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the mac pro it's not a bad machine although choosing xeon w at this point

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in time was an unfortunate decision we'll revisit later

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ladies and gentlemen

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it's later so to help you understand which model of

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mac pro you should consider and whether you should consider one at all

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we got our hands on the 8 16 and 28 core

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xeon w's and laboriously tore down and

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rebuilt our mac pro with all of them to find out where the sweet spot is to make

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our testing more complete we also built benches with both a ryzen 9 3950x

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and a threadripper 3970x to see if any

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mac pro is the right choice for a high-end workstation or if apple made a

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big mistake going Intel this time around

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just like you'd be making a mistake by missing this segue to our sponsor ridge

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this is awful

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we'll begin with cinebench where oh dear

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it's really not much of a contest is it i mean sure compared to the imac pro's

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last gen xeon w performance is up but both our 8 core and even our upgraded 16

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core mac pro get creamed by our consumer

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ryzen bench that costs less than the base model mac pro

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unsurprisingly then the threadripper 3970x for its part embarrasses the

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entire lineup virtually across the board and adding insult to injury even that

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bench is less expensive than a base model mac pro there are a few cases

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where apple wins though there's the firefox compile test where the 28 core

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mac pro picks up a convincing win of about 50 seconds over threadripper and

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then there's puget bench for after effects a compositing benchmark where

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the 28 core xeon w actually posts better overall numbers than threadripper though

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not by much and the ryzen 9 3950x is

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also in contention for top spot ouch now granted our ryzen 9 and

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threadripper benches are equipped with much more powerful titan rtx graphics

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cards but the thing is that card costs

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half of what the Radeon pro vega 2 duo in our mac pro does

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apple's beef with NVIDIA is clearly hurting their competitiveness in tasks

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that call for GPU heavy lifting and it

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doesn't always work to just throw more smaller gpus at the problem in case you

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guys were wondering for games the boot camp drivers don't enable crossfire so

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performance even on Windows is about on par with just a standard Radeon 7.

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now there's one other potential market for apple that some of you commented on

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in our review that has absolutely no need of a GPU like that and that is the

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audio engineer market where more pci express slots is more better and yeah i

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can see that for sure especially with how many mac only audio packages are out

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there it kind of doesn't make sense but it's one of the many reasons why it's such a great option for audio and music

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production you could theoretically cut a vocal or a voiceover like i'm doing

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right now and it does not make a sound but the thing is that's clearly not who

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apple is targeting with this machine with the focus on their afterburner

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accelerator cards dual Radeon pro mpx

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cards and massive system memory capacity and for that matter threadripper out

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does the mac pro in pci express as well with 88 gen 4 lanes compared to xeon w's

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64 lanes at gen 3 speeds there's just no

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way to sugarcoat it apple as far as we can tell should have gone with thread

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ripper or epic here i mean just look at what blur studio did with Threadripper

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on terminator dark fate where in an interview with post perspective founder

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tim miller says the difference for the artists is that instead of working here

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until 1am they're going home to put their children to bed something that

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normally would take five minutes was taking five seconds you're just not

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going to get that level of performance out of any of these zws and with this

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reality i can't see many of the apple holdouts holding out for much

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longer maybe apple simply wasn't aware of what AMD had in the pipeline or maybe

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they just didn't want to optimize their software for AMD's unconventional

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chiplet CPU architecture but whatever the reason apple's in a position now

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where not only their price but even their performance isn't industry-leading

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on this machine but let's say you're a mac-based vfx outfit and you're overdue

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to upgrade some machines hey as you probably are

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if you're stuck in the mac ecosystem what trim level do you go for there may

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not be a single definitively right answer here but there are definitely a

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lot of wrong ones so let's walk through it we know that apple's base model mac

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pro costs 6 000 us dollars and for that

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you're getting a laughable 32 gigs of RAM and 8 of Intel's cascade lake CPU

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cores it's worth noting that this RAM configuration is sub-optimal not only

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for how little you get in a machine costing this much but also because it's

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only four sticks meaning that you're not fully taking advantage of the six

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channel memory controller on your xeon processor so regardless of any of your

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other choices you want at least 48 gigs of RAM or you're going to be leaving

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performance on the table that's a 300 upgrade if you get it from apple putting

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us at 6 300 us dollars but we actually still recommend sticking

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with the base model as far as memory goes and installing your own third-party

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memory it's shockingly fast and easy and i couldn't believe how much cheaper it

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was it's important to note that just like on a pc additional memory will not

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improve your system performance unless you regularly run out of memory so guys

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if your workload doesn't demand more system performance will be just about

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the same going from 48 gigs all the way to one and a half terabytes bumping the

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CPU up to a 16 core xeon w 3245 means

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that you're out another 2 000 from apple and it is worth noting that because this

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is not an m series CPU you're going to be limited to 768 gigs of RAM only the

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24 and 28 core models are capable of

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handling the full memory loadout that is

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so much memory though that unless you're doing 8k raw compositing you probably

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won't need it anytime soon speaking of the 28 core that's a 7 000

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upgrade from stock and as some of you rightly pointed out as an m series xeon

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these do command that price from Intel not the four thousand dollar price apple

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actually are not the ones who marked this one up and that m distinction is

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important for two reasons one if you're upgrading for yourself you need to make

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sure it's an m series CPU that you purchase in order to get that extra

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memory capacity and two this is cool if

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you don't need one and a half terabytes of RAM you can actually get away with

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the standard xeon w3275 for a lot less we tried it and it works

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fine even though apple doesn't offer that option themselves as for the GPU

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there's really only two choices that make any sense right now compared to the

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single GPU Radeon pro vega 2 card the duo gives you a better upgrade path in

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the future so we would go that route if you need the performance today if you

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don't need the performance today you can get the stock Radeon pro 580x and then

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replace or augment it with an off-the-shelf Radeon 7 or even rx 5700

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xt while you wait for the Radeon pro

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w5700x to come out that mpx module while

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it's not yet available is navi based which should mean a significant

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performance uplift over the current factory options and support for a

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display stream compression while still providing you with additional GPU

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provided Thunderbolt 3 ports now only you know how much SSD storage you need

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and only you know whether or not the afterburner card's sole function of

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decoding up to 8k prores raw makes any sense for your workflow but what i can

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tell you is that you're a sucker if you buy the wheels okay yes the feet are

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kind of hard to get off but you can remove them on your own which means you

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can install your own wheels if you really want to and probably for a lower

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cost in time and raw cash than the wheels cost at four hundred dollars

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besides it's not like the feed are unusable so we'd recommend saving that

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money and celebrating all the i o on this thing with a t-shirt lttstore.com

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any other upgrades like internal drive bays or raid controllers have to come

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after sale so we won't get too much into those other than to say that they are

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available and we've got a video showing how to install them and besides for

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expanded storage i would really recommend a nas in this day and age

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anyway remember guys you've got dual 10 gig

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nicks in here so even if you don't have a 10 gig switch a 10 gig equipped nas

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can be directly attached without forcing you onto wireless connectivity if you

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really need the speed so with all that in mind here are a few sample configs

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that might make for a good jumping off point if you're in a situation where

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buying a mac pro makes sense for you follow these guidelines with your use

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case in mind and you'll be okay it's not quite all there is to know though so get

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subscribed so you don't miss our video on the rack mount version of the mac pro

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for today the final question though is this should anyone who doesn't have to buy a

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mac pro buy a mac pro

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based on what we've seen oh hell no the

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thing is you're not the target market anymore and frankly no matter how

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elegant and innovative the machine is and it is

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after seeing these numbers i just can't be convinced

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so close apple if only you'd chosen a different

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platform that performs better and doesn't cost so much and if you're

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thanks for watching guys if you're looking for another video to watch maybe go check out our review of the pro

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display xdr an apple product that unlike the mac pro so far doesn't have much in

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the way of clear competition i'll see you over there