six grand starting price for this thing
better have pretty amazing specs
an eight core processor by the time you kick this thing out with anything decent
it's gonna cost as much as a car wait
unless yeah no
i'll just get the base model one and then
scrape together all the upgrades i need on my own and
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my mac pro isn't actually a base model i
got the afterburner card and a Radeon pro vega 2 duo so that i'd have two gpus
but also have an extra expansion slot if i ever needed four for some reason but
it's also not maxed out to do that i'll be removing the asinine eight core
processor this thing shipped with and throwing in a 28 core xeon w 3275
a whole whack ton of RAM yes my friends
that is two terabytes of memory
a j2i drive cage a pci express SSD and
uh apparently a titan rtx just cause
figuring out what CPU to buy is pretty simple you just grab any 3200 series
Intel xeon off of any reseller that you like as for how to install it well we
could have found out ahead of time but we thought it'd be more fun for us to
just go on that little adventure together so obviously
we need to remove the heatsink now we praised the mac pro in our review for
using mostly standard phillips head screws but that's only for the things
that most end users would actually need to access for something like a RAM upgrade
or a drive upgrade for things like the CPU that apple doesn't actually expect
you to change yeah it's going to be torques next i think we're gonna have to
pull our afterburner card oh i love these captive thumb screws back here
with no risk of losing anything i really like this pci express
lock oh boy we're already up to two different
types of screws and all we've done so far is remove the
mac pro name plate and that might not have even been
necessary because it seems like this is just a cosmetic cover for the
four u-shaped heat pipe cooler that we got going on here so let's move around
to the back then now just pop the cover off of our two rated ssds right there
now we've got a couple more locks we don't actually have to expose the RAM
now but we might as well just take them off and get them out of our way since we
will be upgrading the memory later anyhow and then finally this guy i think yep
there we go wait
do you know what this does Anthony that is the speaker oh for crying out loud
here's six large torx head screws that we're gonna remove
carefully because apple just like with the imac pro has
not mounted the CPU into the socket with a retention lever it's just held on by
the heat sink so once the heatsink pops off it'll just pull the CPU out of the
socket wow these are
these are tight boys
i don't actually know that it's just gonna pop free for me
oh it seems to kind of slide on rather than
being able to lever it away man this thing's worth more than my life
okay just gonna
prop it up there yeah there we go just need two hands
okay
uh yep there it is oh boy
just like that let's see no problem all right so this is what i was talking
about before here the CPU is kind of like fused onto it
with thermal compound right see so you can see that's holding it on there's a
bit of a cross pattern in the thermal paste that i don't know if it's due to
the shape of the base of the cooler or if it's due to their application you can
see they've done a pretty good job of actually covering the important parts of
the ihs here without overdoing it on their thermal compound application not
that that really makes a difference too much thermal compound does not contrary
to popular belief tank your performance but
still it's a nice touch putting on the right amount over on this side we get a
good look at the socket so you can see there yeah it's just
completely devoid of any kind of latching or retention mechanism the CPU
just kind of sits in there and this also gives us a really good look down here
they look just like the 8-pin and 6-pin pci express connectors that you'd have
in your desktop computer but they're mini so we'll need to adapt
these in order to add expansion cards that need auxiliary cables well that was
surprisingly straightforward wanna hit me with that 28 core CPU all right here
we go so to get this done we're going to be borrowing a page out of the car
mechanics handbook we're going to kind of get under it you
know the mac pro 2019 has a convenient
filming hole for performing CPU upgrades and shooting
them at the same time just guide it in there
give it a little wiggle not bad
consulting our trusty gamers nexus modmat um i can't see the part about
thermal compound applications so i'm just going to put it all over the place ah
i drew a smiley face you know what i'm just going to put my
cover back on now before my easy access to this thing ends it is
weird to me that they kind of reinvented the CPU cooler mounting mechanism that
seems unnecessary but you got to give apple credit
what is this six screws
and two thumb screws later
i have completely swapped out my CPU is that unprecedented for them
yeah like outstanding oh we've got a good look at
the guide that was making it so i couldn't accidentally wrench the cooler
out the wrong way so there's a cut right here and just a
nice thick metal here and then there's a couple of notched screws here that keep
it from being inserted wrong okay good luck everybody this part might
be a little tricky
the only thing that makes this tough is that these springs super difficult to compress and
these screws that we took out are actually threaded inserts
well that was painless almost makes the amount of work that we've spent building
that hack pro seems like kind of a waste of time
all right so we're just going to throw our speaker back in place assuming that
we can figure out how the devil to get this thing on here
come on get in there there we go now we can't actually put
our full two terabytes of RAM here this we got our hands on for uh an AMD
project and AMD epic does support two terabytes of RAM but that's okay one and
a half terabytes of RAM ain't half bad
so we will start by opening up our memory slots right
and consulting the handy dandy little
population guidelines they've got there for you isn't that nice i mean a lot of
manufacturers would just color code them but this is a good solution too and it
means that everything gets to be black now we'll peel back all the tabs and
it's time to go shopping now this is really important you can't use regular
unbuffered dims in the mac pro that's a limitation of the xeon CPU that's
installed in it so you will either need ecc registered ddr4 memory or you will
need a special kind of ecc server RAM called lr dimms or load reduced dimms
and memory is one of the most sensible
upgrades that you can do it is much easier as you guys saw than accessing
the CPU and the amount of money you can save is incredible for example for a 768
gig configuration you can expect to pay around 3 600 on newegg for the RAM that
you'd need for your mac pro that is close to a third of apple's price of 10
grand and guys if you're more comfortable with like
a matched set versus just buying your own individual
sticks and checking them in there owc has a kit for 4 900 which is still a 50
savings i just can't believe how simple it is we already pulled off the covers
and now it's just a matter of lining up the notch in the memory with
the notch in the slot positioning it like so
pushing with both fingers on either end
oh you want me to actually show you 12 times sure fine no problem we got this
here we go for those of you wondering i'm using the
same sk hynix ddr4 2933 memory that i
did for the two terabytes of chrome tabs attempt
that we did a little while back
man this is crazy each one of these sticks is
128 gigs of RAM it's nuts
my one regret is that they have green pcbs
i asked once how much does it actually cost to put a black pcb on it and
they're like oh i don't know like a buck i'm like well why don't you just put
black pcbs on all memory and they're like you don't know anything about
commodities do you
might have been two dollars even but the point was that i feel like it matters
for that particular product and there it is
one and a half terabytes of RAM as i'm
closing up the back i wanted to point out that while we are upgrading our ssds
today we can't actually remove and replace apple's
little SSD cards that they've got pre-installed on the machine because
these are tied into the t2 chip on the motherboard and it won't boot unless
they're installed so we can add more storage and we can even boot to and add
in NVMe SSD but it can't be
at the expense of having removed these ones
so they've got to stay in there
oops
there you go
these two kind of lock in together it's a little bit finicky
a little plastic clip broke off from where i don't actually know oh this has
already been glued once did we break it
okay i did it sure i'm not gonna throw anybody else under the bus even if they
did it i did it
guys seriously
man Anthony i gotta stop trusting you with our apple what do you have against
apple why do you break every mac that comes through this door now let's talk
sada there's not a whole lot to this like
really there's not a lot there there's two SATA ports and then that proprietary
power connector that's all you get so if you want to actually install drives you'll need well
an actual freaking drive bay which you will need to buy
separately along with the adapter for that connector so apple just happens to
have one such thing available on their website and we went ahead and picked it
up so it's from promise and yeah there's not a whole lot to this
side it looks a little something like this first
we've got our power adapter that's reasonably elegant so there's
your two SATA data cables your little
weirdo connector there and then over at the other end you've got two of those
handy dandy combo SATA data and SATA powers onto the
enclosure it's actually pretty slick it's the same kind of feel of anodized
aluminum as the rest of the chassis and it's going to match it
absolutely perfectly which i'm sure is not an accident ours came pre-installed
with an eight terabyte surveillance drive for whatever reason from toshiba
no big complaints there it's not a problem they're not bad hard drives it's
just weird and then ah yes this is kind
of cool so all of these screws are pre-installed so all you need to do is
remove these wing nuts in order to expose them if you want to install a second drive and if you don't want to
install a second drive this is pretty slick too
so you go ahead you plug in your one
there we are just like that and you put your second one
just right there so that it doesn't wiggle around inside your case just kind
of clips right into place if you do want to install a second drive
you just remove that screw and then it'll actually pull this plastic bracket
thing off and then you go ahead and plug that into your second drive just like that
pretty handy dandy as with the CPU the whole process
involves shockingly few screws so we just take out this little
piece of placeholder aluminum here that was this written on by hand
somebody put a b on there did we do that
no weird check that out
does that look handwritten brandon yeah it's written in pencil align these slots
just like we saw on the CPU heatsink with these little posts right here
so rather than just screw them in no no ha ha
there's little posts on the back of this spacer here
that sit in there like that and then you put the screws
back in and now it's locked into place
can't fool me with your weird non-standard drive mounting mechanism
easy peasy that ain't going anywhere now we just need to plug these in i could
make my life a little bit easier by removing the i o card there but i
am not going to do that now it's time to really have some fun so before we put
our afterburner card back in which was in
this lot i'm gonna pull out one of these
extremely gorgeous pci slot covers
solid aluminum sort of like
man are these machined out of a single block
man that is overkill anyway anyway sorry sorry sorry just
i'll go ahead and throw an Intel opt-in
SSD in here this way we could run a secondary os
like Windows or something like that without resorting to bootcamp if for
whatever reason that mattered to us then we're going to throw a titan rtx into
this bottom pci express slot now apple has their own approach to auxiliary
power and they use this extension to the pci express slots over here
but because this is just a standard pc card we are going to need
some power cables all right happy with them
a little high that's fine strangely these are not available as an apple
first party accessory but thankfully belkin has a kit already ready to go at
launch so we're gonna go ahead and use that so cable set one PCIe aux power
eight pin to dual six pin nope
cable set two eight pin to six plus two pin
okay that we could use eight pin to six plus two pin six pin to six pin wow and
that's adorable you got your baby eight pin and your daddy eight pin nice and
low profile too so that if you have long cards they can sit over top of them now
we can go ahead and install a real graphics card in here i really do
wish that apple and NVIDIA would bury the hatchet but
i don't think they ever will next time jensen or tim cook does an ama we just
all need to spam them with when are you guys gonna kiss and make up hey look at
that no sag cause it's supported by the other GPU
sweet this looks very out of place in here i'm gonna have to fold these down
here in order to get my afterburner card in i gotta say i do like these supports
here to keep the card stable love that
all right and everything is locked in
isn't that mechanism just gorgeous love or hate apple you gotta just
appreciate some of the little things they do
that slide action it's beautiful all right let's fire this
up oh there we go how long was that that
was like at least three minutes you don't think it was three okay
i don't know it was well over a minute but we're up okay
oh all right one pitfall you got to watch out for
guys if you want to max out the memory in the system is while you're shopping for your CPU make sure you get one that
supports the amount of memory you're installing not all of them can handle
1.5 terabytes of RAM
speaking of things that we can't necessarily handle let's have a look at
our pci cards this is actually really cool so the mac pro
allows you to either automatically or manually
assign your pci express slots to two different pools a
and b to make sure that you don't overdo
the pci express lane allocation within
each pool so if we were to move here watch this if i move them all to a you
can see that i've overdone it and it's unhappy whereas if i go like this look
at that everything is perfectly balanced
absolutely love it i'm going to switch it back to auto mode because we don't really need to do that but it does mean
that all of our pci express devices are showing up and have the correct number
of lanes and we're going to go ahead and initialize our optane
SSD it's showing up as an external SSD do
you have any idea what that would be okay so guys we've got the uh pro
display back there can you see that brandon okay
so i'm gonna have to kind of operate the computer
from here and we're gonna see if we can get an output on this puppy do we know
that this is gonna work has anyone tried this yet microsoft basic display adapter okay so
it definitely does not have drivers NVIDIA control panel went and installed
itself so it looks like Windows grabbed some drivers while i was waiting for
that download and video display settings are not
available hey there it is
nice
uh yeah it is really dim
oops oops what the
okay how do i get to brightness
oh okay well whatever i'm just cranking the brightness i don't care
now that's curious this actually ain't running great
Anthony yeah i think it might be using the
Radeon vega 2 pro duo
turbo etc there we go that's better
still 60 hertz but it's way better
i guess yeah way better that's the theme of today's video this
was a heck of a lot easier than our
previous experience upgrading max if you
guys are looking for another video to watch right now by the way our imac pro
upgrade video series is definitely worth a watch um but yeah this was by
comparison great i mean there's still things that apple could have done better
m.2 slots drive bay included standard that would
have been pretty neat a cooler bracket that's not super weird and proprietary
but still i mean the fact that this is even
possible let alone officially sanctioned by apple as a minor miracle and lets
enthusiast shops get out ahead of the game by getting the kitted out mac they
need for a price they can much more easily afford so
all that's left to say at this point is happy modding ladies and gentlemen
that's an rtx titan gaming on a mac pro
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