$7,000. And that's just for the base model of
the new Mac Pro. I mean, in fairness,
Apple has been true to their word here. They have both completed the transition
to Apple Silicon, which they said they would, and they've offered professionals
who are invested in the Mac Pro form
factor some continuity in a product line that has for 20 years been in constant
flux. But I can't help but feel like this is a
classic case of malicious compliance where they're bringing this thing back
to life once again only to prove their
point that it should have stayed dead.
And I'm not the only one. With the same
class of hardware as the Mac Studio that
costs a little over half as much, the
Mac Pro has had a hard time convincing folks that it has any reason to exist.
which won't prevent us from running some interesting experiments on its animated
corpse. For example, Apple said you
can't put a GPU in it, but we tried it anyway just to see what would happen.
And we put it through a battery of tests to search for some
any reason for this computer to have been built. Like the new M2 Ultra
version of the Mac Studio that launched alongside it, the new Mac Pro is
externally essentially unchanged from its predecessor, there's only a couple
of subtle differences around back. Where the previous gen Intel Mac Pro had its
graphics cards mounted at the bottom of the case, nearest the power supply and
the dual 10 gig LAN ports, the HDMI ports for the M2 Ultra Mac Pro are up at
the top, just under the healthy bank of six Thunderbolt 4 ports to go along with
the two on the top. That total of eight is less than the maximum on the old
Intel Mac Pro, but hey, at least you get all eight regardless of the hardware
configuration. Once again, then it's all about what's on the inside. Powering the
new Mac Pro is Apple's top tier M2 Ultra
SOC, which is basically two M2 Max SOC's
glued together with Apple's Ultra Fusion interconnect, which allows them to
operate as one, which is cool, but it
happens to be the exact same chip down
to the maxed out 76 core GPU that's in
our new Mac Studio. The only difference is that unlike our studio, which we set
up with 128 gigs of RAM, our Mac Pro is
equipped with the maximum 192 GB of
unified memory, which sounds like a lot
because it is, but you've got to consider the customer here. One of the
biggest drawbacks to the Intel Mac Pros
was that some CPU configurations were limited to only 768
GB of system memory, which again sounds
like a lot because it is, but was also a
legitimate reason for some professional users to spring for the higherend chips
that could address twice as much. So what I'm trying to say is that when it
comes to folks who are dealing with complex simulations, machine learning or
any large data set, Apple no longer has
any option for them at any price. Now,
this smaller memory pool does have the benefit of being unified, meaning that
Apple's GPU can address more memory than any PCGU, even ones that cost as much as
this entire machine. But we are talking about some pretty specialized workloads
here that what would benefit from a ton of GPU memory that comes at the direct
cost of having basically no system memory. So, we're finding ourselves
asking, if the system configuration is
identical to the Studio and in some ways worse than the old Intel model, what is
the point of the new Mac Pro? What is
all this cooling for? We can answer that
with benchmarks. A quick note before we begin. Apple's product page pits the new
Mac Pro against the previous gen, both baseline and fully kitted out, which is
a 4-year-old machine that started for $1,000 less than this one. But credit to
Apple, it's still a far better frame of reference than their studio comparisons
were. Now, we don't have either a base model or a fully kitted out Intel Mac
Pro, so our testing is going to focus on current gen hardware, including a PC
bench with a Core i9 13900 K and an RTX
4090. Starting with Octane, the Mac Studio is exactly as fast as the Mac Pro
and costs $3,000 less. Not a great
start. And Red Shift doesn't give us much to celebrate unless you consider 1
second a massive win over a machine that is already substantially more expensive
than the PC bench that is obliterating it. Blender 2 shows the Mac Pro's GPU
pushing mostly the same performance on lighter renders, but Gooseberry sees an
8-second gap between the two machines, suggesting that extended GPU loads could
benefit from the extra cooling at its disposal. I mean, [music] they don't
benefit enough to justify Apple's refusal to allow their users to install
more powerful accelerators like the RTX 4090, cuz our PC bench at a lower price
manages to beat both of them. In our mixed 4K 8K HDR timeline in Da Vinci
Resolve, we ran into that same bug that cropped up in our Mac Studio review that
prevents us from comparing these two units. But what we can at least do here
is see the performance that the M2 Ultra is supposed to have, regardless of which
machine it's installed in. Internally, we've investigated this bug a fair bit,
and our best guess right now is that whatever heristics Apple is using to
determine power states and fan speeds is preventing our studio from achieving max
performance. The SSDs are nearly identical between the two machines, with
both of them dramatically outperforming the encoding speed, meaning that they
will never be a bottleneck. [music] We did discover though the Mac Pro's SSD
seems to have a minor advantage in 4K reads. So, point Mac Pro. And another
point for the Mac Pro is in our Chromium compile where it shaved just over two
minutes off of the Mac Studios time, which sounds really impressive until you
realize that that works out to about a 4% performance improvement. But hey, it
does at least show again that the additional cooling may be making a
difference. When we move to synthetics, however, everything kind of falls apart
again. Performance test has the Pro and the Studio at about the same performance
level, and Geekbench gives the Pro only a 1 to 2% lead in the GPU and CPU tests,
respectively. Cinebench surprisingly shows the Pro gain about a 7% lead over
the Studio, which is especially odd considering the renderer that R23 uses
is still Intel optimized. But hey, it's something. And something else is
Blender's CPU renderer, which might not be super relevant to most people, but
here is one more synthetic test that sees real gains over the Mac Studio with
performance more closely matching the PC bench in some scenes. Perhaps the pros
CPU cores are able to more aggressively turbo. Or maybe the massive cooler is
preventing the system from throttling when the studio otherwise would. To test
that theory, we set up our combined CPU and GPU stress test and ran it at room
temperature where oh, lookie here. While
the GPU clocks are roughly the same throughout the run between our two Macs,
it seems that the Mac Studio allows its CPU clocks to drop down before the fans
even get a chance to fully ramp up. That throttle point is visible right here
when we look at the temperatures. For comparison, here's the more gradual ramp
on the Mac Pro without the throttling hump. Curiously though, the fans didn't
kick in for either system until about the 4minute mark of this load. So, the
Mac Pro's ample cooling system seems to be almost purely for show. And given
that at room temperature, the Mac Studios fans never approach their
maximum 3500 RPM, it's pretty clear that with an aggressive fan curve, a Mac
Studio owner should be able to reach the same level of performance as a Mac Pro
owner. [music] There's no additional special sauce in the silicon. And all
while saving enough to buy 150 of the
new mystery water bottles at ltstore.com.
As expected, then lowering our ambient temperature to 10° yielded no change in
performance, and the Mac Pro's fans barely spun. And at 35°, same story,
except the fans finally broke 1,000 RPM,
making the Mac Pro the perfect machine for running heavy loads super quietly in
a really hot environment. Sort of. Actually, I'm not quite sure
how this works given their nearly identical performance, but the smaller
studio draws just a third as much power at idle, meaning that the Pro will
actually kick more heat out into your room. And the Pro also reaches a higher
peak power consumption at 356 W. How
much of this extra draw is from the SOC versus the, you know, extra boards and
fans? We can't say that for sure. But what we can say for sure is that both
machines are substantially less power hungry than our PC. Both at idle and at
full bore. The Core i9 13900K and the RTX490 alone can draw upwards of 600 to
700 watts when both of them are running full tilt. So the Studio offers the same
performance with a smaller footprint and even less power draw. Surely there must
be something the Mac Pro does that the Mac Studio can't, right? Ah, cracking
open the chassis reveals a lot. A lot of
empty space. That is the Intel Mac Pro
had eight PCI Express Gen 3 slots, usually with some expansion cards in
them, while the M2 model features a total of seven PCI Express Gen 4 slots,
which sounds like not much of a downgrade, but it's more than you would
think. While six of the slots are full length, only the bottom two are wired up
for the full 16 lanes with the next four limited to half the total bandwidth at
eight lanes and the slot that's normally occupied by the Apple IO card haved
again to a mere four lanes. Meaning that should you choose to use one of your
Thunderbolt ports as a DisplayPort output and rip that card out and replace
it with something else, your options would be a little limited. Well, more
limited. Um, we're going to get to that later. First, on the subject of
Thunderbolt ports, you might think that you could remove that card, too, and
maybe get another internal expansion slot, but you can't. The design is
proprietary. There's no key like a PCI Express slot would have, and the power
is supplied on the Edge card connector in a shrunk down interpretation of
Apple's one-off proprietary MPX connector for graphics cards. This
enables sufficient power delivery without the use of internal cables. It
really does look pretty on the inside. Now, because MPX is officially gone now,
these three miniature cable connections then are the only way to get a total of
300 W of additional power if you need them for your expansion cards. Not all
expansion cards need that, of course, especially if you're not installing any
GPUs, but this arrangement means that expansion cards like the 4 bay MPX hard
drive module that Promise used to sell are no longer compatible with the new
version of the Mac Pro. That leaves hard drive expansion to just the upper
chamber where a sold separately two drive bay can be fitted that makes use
of the connectors just above the IO cards. Good gravy is there ever a lot of
empty space in here. Turning the computer around reveals that the
shrouded RAM slots are actually still
here from the previous model, complete with easy open locks, except
instead of RAM we get some heat sinks.
Bummer. But wait. Ooh, that's where the
SSD slots are now. All two of them. But
unlike the SSDs used for the Mac Studio, which are bare flash modules, Apple does
in fact still allow users to upgrade these. So that's one major advantage
over the Studio. That is assuming that you don't just kit out your studio from
the factory with all the money you saved by not being a chump and buying a Mac
Pro. The other major advantage is back with those PCI Express slots. So, let's
talk a little bit about what we got working in here. To get the obvious out
of the way first, the Radeon 5700 XT that did work fine in an Intel Mac Pro
was a no-go here. It wouldn't output anything. And while it is detected in
macOS, actually, which is farther than I expected to get, it shows that it
doesn't have a driver. Of course, that is what Apple said would happen. They no
longer offer support for GPUs, even for AMD ones. So, here's all the other cards
we tested, and we did find some surprises. What wasn't surprising is the
biggest issue by far is driver [music] support. Companies like Blackmagic have
large professional Mac user bases, and
their products worked without much ado, but others like Elgato and Aver Media
perhaps rightly feel that there's a larger Mac market for external capture
dongles than there is for internal [music] cards. It was surprising to see
the Melanox 100 gig Ethernet card that we grabbed just pick up and run just
like that. I mean, I would have half expected Apple to remove the driver
despite NVIDIA who acquired Melanox in 2019. [music] Unsurprisingly then, our
Apex Storage X21 SSD carrier card didn't work in fairly spectacular fashion. But
then along came the Honeybadger. Honeybadger don't give a crap.
Honeybadger does what it wants and it wants to work. Not only did Liquids M.2
2 card managed to make the SSDs show up in system information. But we were even
able to use disk utility to create a RAID array on it. Though for some reason
known only to Apple, they are registered as external drives. I mean, hey, at
least we can install SSDs in the slots.
[laughter] Yay. And so between this and the 100 gig
nick, you know, if the dual onboard 10 gig nicks are not enough for some
reason, uh we might have found some of the only expansion cards that really
make more sense inside the Mac Pro than in one of the six Thunderbolt enclosures
that you could buy for the difference in price and install your expansion cards
in with the Mac Studio. Oh, there is another card that pros might want to
use. Avid's HDX. It's $500 and we have
no use for it, so we didn't buy one. But apparently a driver does exist for these
cards and it does work on Apple Silicon. It just requires you to relax the
startup security settings on your Mac, which should be fine, but isn't ideal.
The more I look at this thing, then the more I'm coming to appreciate the Mac
Studio, I guess. As much as we ragged on that machine for not living up to
Apple's hype and for not liking the way that they marketed it, it's safe to say
that it's more than enough computer for 90% of the people who were looking for a
Mac Pro. And hey, at least it doesn't
cost another $3,000 only to do
almost nothing to address the other 10% of users.
I don't know what to say other than that this thing is an abject failure and an
absolute slap in the face to Apple's professional users yet again. Um, does
anyone want to buy a lightly used M2 Ultra Mac Pro that uh got scratched
while we were sliding it out of the thermal chamber? No. If you guys enjoyed
this video, go check out our review of the Mac Studio for our critique of the
somehow better of the two machines.