hey sir they found it you better get over here now
oh oh nevermind yeah no sorry false
alarm uh yeah i thought they were gonna take the fast one
yeah you have a good night
this is the pc pro 32 000 worth of pc
hardware so fast it'll knock your socks right out of your sandals let's take a
look inside at the uh beautiful power supply provided by our
sponsor c sonic who makes great power supplies for everything from entry-level
gaming rigs to servers to monsters like
this
the 2019 mac pro is a thing of beauty and there's no denying that it's
powerful ours here is equipped with 28 processing
cores 768 gigabytes of memory it's got an AMD
Radeon vega pro duo a graphics card so exclusive you can only get it in this
machine and it's got one small problem macs aren't known for their bang for the
buck so then even if i had a lot of
bucks 33 000 of them to be precise here
would i be better off with one of these or
one of these with the pc pro our goal was to create a
machine that beats the mac pro in every
conceivable way starting with the case
this inwin 2 2.0 is one of only 300
units in existence and it's one of the few pc cases that i think is truly
striking enough to take on the mac pro the outside is covered in five
millimeter thick tempered glass that has been vacuum sputter coated to create an
incredible one-way mirror that only shows off your hardware when internal
lighting is applied the process is a little deeper than we have time for now
but it's super freaking cool so watch this video from applied science later on
all of that tempered glass is held in place by an aluminum frame that was
welded by hand giving it the distinctive
geometric look that it has now hearing words like welded by hand and
vacuum sputter coating and one of three hundred you'd probably guess that this
is worth a pretty penny and at two thousand dollars
you'd be correct so for that price how good is it to build in not good very bad
all right so hardware access then
mac pro one pc pro zero now alex i can't help but
notice that we've got two monitors hooked up to the pc pro and only one to
the mac yeah the second one there is just for
the post sequence so you know that it's actually doing something after you hit
the power button of course it is i feel like i know how this is going to work
out but let's do our power on boot time test
okay fine i'll press that button just give it a second
okay what did you do i just held it for longer the good news is that you've got
remote access over ipmi so if you're not
you know in the same building you can still remote into it over the network and like
you know update the BIOS or you know restart it or whatever the bad news is
it outputs to vga first and then
displayport later all right boot time is admittedly not a strong point for the pc
pro here so mac pro 2
pc pro zero admittedly this isn't going very well for us so far it'll get there
now one of the toughest decisions for this build was actually the CPU
Threadripper was very tempting because of its excellent single core performance
overclocking capabilities and official support for Windows 10. the deal breaker
for us was its maximum memory capacity of 256 gigs now for most applications
256 gigs of RAM is a lot but the mac pro
here can be kitted out with up to one and a half terabytes of memory and we
couldn't allow ourselves to get beaten like that that's why we chose
against AMD's wishes the epic 7502p a 32 core server processor with
support for up to two terabytes of RAM
now it adds 3 847.18
to the total of our machine here but as far as we can tell it's lack of support
for Windows 10 is just a validation bottleneck over at AMD and i'm quite
confident that it will beat the 28 core mac pro in multi-threaded tests even if
it falls somewhat behind in single threaded tests besides i mean
i think it's fair to assume that anyone buying a 28 or 32 core processor is
mostly concerned with multi-threading anyway right the main problem with
choosing a server processor is that you're usually stuck with a server
motherboard in our case the taian mainboard s8030gm2ne
now to be clear we really like it and there's even another version of it that
has dual onboard 10 gigabit network cards but the thing is we aren't exactly using
it in its intended application so certain things like fast
boot times robust io and fancy black
pcbs have been sacrificed for things like reliability high quality pci
express gen 4 capable traces and heaps and heaps of storage options let's go
ahead and open it up that is a thick boy of a panel dang man
there is something positively delightful about seeing 64 threads in task manager
and check this out 1020
gigabytes of memory however keeping a
terabyte of RAM cooled is uh no laughing
matter these 128 gig modules that we're
using from sk hynix run freaking
hot so we're actually using something that i haven't seen since like the skull
trail days these active coolers running
over top of our dual four dim
banks of memory modules here and i had a small heart attack when i saw that this
one was resting on the back of our graphics card but actually it's okay
good job alex you covered it in electrical tape which is definitely an
appropriate solution for a 30 000 machine do you want to hear why
we really need those coolers let's just turn these off for a second there's an
alarm that goes off at 95 degrees it's mad we gotta we got to plug the RAM
coolers back in all right that's better we're down to
about 50 degrees now now that alarm might seem obnoxious but
all the monitoring on this motherboard is part of what allows it to run 24 7 in
a server type environment besides we got to protect these modules because they're
over twelve hundred dollars each for a total of nine thousand seven
hundred and ninety two dollars of memory alone in our system pivoting to our
least expensive component if we were to 100
push everything in this system we'd be drawing close to 1300 watts now normally
we throw a sea sonic prime platinum 1300 watt power supply in rigs just because
we can it'll run most gaming machines without even turning on the fan here we
actually need the entire 108 amps on the 12 volt rail and 13 20 watts of
continuous power now in real world operation you almost never actually run
every component of a system at a hundred percent so we're not expecting to see
more than about a thousand watts of power usage at a time partly because of
how the gpus are configured more on that later but it is considered best practice
to over spec your power supply a little because they do degrade a little over
time also upgrades happen and
a failure especially in this case can destroy a lot of expensive hardware so
this unit has a 12 year warranty and only took a 270 byte out of our budget
which sounds totally reasonable in this context back to expensive stuff now this
right here is a quadro rtx 8000 NVIDIA's
top GPU with a staggering 48 gigabytes
of vram and a price tag of 5500
just a single one of these should be able to put a vega pro duo in
its place naturally we got two
but there's more to it than that joining the two together is an envy link bridge
which is basically a 100 Gigabyte per second data super highway that allows
the two cards to not just communicate with each other but actually share
memory giving digital artists data scientists and engineers
96 gigabytes of effective vram in a
single workstation that is it'll give them that if their
boss will sign off on the expense report so we've got two quadros and an envy
link bridge which means that nvlink should just be
working right you might think that by looking at NVIDIA's literature the only
problem is that this guide contains almost zero useful information
run a command to check if it's working you say how and where do i run this
command fortunately for us the guys over at puget systems put together a guide
for how to get nvlink going which they created through trial and error without
any documentation from NVIDIA first problem when enabling nvlink on
quadros the display output actually gets disabled so we needed another GPU of the
same generation or newer in our case this rtx titan here is going to act as
our display output then we have to do some command prompt stuff to enable
nv-link on the gpus and after a reboot we can run the nv-link tester that puget
systems actually made to ensure that it's all working and check the bandwidth
between the cards huge thanks to those guys for putting all that together i
have no clue how NVIDIA expects their customers to figure these things out
otherwise in a nutshell everything i just said means that this rtx titan here
is just a really pretty golden display output bringing our total spend on
graphics up to thirteen thousand four hundred and ninety nine dollars
ridiculous fortunately the rtx titan is also the fastest gaming GPU on the
market so naturally for our first test we're gonna see just how well these two
computers that are completely not designed for gaming fare against each
other in gaming ready for the drag race yeah all
right run benchmark three two one go they're both running Windows by the way
just so you guys know that's a lot more FPS yep
oh i'm sorry yep it's a lot more and you can talk all day about how this is
gaming and it's not you know for gaming or whatever but more GPU powers more GPU
power that would be clearly beneficial oh nice
that was a pretty one-sided fight but a w is a w so it's 2-1 for the mac pro
let's go for the mac pro's main draw though content creation to test this to
its fullest our video editor mark who is admittedly a mac guy put together a
benchmark for us in premiere and final cut pro to really test if the better
optimized mac pro which does by the way
have the accelerator card in it or the much more powerful pc pro is able to
take the win so we've got a multi-platform audio visual render kit
or markbench as we're calling it so we
weren't kidding when we said that the i o on this thing is terrible
it's got two usb 3 ports
a management network interface that that's not like a network port you can
actually use vga serial and then two
gigabit network ports and then it could also have two more 10 gig net reports
lots of networking that's uh what is that now three one for the mac pro yep
wait so i see there's a usb card right here is there a reason we didn't install
this in the bottom slot yeah we bought pretty cheap ones and
they were causing stability issues mark bench also known as benchmark oh i love
myself so here it is the afterburner card versus
two rtx 8000s worth of GPU muscle
three two one go keep in mind that this is uh multiple
8k clips animated with you know effects attached to them
oh so you did the same project yeah in
both pieces of software i thought we were just doing a simple encode but
we're not oh this is way more interesting then so
we're using a hundred percent CPU right now
this is using 90 GPU
uh these puppies are up at 80 degrees it is using them perfect okay are you done
oh yeah oh yeah it's done i'm at 45
that's thrashed oh dang
i was not expecting that result it wasn't either the scripts were oh this
is the first time you've seen it yeah it's the first time i've seen it oh that's hilarious okay the script's
written as if the mac wins mark bench oh okay
the problem with a lot of videos about the mac pro though is that people that
make videos about the mac pro are mostly well video creation professionals in
real life video editors who might observe that the mac pro is so
much faster uh make up only a small portion of the
people that need massive computing power for their work engineers and scientists
financial analysts medical professionals and many others require this kind of
power so for them how is the performance
between these two machines going to differ we're going to find the biggest
differences in applications that support NVIDIA's cuda GPU compute exclusively
and will not be able to take advantage of the AMD gpus found in the mac pro for
instance solidworks visualize only supports cuda so on the mac pro it took
several times as long as it did on the
pc pro meaning our score is now even to look at
some other workloads we're leaning on the spec workstation benchmark
in many of the CPU tests that are either
single core dependent or shorter burstier multi-core workloads the mac
pro comes out ahead so 7-zip blender
python compiling and simulations that are just out of necessity single core
like stress analysis because it can't be paralyzed that nets the mac pro 11
points the only thing though is that the mac pro only won these CPU benchmarks by
a little bit whereas in anything that required GPU muscle the pc pro
absolutely wrecked house sometimes doubling the mac pro giving it a total
of 13 points
sort of i mean here's the thing guys cheerleading any kind of inanimate
object is silly and making the right decision is
always going to come down to your particular workload and budget so let's
get back to practicality as cool as the pc pro is
i don't think anybody should buy this i mean we did find a way to spend
32 000 on a pc but this configuration isn't going to
excel at any one task like a machine that was built with more focus would
like say we wanted the fastest rendering machine possible we would sacrifice a
bunch of the RAM and spend that money on additional GPU muscle maybe we do need
loads of RAM for big financial calculations well in that case we could
ditch some GPU and get a server board that doubles our maximum memory capacity
to four terabytes probably the most egregious waste of money is of course
the case which is 100 form over function and is 10 times the
cost of a less flashy and more pragmatic one though in fairness to us we were
trying to compete with apple here when in rome right and besides at the
end of the day we achieved exactly what we set out to do look at this thing
the pc pro is a nod to excess and in
that it excels absolutely where the mac pro
destroys your wallet while making massive performance compromises because
mr cook and mr wong can't sort out their differences the pc pro evaporates your
bank account while being the most op system around and yeah it doesn't excel
at one single task and definitely has its own problems but i think it's pretty
epic pun intended and i want to thank csonic for sponsoring this video and you
for watching it if you guys are looking for another fun over-the-top mac themed
pc video maybe check out our hack pro series by the time this is out we should
be done filming the finale and you're going to be able to binge watch the
entire thing very soon