Every so often, and I hate to admit it,
even I run into some kind of an issue
where the only viable solution is to use a Mac.
In my case, it was that I was trying to work on a review
of this archival tape storage backup system
and the Windows software experience was,
to put it as politically correctly as I can, awful.
So my solution, some kind of Mac machine
with 10 gigabit networking
and getting that going on the MacBook Pro
wasn't gonna be a thing
because even though I found a network card
with literally the exact same chipset
that is in the iMac Pro
and plugged it into an external enclosure,
macOS just wouldn't pick it up
because whatever, you Linus.
So I dug the iMac Pro out and then I went,
oh right, the whole reason we were opening
this stupid thing up in the first place
was that iFixit sponsored us
to do a video on how to upgrade it.
So I guess that's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna go from eight cores and 32 gigs of RAM
to theoretically 128 gigs of RAM and 18 cores,
all while saving $1,000.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Let's hope it works.
Oh, you cut audio as well?
I did not cut audio.
You didn't cut audio?
No.
Okay, sorry, I don't think I have to re-sync.
But he did cut the audio.
So it's not gonna sound very good.
Sorry about that.
Step one of any upgrade is to run some benchmarks
to establish a baseline.
Oh, actually, no, hey, it's done.
All right, so this gives us some idea of where we're starting.
Here's our 32 gigs of RAM.
We've got a Xeon W2140B.
So this is fairly similar,
although not exactly the same as the 2145
that's worth about $1,100.
So our base iMac Pro upgraded
compared to buying a top-of-the-line model
from Apple in the first place
gives us a difference of about $250.
And we're still gonna have an eight-core processor
and 32 gigs of RAM to flip on Craigslist.
We'll be using our iFixit kit
along with one of their guides to complete our upgrade,
starting with cutting the adhesive
around the edge of the display
and disconnecting the three ribbon cables
before carefully putting it aside.
And all without breaking it.
Take that, Anthony.
That's okay.
He knows what he did.
First order of business is we remove the fan.
You just need to turn them counterclockwise
until they start making that noise.
And they're gonna be retained
by the little rubber washers that are in there.
Now there's two little connectors here.
One right there, one right there.
Those power the fans and you can just pull these out.
Be very careful around this power supply.
No touching.
You could actually die.
Next, we're gonna pull out Apple's excellent Wi-Fi card.
And we're gonna stash this out.
Stash those screws,
along with this handy dandy little shield right about there.
Is that it?
Now all we gotta do is pull some of these other cables out
and their covers.
And we can go ahead and pull this board out.
And all these little antenna connectors.
These guys are gonna come off too.
These are really fragile.
RF shield or something down there.
That's getting in my way.
I wonder if I could make my life easier
by making it temporarily much harder.
Let's pull this speaker out.
This is kind of a do as I say, not as I do moment.
We're having right now.
Boards out and I didn't get zapped.
So now that we've got this opened up for our upgrade,
we can talk about what exactly in the iMac Pro is upgradable
because frankly, it's not much.
Over the years, Apple has gone from
with the original Mac Pro being very upgradable,
PCI Express cards, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage,
pretty much everything, just like a normal tower,
to the new Mac Pro, the trashcan Mac Pro
that theoretically had upgrades.
Upgradable GPUs, but I don't know
if they ever actually followed up with anything newer.
Had upgradable RAM and had upgradable CPU and storage
if you were willing to put a lot of work into it,
to this iMac Pro where even,
so the GPU is actually baked right into the motherboard here.
So that's where our Vega 56 is.
So that will not be upgradable to the storage.
So the storage theoretically can be pulled off and replaced,
but because of this T2 encryption chip is actually tied
into the motherboard in such a way that
if you swapped them out, it wouldn't work.
And pretty much only the CPU and RAM are upgradable.
And I mean, the CPU is even a theoretical one.
I don't know if anyone has actually done a CPU swap on it yet.
It's possible that they've even locked out the BIOS.
So I'm not a hundred percent certain
if that aspect of this upgrade is going to work.
So let's find out then, shall we?
Let's take off these stickers here that were the problem.
And the reason that Apple refused to give us
their replacement pricing on the logic board.
So technically it's not that they're denying us
warranty service,
but they were definitely treating us differently.
Whether it is legal for them to treat us differently
because of a sticker having been broken or not
is something that is very much an ongoing debate
and something that if you're down in the US,
you should probably contact your local
congressional representative about.
So there's eight screws that we're going to use.
We're going to have to pull off.
Wow. There's a lot of tension on those mounts.
I'm having fun. You having fun?
Oh yeah. Good times.
Actually it just goes right metal on PCB.
How interesting.
So you might not think that we'd have to remove the screws
from the GPU here,
but the reason that we do is actually
because the entire cooling unit is one piece.
So it's connected by heat pipes between both CPU and GPU.
So it's connected to these metal cooling fins here.
Holy crap.
Okay. I did not see that one coming.
What the heck Apple.
So they don't use the retention mechanism for the CPU
that is normally part of the socket design,
I guess to save some space on the board,
which means that when you take the heat sink off,
it just rips the CPU right out of the board.
Fortunately that came out clean.
So I don't think we're going to run into any trouble.
And Apple expects even their authorized service providers
to get boards with CPUs, RAM and SSDs pre-installed on them
as a single unit,
even though they are socketed and they are not soldered.
So I guess this isn't supposed to be a problem
for the end user,
but I'm still not a fan of designs like this
that just the thermal paste just pulls the CPU
out of the socket.
Go ahead and cut.
Kidding.
Anyway, enough about that.
This is upgrade guide, not complain about the process guide.
So right here around the CPU socket area
is pretty much everything we can do.
So we're going to pull out our eight gig sticks of RAM.
So we're going to be careful here,
not to have them pop out of the slot,
because if they did,
they could accidentally bend the pins in the CPU socket.
Then we're going to go ahead and take our 18,
18 core CPU.
Currently Intel's highest end workstation chip.
There we go.
So they haven't done anything funky
with the spec of the socket.
Just goes in a little something like that.
Now we get to crack open the seals
on two grand worth of memory.
Look at all the DRAM packages on this thing.
Line that bad boy up.
One, two, three, four.
The only thing I regret,
is using a green PCB.
So now we get to pippity pop our cooling solution back on.
Going to have to,
we're probably just going to reuse the thermal compound
for the GPU,
but this CPU situation might need a little bit of help.
I got to like pry this baby out of here.
Oh, okay.
Well that was easier than it looked like it was going to be.
Alrighty then.
We'll put on some new thermal compound here.
What?
Just pop that on just like that.
Oh, oh, oh.
Okay. We made one small mistake.
We're going to have to put in these two RAM sticks afterward.
Hey, don't blame me.
You guys subscribed to this mess.
Pop that back in there.
Go ahead and turn this over and get that bolted down.
Now with our upgrades done,
we're going to flip the machine back over.
Now it is really important because of the way that CPU
is just going to pop out of the socket.
If we move the heat pipe cooler,
we're going to make sure we hold that in place.
Oh boy.
Yep.
Hold that in place against the board.
Oh, good.
Our CPU didn't pop out.
Then we're going to go ahead and put our mounting bracket
on the back, back on.
Now this is a little bit tricky here
because there are two different kinds of screws
and you need to make sure you put the right ones
in the right holes.
So the ones with the kind of built-in standoff on them,
those go the orientation we were looking at the board here,
top left and bottom right.
The ones with the much shorter posts,
those go top right, bottom left.
If you screw this up, best case scenario,
you've got kind of wonky mounting pressure.
Worst case scenario, you will damage your board.
Boy, this is a lot more pressure
than I'm comfortable putting on a motherboard.
I hate these mounts.
Okay.
Gorgeous.
Now the GPU is not nearly as scary
because there's no pins that you can accidentally
rip the CPU out of and then accidentally put it in sideways.
You don't have to mangle them up or anything.
Oh, by the way, I'm sorry, off camera,
I did wipe the thermal compound off the GPU
and I did reapply, but I'm not gonna pull this back off
to show you guys that.
So to put our GPU cooler back on,
see these little cutouts right here?
So just look at these two holes here
and then the shape of the components underneath them
and you won't be able to screw up which one goes which way.
In this case, all the screws are the same.
So we just go ahead and position these bad boys
and then screw them down.
Once again, applying far more pressure
than I am super comfortable with.
Beautiful.
That is our upgraded logic board.
And they said it couldn't be done.
Now to put it together and find out if it works.
One thing we're gonna do to make our lives
a little bit easier compared to when Lewis and I did this
is we're gonna pull out the speakers,
put those back in after we've installed the logic board.
Let me see.
There we go.
Actually, that should be fine.
All right.
One of the keys at this stage is making sure
that you don't accidentally cover up some of the connectors
that you're gonna need to plug back into your motherboard.
Now the last thing we wanna do is accidentally scratch
the PCB with one of these standoffs here
while we're inserting the board.
This is one nice thing about the design.
They've got this rubber stopper here
so you can't let it fall down or anything.
Now let's go around and do our motherboard screws.
Gonna arbitrarily pick this one to start with.
We want those as centered as possible
because it can affect the alignment of your rear ports
if you don't have the board in perfectly.
We're gonna need to lift up this side of the board here
a little bit.
Perfect.
I'm gonna do these power ones now.
There we go.
Oh, beautiful.
Okay.
One little trick, guys.
This speaker connector right here has this little loop here.
So we're gonna go ahead and put that on just partway.
We're gonna plug it in.
Shoop.
Then we're gonna tighten it down.
While we're at it,
we can start connecting some of the back ribbon cables.
There we go.
All right, we're gonna check our rear port alignment
at this point.
Looking pretty slick.
All right.
Now we're gonna throw in our other two power screws.
Tighten those up.
Don't wanna lose connection here.
There we go.
And we can start connecting the rest
of the connectors on the back of our board.
We can go ahead and put our speaker back in
at this point too.
How's that cable managed?
Feeling good now.
Now we're gonna hook up all the antennas.
These are really fragile connectors.
Please be careful.
Now we're just gonna stick this shield
into its little cable management slot here.
There we go.
It should sit on kind of a little hinge like that.
Then we're gonna adjust these antenna wires
and screw it in.
Now this motherboard mounting screw,
we're gonna have to take out temporarily.
We're gonna put this little shield in place.
Screw it back in partway.
Screw in the other side.
Being very careful not to drop it.
Undoing all of the work we just did.
And we can go ahead and tighten down our motherboard screw.
All right, now we're gonna throw the speakers in
and we are almost home free.
So where did this go?
Yep, there it goes.
Now we've got a somewhat obnoxious task ahead of us.
Because the display is glued on,
it means we've gotta remove all of the old adhesive.
So this will take a little while.
On there too.
That won't hurt.
Now that that's all off,
I'm gonna stretch out my ARM a little bit here.
All that is left is for us to put on new adhesive strips
and put on the screen.
Be really careful with these.
You don't get two cracks at them.
So you can see they got this little hole up here
for alignment, whatever it's for.
Nailed that one.
Onto the next.
These last two along the bottom are the trickiest
just because this kit was designed, as far as I can tell,
with the original Retina iMac in mind.
And there might be just some slight,
ever so slight differences.
So you're gonna have like this little tab doodad here
that kind of doesn't really go anywhere.
It's not a big deal.
Or I don't know, maybe it goes along this thing here.
That really doesn't matter.
There, boom.
Minor detail.
Guess I better put the cooler back in.
LOL.
And also these two screws right there.
Now.
The trickiest part.
Removing the adhesive strips,
putting the display back on.
We're gonna put on these three cables first though.
Apple's gonna be watching this video.
They're gonna be like,
we want to recruit Linus
to be an Apple authorized service provider.
Looks like it goes right there.
Yep.
And then put the latch down.
Boop.
Oh, it looks like that one went in super easy.
And this guy.
Never a problem, you know?
Now.
This is not attached.
This is very scary.
But I want to know if this thing powers on
before I waste my adhesive and an hour of my life
peeling it all back off and reapplying it again.
So let's go ahead and get this plugged in
and see how she goes.
Ooh.
Ha.
Okay.
Jesus.
Had me going for a minute there.
I don't use Macs much.
I don't know how long they take to boot up.
Whatever.
Let's get this keyboard and mouse hooked up.
Let's see how much performance we got.
Whoa.
Now we're not out of the woods yet.
There's a distinct possibility
that some of our stuff might not have been detected.
So, okay, nevermind.
That ruined the suspense and anticipation
because there it is.
Intel Xeon W2195.
That's our 18 core processor
with 128 gigs of DDR4 memory.
So let's run our benchmarks, shall we?
So a quick Google search online tells me it should be
in the neighborhood of 50,000.
Come on, show me the big score.
There it is.
So we just crushed our old performance.
We are right up there
with the regular factory Apple iMac Pro with the 18 core,
but we saved ourselves a bunch of money
at, of course, the expense of our time.
Fantastic.
This thing is now officially tricked right out.
And, of course, this video wouldn't have been possible
without iFixit sponsoring it.
So a massive thank you to iFixit for sponsoring this video,
sending over the RAM upgrade,
sending over the adhesive strips,
their tool kit that was perfect,
had everything we needed in it.
You guys can check out iFixit.com.
They've got tons of great guides,
as well as, of course, their comprehensive lineup of tools,
replacement parts, and all that good stuff
at the link in the video description.
So thanks for watching, guys.
If you disliked this video,
you can hit that button.
But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed,
maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff
we featured at the link in the video description.
Also down there is our merch store,
which has cool shirts like this one,
and our community forum, which you should totally join.
If you noticed that we had some audio issues
for part of this video, you can thank David.
You can thank him in the comments.
I can't be in the video.
Can't talk about it.
I can talk about whoever I want.
I'm the CEO of the company.
That's a good one, sorry.