintosh still pulls off a very respectable 40 second lead

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over the imac pro bringing us then to our final test

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final cut pro

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now that is the only actual clear loss for our

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hackintosh today as it turns out final

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cut's background renderer is not highly threaded and is very

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bursty that is to say it results in regular spikes of CPU utilization which

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means then that our imac pro's higher boost clock wins the day by a wide

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margin and it only adds up as more and more of those spikes have to happen on

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our xeon w3170x again something we could potentially

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overcome with some overclocking before we go any further though we need to do

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something to validate our approach here because in theory you're not losing a

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ton of performance using virtualization at most you know

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one to three percent but we don't have any real world

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validation of this so what we need to do

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is shut this down and compare the results that we just got in macOS

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to our bare metal hardware running in Windows in as many cross-platform

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benchmarks as we can find to see how big the difference is

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unfortunately when we did this testing it was all over

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the place even with the two extra threads that our

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bare metal machine has available so on Windows occasionally we're

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eclipsing our macOS score in CPU tests

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like our handbrake transcode and in cinebench

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but then our Windows machine drops off significantly in blender and v-ray which

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you would think would be very similar benchmarks to cinebench

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as for our more GPU-focused tests like luxmark

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well that shows that there is a bit of

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performance left on the table even with direct pass-through although

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this again could be down to driver optimization

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yeah it kind of smells to me like it's a little bit of a scheduler issue in

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Windows it's something we've seen before so ironically

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that means our real world performance is actually better

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in the vm now to be clear we're not saying that

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there's magic performance that you get by running your operating system in a

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virtualized environment in fact quite the contrary it's just that

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what we've discovered is that unless we run this bare metal hardware as a

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hackintosh we're not going to be able to quantify the difference

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in macOS now i'm not saying that's impossible it's just that part of the

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reason that we had wanted to do it this way with a vm in the first place was we

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wanted to avoid the fragmentation of hardware and

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the way that apple is constantly updating macOS in ways that can brick

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compatibility now a vm could still have the

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compatibility bricked but at the very least it's just

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one set of things to maintain instead of every motherboard on the planet

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anyway bottom line is this is very experimental right now this is not

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something that we're recommending that you go do for yourselves unless you've got a ton of time to kill i mean

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this motherboard has a market segment composed of a few

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dozen people at best and when Anthony said this was a

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complicated setup he wasn't kidding i'm just going to let this list of pitfalls

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and problems scroll by wow

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but there is still even more potential here

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because unlike our imac pro we can overclock we can add more memory and

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uh well if this GPU slot wasn't dead we

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could even add more than one graphics card to our hackintosh

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but since support for the Radeon 7 is still as a filming in beta we're not

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going to press our luck any further than this besides i think um

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we've got enough future plans for this that there's

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another video in here freshbooks is the small business

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have that linked below and enter Linus tech tips in the how did you hear about

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us section so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that

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button but if you like seeing the fastest mac on the planet

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then hit that like button get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to

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