the mac pro it's not a bad machine although choosing xeon w at this point
in time was an unfortunate decision we'll revisit later
ladies and gentlemen
it's later so to help you understand which model of
mac pro you should consider and whether you should consider one at all
we got our hands on the 8 16 and 28 core
xeon w's and laboriously tore down and
rebuilt our mac pro with all of them to find out where the sweet spot is to make
our testing more complete we also built benches with both a ryzen 9 3950x
and a threadripper 3970x to see if any
mac pro is the right choice for a high-end workstation or if apple made a
big mistake going Intel this time around
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this is awful
we'll begin with cinebench where oh dear
it's really not much of a contest is it i mean sure compared to the imac pro's
last gen xeon w performance is up but both our 8 core and even our upgraded 16
core mac pro get creamed by our consumer
ryzen bench that costs less than the base model mac pro
unsurprisingly then the threadripper 3970x for its part embarrasses the
entire lineup virtually across the board and adding insult to injury even that
bench is less expensive than a base model mac pro there are a few cases
where apple wins though there's the firefox compile test where the 28 core
mac pro picks up a convincing win of about 50 seconds over threadripper and
then there's puget bench for after effects a compositing benchmark where
the 28 core xeon w actually posts better overall numbers than threadripper though
not by much and the ryzen 9 3950x is
also in contention for top spot ouch now granted our ryzen 9 and
threadripper benches are equipped with much more powerful titan rtx graphics
cards but the thing is that card costs
half of what the Radeon pro vega 2 duo in our mac pro does
apple's beef with NVIDIA is clearly hurting their competitiveness in tasks
that call for GPU heavy lifting and it
doesn't always work to just throw more smaller gpus at the problem in case you
guys were wondering for games the boot camp drivers don't enable crossfire so
performance even on Windows is about on par with just a standard Radeon 7.
now there's one other potential market for apple that some of you commented on
in our review that has absolutely no need of a GPU like that and that is the
audio engineer market where more pci express slots is more better and yeah i
can see that for sure especially with how many mac only audio packages are out
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
production you could theoretically cut a vocal or a voiceover like i'm doing
right now and it does not make a sound but the thing is that's clearly not who
apple is targeting with this machine with the focus on their afterburner
accelerator cards dual Radeon pro mpx
cards and massive system memory capacity and for that matter threadripper out
does the mac pro in pci express as well with 88 gen 4 lanes compared to xeon w's
64 lanes at gen 3 speeds there's just no
way to sugarcoat it apple as far as we can tell should have gone with thread
ripper or epic here i mean just look at what blur studio did with Threadripper
on terminator dark fate where in an interview with post perspective founder
tim miller says the difference for the artists is that instead of working here
until 1am they're going home to put their children to bed something that
normally would take five minutes was taking five seconds you're just not
going to get that level of performance out of any of these zws and with this
reality i can't see many of the apple holdouts holding out for much
longer maybe apple simply wasn't aware of what AMD had in the pipeline or maybe
they just didn't want to optimize their software for AMD's unconventional
chiplet CPU architecture but whatever the reason apple's in a position now
where not only their price but even their performance isn't industry-leading
on this machine but let's say you're a mac-based vfx outfit and you're overdue
to upgrade some machines hey as you probably are
if you're stuck in the mac ecosystem what trim level do you go for there may
not be a single definitively right answer here but there are definitely a
lot of wrong ones so let's walk through it we know that apple's base model mac
pro costs 6 000 us dollars and for that
you're getting a laughable 32 gigs of RAM and 8 of Intel's cascade lake CPU
cores it's worth noting that this RAM configuration is sub-optimal not only
for how little you get in a machine costing this much but also because it's
only four sticks meaning that you're not fully taking advantage of the six
channel memory controller on your xeon processor so regardless of any of your
other choices you want at least 48 gigs of RAM or you're going to be leaving
performance on the table that's a 300 upgrade if you get it from apple putting
us at 6 300 us dollars but we actually still recommend sticking
with the base model as far as memory goes and installing your own third-party
memory it's shockingly fast and easy and i couldn't believe how much cheaper it
was it's important to note that just like on a pc additional memory will not
improve your system performance unless you regularly run out of memory so guys
if your workload doesn't demand more system performance will be just about
the same going from 48 gigs all the way to one and a half terabytes bumping the
CPU up to a 16 core xeon w 3245 means
that you're out another 2 000 from apple and it is worth noting that because this
is not an m series CPU you're going to be limited to 768 gigs of RAM only the
24 and 28 core models are capable of
handling the full memory loadout that is
so much memory though that unless you're doing 8k raw compositing you probably
won't need it anytime soon speaking of the 28 core that's a 7 000
upgrade from stock and as some of you rightly pointed out as an m series xeon
these do command that price from Intel not the four thousand dollar price apple
actually are not the ones who marked this one up and that m distinction is
important for two reasons one if you're upgrading for yourself you need to make
sure it's an m series CPU that you purchase in order to get that extra
memory capacity and two this is cool if
you don't need one and a half terabytes of RAM you can actually get away with
the standard xeon w3275 for a lot less we tried it and it works
fine even though apple doesn't offer that option themselves as for the GPU
there's really only two choices that make any sense right now compared to the
single GPU Radeon pro vega 2 card the duo gives you a better upgrade path in
the future so we would go that route if you need the performance today if you
don't need the performance today you can get the stock Radeon pro 580x and then
replace or augment it with an off-the-shelf Radeon 7 or even rx 5700
xt while you wait for the Radeon pro
w5700x to come out that mpx module while
it's not yet available is navi based which should mean a significant
performance uplift over the current factory options and support for a
display stream compression while still providing you with additional GPU
provided Thunderbolt 3 ports now only you know how much SSD storage you need
and only you know whether or not the afterburner card's sole function of
decoding up to 8k prores raw makes any sense for your workflow but what i can
tell you is that you're a sucker if you buy the wheels okay yes the feet are
kind of hard to get off but you can remove them on your own which means you
can install your own wheels if you really want to and probably for a lower
cost in time and raw cash than the wheels cost at four hundred dollars
besides it's not like the feed are unusable so we'd recommend saving that
money and celebrating all the i o on this thing with a t-shirt lttstore.com
any other upgrades like internal drive bays or raid controllers have to come
after sale so we won't get too much into those other than to say that they are
available and we've got a video showing how to install them and besides for
expanded storage i would really recommend a nas in this day and age
anyway remember guys you've got dual 10 gig
nicks in here so even if you don't have a 10 gig switch a 10 gig equipped nas
can be directly attached without forcing you onto wireless connectivity if you
really need the speed so with all that in mind here are a few sample configs
that might make for a good jumping off point if you're in a situation where
buying a mac pro makes sense for you follow these guidelines with your use
case in mind and you'll be okay it's not quite all there is to know though so get
subscribed so you don't miss our video on the rack mount version of the mac pro
for today the final question though is this should anyone who doesn't have to buy a
mac pro buy a mac pro
based on what we've seen oh hell no the
thing is you're not the target market anymore and frankly no matter how
elegant and innovative the machine is and it is
after seeing these numbers i just can't be convinced
so close apple if only you'd chosen a different
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
display xdr an apple product that unlike the mac pro so far doesn't have much in
the way of clear competition i'll see you over there