Apple's latest Mac Pro is an embarrassment. It doesn't even have
their latest gen M3 silicon. It costs $3,400
more than a Mac Studio that has the exact same specs. And their prices on
storage and RAM upgrades would seem to suggest that they're made out of gold
rather than silicon. The worst part though, it's not even that good.
Yeah. Here we go. Final scores. 3,000 and change. 1,900 and change.
Wow. Wow. 50% faster on CPU. But showing you
all the results right away is no fun and not very helpful. So, let's talk about
our choices while we work together to build the PC Pro 2. Yeah, if you
remember, this isn't the first time we've done this. And last time, the PC
wasn't a clear winner, unlike our sponsor, MSI. If you don't have time to
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enabled motherboard, and it has the benefit of being easily upgradable.
Check it out at the link down below. Right out of the gate, this PC Pro build
is going to be a bit more of a challenge. While our Mac Pro comes in at
a whopping $11,800,
the old one was like $30,000. So
bargain? Well, it all depends on what you're getting, right? There are two
different M2 Ultras. One with 60 GPU
cores and the other with 76. We've gone with the ladder, meaning that that
machine is as fast as it can be.
Meanwhile, the PC Pro is getting something a little, I don't know, newer,
faster, wider. How about all of the above? The AMD Threadripper 7970X
features AMD's latest Zen 4 architecture with a monstrous 32 cores and a boost
clock of 5.3 GHz, all while drawing 350
watts. And that's before you turn on PBO
or precision boost overdrive. More on that later, but um is a potential
drawback of our machine uh compared to that one. This isn't a top-of-the-line
Threadripper or anything. that would have cost us more than half of our
budget by itself. But I'm still confident that this CPU is going to have
no issue. I'm still confident that this bad boy is going to run circles around
that thing. Now, unlike the Mac Pro with its
soldered CPU, our chip needs a motherboard with a socket to go in.
Specifically, the Gigabyte TRX50 Aerody.
There's only a handful of TRX50 motherboards out there right now, and we
settled on this one primarily due to the spacing of its PCI Express slots, which
is going to make a bit more sense later. It also conveniently is the least
expensive TRX50 board while still including great features like dual
high-speed LAN ports, Wi-Fi 7, and a whopping four quadlane M.2 slots, three
of which are PCIe Gen 5. Now, hold on a minute, Lionus. This is regular Thread
Ripper. How is this machine pro? That is
a fair point. Compared to Threadripper Pro, we've got fewer PCIe lanes, so you
can't connect as much stuff to it, and limited RAM capacity across half as many
memory channels. But then I ask you this, how do we stack up to the
competition? Compared even to this nonpro system, the Mac Pro has fewer
PCIe lanes, still supports less RAM, has
limited support for professional applications outside of video and photo,
and doesn't support ECC memory at all. It does have faster memory, but we'll
have to see how much of an advantage that's going to give it. Let's talk
about memory. The base model Mac Pro comes with 64 GB of unified memory. And
unified memory is legitimately super cool. Apple RAM is directly on the SOC
package, which increases bandwidth to both the CPU and the onboard GPU. Not
only is it fast, but if the CPU completes a task and needs to hand it
off to the GPU, that GPU has immediate
access to it rather than having to wait for it to be transferred between system
memory and traditional GPU memory. Apple's RAM also supports dynamic
caching, meaning that the CPU and GPU can partition the system memory
dynamically to best complete their respective work. or at least the M3 can.
It sucks that this Mac Pro is still stuck with the M2. And what also sucks
even more is the price. We added another
128 gigs to our config, which cost us
$1,600. On the PC side, okay, sure, it's not
unified, but boy, do we ever get a whole
lot more for our money. I am talking double the capacity at 384 GB. These are
Micron's 96 gig 5600 megat transfer per
second DIMs. They're registered ECC, meaning they should be
beautifully stable, and we're going to fill all four slots here, maxing out our
motherboard. It's kind of funny. We ended up with exactly double the RAM
because there was that clip that circulated of an Apple employee
erroneously stating during an interview that 8 GB on an M3 uh MacBook Pro is
probably analogous to 16 GB on other systems.
I guess that's why it costs twice as much. Another sore spot that Apple users
have been complaining about more and more lately is storage pricing. To go
from the stock one terabyte in that machine to 8 terabytes will add $2,200
to your bill, $2200.
For that price, you could buy a whole other computer. You could buy one of
every screwdriver on ltstore.com twice. Or you could do what we did and
pick up two of these. The Cyber Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB. Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Twice as much storage. Hey, Apple. Uh, is your 8 tab equivalent to our 16 tab?
Is that is that a thing? We're going to find out.
Yeah, we sure will. But what we can do is just have double the capacity.
Whether it's for projects, videos, games, or whatever we want. One
advantage for Apple, though, has been, and maybe always will be, sex appeal. I
mean, look at this fine ass cheese grater. That's why people keep buying
this thing. For us, we've gone with
Well, it's fine. This is the Define 7 XL. It's not a new case by any means,
but it's compatible with high-end hardware, fits lots of storage drives,
and uh hopefully won't be too constricted when it comes to airflow.
Worst case scenario, we'll drill some holes in the front, bring back the
cheese grater aesthetic.
For cooling, we've gone with an NZXT Kraken 360 because, well, we had
mounting hardware and with this triple radiator, it was able to handle our 32
CPU cores under full load, at least at
their default speeds. Uh, the system does support overclocking, but it's
really not something that we would recommend for a pro machine in a
production environment. Anyway, now while you watch this delightful little
montage of our cooler being installed, I'd like you to think back to when I said this motherboard has the PCIe slot
spacing we needed. That is because for our build, we're using not one but two
of MSI's RTX 4090 Supreme cards. Yes, my
friends, Apple is what it took for NVIDIA's pricing to finally seem so
reasonable that you can just put in two.
However, there's a twist. The keen item among you might have noticed that one of
my cards is air cooled and one of them has water cooling. That my friends is
because we couldn't find any combination of motherboard and case that could fit
two air cooled 4090s. And then well when
we wanted two of the liquid cool ones, we found out gosh darn it AI rush in
China there's now a 4090 shortage. So,
we asked our trustworthy bro Ryan from the LTT Store support team if we could
borrow his aircooled variant, and we used our one remaining liquid cooled
variant. That way, we've got two of the same cards, but with slightly different
hats. Now, since the shortage, prices for
these have gone up a fair bit, but still
think we're going to end up looking pretty good by comparison.
Let me deal with that. Anywh
who, to power this mess, we went with the Silverstone Hela 2050R Platinum or
SST HA2050R-PM
for short. It costs a whopping $670,
which only sounds like a bad deal until you compare it to the Mac Pro. Ah,
reasonable. Now that the build's done, all we got to
do is fire it up and run some benchmarks. Now,
our final price not that far off, but
for fun, we're going to include results with both GPUs as well as with only one
GPU because a little bird told me,
bird named Elijah, that it'll still win even with just one
GPU. Yes. Good job, bird. Spoiler alert.
I stuttered. I'm sorry. Okay, I up the shot.
No, I loved it. It was great. Editor, please cut around and make me
look good. Can you please freeze frame? Cut around
him. Put me in a beach, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like make me look good.
Give him like a Tom Celic mustache. And like you don't know who Tom Celich is.
He's the Seleian one. What does that mean? Couldn't help
noticing, Elijah. We're off to a pretty bad start here. Our system didn't even boot up.
Error code 0D. You think you've seen little PP energy? That's zero PP energy.
And they're booted. Finally,
PCs. Yay. But which one's faster? Classroom. And go. Wait up.
That's what is it? F12? I don't know. I don't know. Is there a
hotkey to render? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that.
It is F12. There you go. Go. I got F12 on a Mac. What is this?
Command option F12. Oh, I don't know. I was just guessing.
I get that. If anyone should have had the head start, it should have been you.
Spoiler. Are you done? Uh, no. I
Oh, no. It's still going. Yes, I am going much faster than you,
though. Oh, wow. Yes, you are.
All right, I finished. I'm not even halfway.
You started late. You started late. What? Let's give it the benefit of the doubt. We'll let it heat up, catch up.
You know, I started like 5 seconds after you.
So quiet, though. It sounds like it's barely doing anything. Wait,
since we're still waiting for the Mac anyway, why don't you run a GPU intensive test and see if they spin up?
Yeah, sure. We'll run Cinebench. We'll see what it can what results it can give us. You Oh, you finished.
Yeah, I finished. Yeah. Total time. Oh, 246 was the end
result. Ivon's so proud of me.
Here we go. Boom. It's starting. Oh, hey, you've got a running back.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. GPU start. Hey, my fans are spinning.
Definitely louder. Is it? Yeah. No, I mean louder than the Mac.
Like this thing just gets silent. Yeah. I mean that's what happens when you hook a
Raspberry Pi up to a heat sink this big.
It's not a Raspberry Pi. It's a powerful computer. It's an Apple Pi.
Yeah. Don't feel bad. Your computer's really powerful. Good boy.
Okay. This is This has rendered this multiple times. We're getting about
65,000 points, give or take. It's doing it over and over and
preparing. It hasn't even started.
Just run it like four times. Remember the first gen when Apple was all our GPU
was like, "Yeah,
and NVIDIA's like, what are you even talking about?" Okay, that was the 3090
if I recall correctly, not the 4090. But still,
it has done this multiple times while it's trying to finish this one. It's
kind of insane how it's just crushing it.
There it goes. It finally finished one. 9,500 points.
We are over six times that. What was our difference in price?
Give or take like a couple hundred bucks depending on sales of parts.
But Final Cut, the ecosystem.
I get my Windows phone back. Please bring it back. Dozens of people are so upset right now.
Is the noise difference enough that you would prefer to buy the Mac over this?
No. This is still a really quiet machine. We should put the side panel on in
fairness, though. Oh, yeah. Apple's side panel game on
fleek. Kids don't say that anymore. How would you know? You're old now.
Let's do the CPU version of Cinebench first before we completely write this
thing off, though. And they're off. Coming out of THE GATE STRONG. WE'VE GOT
NOBODY. Nobody is coming out of the gate strong. Wa. Hold on a second.
This is actually closer. Yeah, this may be a competition.
Oh, okay. Oh, PC PRO 2 IS PICKING up speed. It's
coming out ahead on the first turn. So, I'm going to stop that now. Yeah, please do. Yeah,
this one had like a moment where I thought, "Hey."
Yeah. Hey. Yeah. No.
Hey. Yeah. What?
Cuz you said, "Hey." Yeah. It's a song. Oh, I don't get it.
Do we have scores yet? Yes. 3,000 2,000.
Oh, this one's not even done still, though. Oh, does it give preliminary scores?
Yeah, I think it's interesting. Estimating what it's going to be. Okay. Well,
it's almost done it or it's like halfway done its second one, though. And this
one's not done. It's first. It took a bit to spool up. Yeah. Here we
go. Final scores. 3,000 and change.
1,900 and change. Wow. Wow.
50% faster on CPU. Apple Silicon has been a huge win for
them in mobile. Mac Mini.
Super cool machine. The Studio as well cuz we're not we're
just dissing this one because it's the same spec, but it's like what? $3,400.
We said expensive. You're paying $3,500
for a fancy case and some PCIe slots.
You don't even have expandable RAM in it anymore like you used to.
And that's the problem. We like silicon because of its efficiency. And you know,
we love silicon. Can't say that.
Apple silicon. Oh, we love Apple. It's silicone.
What? Nobody is talking about that. They're different.
What? Silicon. Yeah. is an element.
Okay. Silicone is a compound that contains
silicon. So, they're the same. No, that's like saying that water is the
same as oxygen because there's oxygen in it.
I understand now. We got there, ladies and gentlemen. For
LOL's gaming. Sure. Let's play game. So, CS2,
Counter-Strike 2 it is. I was going really fast. Yeah, that's pretty fast. How fast could
you download the game? Delete it and reinstall it. All right, manage. Uninstall.
Here we go. 1.5
1.6. Is the Mac going to win the game
download benchmark? Oh, no. Oh, did we beat it?
Three. Yes, we passed. Okay, we beat it for 3.1. One thing I will say that is a W though,
that boots way faster. Yeah, that was a problem we had with the last
Mac Pro killer as well, was that one took a while to boot. Workstation
platforms on PC tend to be
poorly optimized, but hey, you can download games at 3.4 Gbit per second
compared to 2.8. Wait, is Counterstrike 2 not available
from Mac? Did you check? It's not available for Mac, so it's trying to get you to launch it.
Oh, for Christ. I didn't even realize that. Okay, Rocket League,
Rocket League's not launching either. Is Are you sure this is It doesn't work on the M Silicon.
Okay. Are you Were you just trying to make a point that nothing works or were we supposed to compare this? I was
trying to make a point that it's very difficult. There's very select games
that you know you may or may not get to play the ones you want.
Were you? Or did you think they worked? I totally was doing it on purpose. It is
one of my f Whoa. Sound boomer enabled. Okay. Very cute.
Sound boomer is not a real thing. What
speaker is that? Is it just playing off the speaker?
That sounds like it. Eh, is that a thing? I didn't know that was
a thing it could do. Well, where's your PC Pro built-in
speaker at? Okay, fine. I guess you got me on that
one. All right. I don't have a speaker embedded in my computer.
To be clear, Linux is a piece of Windows
is a piece of So, when I say macOS is
also sometimes problematic. Don't get upset. You know, why can't I type right
now? You know, I'm clicking this box. I'm highlighting this text.
It's not that my keyboard's not working. Oh, look. Spotlight. Oh, good. Wait, I
think I figured it out. Keystroke receiving. Dusk would like to receive
keystrokes from any application. So, like clicking.
I don't. Is that what it's asking? So, it wants
access to the keyboard to play. I'm exhausted just trying to open one
stupid game. Oh, wow. This mouse is
really laggy. Imagine the bottom charging port not being the worst thing
about it.
Hey, wave two shotgun. Let's go. I mean, it looks kind of smooth. I can't
tell what you're feeling with the mouse, though. Does it feel rubbery?
Oh, no. It's Well, the mouse is terrible, but the actual game is fine.
Okay. Yeah, it's running super smooth. Yeah. So, why don't I have an FPS counter?
Dumb question. Did it actually enable? I don't know. Okay, I'll tell you what.
Elijah is going to find at least one game that runs on both of them. We're
going to have a little graph right here, but spoiler alert, it's not going to be
pretty because the raw horsepower of the GPUs in the PC Pro 2 is vastly greater.
And remember that in games, we aren't even able to make use of both of them
because NVIDIA no longer supports Envy Link or SLI at all for that matter on
consumer cards. Jerks. So, okay, Lionus,
we hear you. Apple is expensive and none of their products are good. But that's
not what I'm saying. There are some arguments, strong arguments for many of
Apple's products. There's the power and portability of the MacBook, the
efficiency of the Mac Studio, or my personal favorite, the Mac Mini. That
thing is a powerhouse. Or the convenience of AirPods, which I happen
to daily drive. It's just that the Mac Pro is so bad that Apple will almost
certainly can it. By which I don't mean turn it into a can. Again,
I remember that. I mean, discontinue it. I mean, even Apple's most ardent
defenders are starting to realize that Apple's pricing, especially with Halo
products like this, just doesn't make any sense anymore. If you search for the
M2 Ultra Mac Pro, almost every article or video, reaches the same conclusion.
It's dumb. There are some things that it does do well. I mean, like the Mac
Studio because it's the exact same machine. The single core performance was
actually on par or even better than our PC Pro 2 sometimes. and its efficiency
is outstanding. I think its overall power consumption is closer to one of
these GPUs than it is to this entire system. But for the price of this thing,
you can get a fully kitted out Mac Studio for your home office and still
have enough money to buy a refurbished M2 Max MacBook Pro from Apple's
certified refurbished store. Or if all that seems like a bad idea, you could
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this video, go back and watch the first time we did this. That one cost over
$30,000 and it actually wasn't even a
clear winner. So, I don't know. Hey, at least Apple's cut the price since then.