when we ordered the imac 2019 for our review we decided that it didn't really
matter which graphics card we configured it with if we were willing to upgrade
later using Thunderbolt 3 which then got us thinking this is after the review
you know the macbook pro has Thunderbolt 3 ports
too which means that for better or for worse
both of these machines actually have similar upgrade paths
so maybe by evaluating the imac solely as a
desktop we missed out on another viable option i mean
if you're giving up a lot of the traditional benefits of a desktop anyway
given that both of these are running high-end core i9 processors
are you better off with an imac
or a macbook well
there's only one way for us to find out
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so the first thing we'll need to give little mac here a fighting chance
against king hippo is a graphics card
now unfortunately NVIDIA is still in talks with apple to get official GeForce
support under macOS but it's not all
bad news the Radeon 7 which we're going to connect up via a razer core v2
enclosure is still significantly more
powerful than the top-end GPU configurations for either of these
machines and armed with the beta of apple's macOS mojave 10.14.5
we and by we i of course mean Anthony
should be able to get it working now while Anthony's setting that up i want
to answer the burning question that i'm sure is on everyone's mind right now
these two computers here are fundamentally very very different
so why compare them at all and that is a good point except for a few things one
is that they're both actually aimed at a really similar market segment namely
graphics artists and professionals thanks to their high resolution wide
gamut dci p3 displays number two
in both cases our bang for the buck recommended config
includes a dedicated AMD GPU a Radeon
pro 560x in the case of the macbook and
a Radeon pro 580x in our imac
finally number three they both suffer from thermal
constraints that affect their peak performance in ways that you can't
easily read off of a spec sheet so
what we want to know then is if they have similar purposes and design goals
well which one of them should we choose a macbook pro with some upgrades and i
don't know maybe a secondary display or something like that or
an imac which is running faster dedicated graphics and of course a
larger monitor in the first place furthermore how do the costs pan out and
is the mobile processor bottleneck going
to cause real performance problems for professional work
so what do you think i think for compute we're probably
looking at a much faster experience with the macbook pro just as a result of the
much faster Radeon 7 however
the imac has two more much faster cores
so depending on how they thermal throttle
it might be a wash or it might be a win for either of them really before we do
that though we're going to do a quick cinebench run to get a baseline for the
CPU performance it's worth noting too though that our imac isn't equipped with
the fastest GPU that it could have had the thing though is that paying for that
upgrade uh to vega 56 or something yeah vega pro 56 yeah paying for that upgrade
would have gotten us half of the way to a much faster external Radeon 7 anyway
so we just didn't think it made sense so i'm looking at somewhere in the 4100
range and uh what
yeah 2340 on the macbook pro okay so
as expected more cores is more better in
a heavily multi-threaded workload and
furthermore our macbook pro thermal throttled considerably harder than our
imac which widened even our anticipated
performance difference but
of note is the fact that a single threaded score between these two
machines isn't that far off and often your single
threaded performance is more important for light tasks like web browsing
application launching and general use
yeah on that subject actually i also ran blackmagic's disk speed benchmark and
while it's not a great test since it only looks at sequential speeds
it appears that apple is using a similar class of SSD on both of these machines
which probably contributes to the fact that i didn't really notice any chugging
between them that being said the
imac is equipped with a fusion drive which is spinning rust along with the
SSD meaning that after a certain period of time the caching stops and it becomes
slow and that's kind of the thing about macOS isn't it for all its shortcomings
it's really well optimized and you almost need a heavy load in order to
tell the difference between one decently equipped mac and another so with that in
mind we're gonna go full opposite end of the spectrum and hit our machines with
luxmark a GPU dependent 3d rendering
benchmark and this is where things get really interesting so
right out of the box with no upgrades to either machine there is a clear
performance advantage for our desktop i mean we're talking
double the horses here and four hundred dollars cheaper but
that's not to say that if you ran out and buy yourself a macbook pro you are
plumb out of luck if you can afford the graphics card upgrade it can inject a
lot of fight into your portable machine so with the Radeon 7 in tow our core i9
equipped model managed anywhere from three to even four times the performance
of our all-in-one desktop it's worth noting though
when our imac is similarly kitted out with the Radeon 7 it actually does a
much better job of combining the power of both the on-board and external
graphics which allows it to keep performance advantage albeit a much
smaller one next let's take a look at video editing adobe premiere whether
it's related to the external nature of our graphics card or the beta version of
macOS that we're running didn't actually benefit from our
Radeon 7 GPU upgrade so
we had to pull it off which means that we're looking at a 20 to 25 performance
difference in export times with what i would describe as
pretty darn similar on timeline scrubbing performance and
this is with pretty heavy footage but i
think you can go a little bit worse this is only twenty to one footage if i
recall correctly is that right brenden yeah
as for final cut let's go ahead and fire that up
this is a tricky one to benchmark because apple has a really cool feature
that pretty much renders your video ahead of time in the background
while you are cutting it together and this avoids the traditional long wait
times while your finished project exports what we can do though is we can
cancel delete our rendering cache and then
start off the rendering process manually as well as look at our timeline
performance while doing the render because i've attached four looks to each
of these yeah so it should be pretty so yeah it's
it's smooth mousing over i'm getting really quick
previews what's yours like i think i'm actually faster than you that actually
does look a touch faster but i've got the fusion drive and these are large
files that's true so that could be affecting me there
interesting also interesting
when we actually did benchmark our renders we found that the imac was about
twice as fast as the macbook pro even
with the external GPU so this seems to be pretty much
purely dependent on multi-threaded CPU
performance finally one more heavy thing that macs are used for pretty often
these days is for programming work so i've taken the liberty of downloading
the mozilla firefox source code onto both of these machines so we can put
them head to head and see just how much of a practical difference those two extra cores on the imac can make one
thing that i had wanted to do was gather results on Windows for both machines but
getting an external GPU running under mojave's bootcamp requires quite a bit
of extra setup and i'm not even sure if it'll work at all with a t2 enabled mac
like our macbook pro right so there's no t2 in the new mac
yeah so that's a point in the imac's favor in my opinion
you lose the hardware encryption and secure enclave features that apple touts
as benefits but you gain the ability to run Linux
and you stand a much better chance of recovering your data in the event of a
hard drive or a logic board failure
it's kind of important when your machine is constantly overheating so
since we've actually run this before and this is just movie magic i guess we've
got enough data to draw our conclusion then at a price difference of about four
hundred dollars between our core i9 equipped macbook pro over here and our
eight core imac 2019 it's clear you are definitely paying a
mobility tax with the laptop you get two fewer
and overall much slower course you're
getting a weaker included GPU and obviously you're getting a smaller
display furthermore if you were going to buy the
external GPU anyway the extra spend of
about a thousand dollars for a Radeon 7 plus an enclosure is less likely to be
bottlenecked by the more powerful CPU in the imac and
at this time anyway it also happens to team up more cooperatively with the
graphics cores it already has
but and it's a big but the imac
isn't portable and if you need something that is then from our testing you're
actually still getting a lot of bang with our tricked out macbook pro so
if you need a laptop anyway then compared to the prospect of buying a
laptop and an additional desktop an
external GPU upgrade looks like a great way to close the gap since it's a lot
cheaper than even the entry-level imac
by the way guys just one last note we did it but
to be clear we're not actually recommending running beta versions of
your operating system on a machine that you use for professional apps
those crashes are going to get you when you least expect it and poor Anthony
this video was quite a lot of hassle to get done
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