Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The 2020 Mac Pro: A Silent Killer!”.
Hey what’s up guys mkbhd here, and this is the new, the newest 2020 cheese, grater mac pro there’s a lot of things that i could say about this from the couple months that i’ve been using it, but mainly they boil down to three main things: one. It’S extremely well made to the point of like over engineered, almost two, it’s modular. Finally, and three: it’s really fast now my typical review video for a piece of tech. That’S really good ends with something like it’s really good. You should buy it, but with this, even though it’s quite good, it’s more along the lines of you probably shouldn’t buy it most. People will never need this, but i’m really glad they made it.
So this, of course, is the newest highest end mac ever made and the max price that you can pay, for. It also makes it the most expensive mac ever made, and you might remember everyone had a good time with their headlines with that, but it’s more than just that. It’S the highest end and most modular tower computer apple’s made in years, and that’s something that people like me were waiting very patiently a very long time for so everything about the design of the mac pro – and i mean everything from the inside out – is really well Done but like to the point of over engineered like it’s, it’s unnecessary, it’s the most over engineered, desktop tower i’ve ever seen, and most of this over engineering is in the name of aesthetics and noise.
So you might remember apple sort of showed the world how much they really care about aesthetics and noise when they tried to make the last mac pro a tiny cylinder on your desk cooled entirely by one big fan at the top. But that didn’t go so well. So while they are now finally back to making the modular tower form fact that we were waiting for, that, did not stop them from making possibly the cleanest quietest desktop computer possible like the cheese, greater design with the holes up front and the mesh piece behind it. It is weird looking to the point where it’s like unmistakable, you know kind of like some other apple products this year, but it’s also an airflow design as much as anything you see the entire mac pro when you take the shell off and look inside is designed To be passively air cooled there isn’t much of fans on any of the internal components.
There’S no liquid cooling there’s just three huge blowers at the front, one here back near the rear and a bunch of heat pipes on everything. So the entire chassis is designed to pass as much air flow through the system as possible to cool everything. But airflow is not quiet and even you know, fans like these are not typically quiet by themselves and if you have all three fans like this spinning at the same rate, they sort of amplify each other and make this whine.
That you’ll probably hear now a lot of pcs do this, and this is fine, but apple, decided to make this computer quieter. They’D spin each of the fans at a slightly different rate, so that they wouldn’t all match. But even when you do that, you sometimes end up with harmonics that sort of amplify some of the sounds and still make it audible. So apple’s fan controller literally modulates the speed of each one of these fans and ramps them up and down so that they never match and are never study so that you never hear it and it works. Another thing you might notice when the system is open, is well number one. You can’t open the mac pro unless you unplug everything from the back, including power which is kind of annoying, but i guess not a huge deal anyway. You get it open and you don’t see any cables. There is not one single exposed, cable anywhere in the mac pro as you get it from apple now, there’s headers to plug stuff in if you want, but all the first party stuff just plugs right in with strategically placed pins. So, in apple’s ideal world everything everyone makes is compatible as mpx modules and they just slide in just like theirs keeping the world clean, matte, black and easily modular.
The only tool you need to do most of the adjustments inside is a single phillips, head, screwdriver and then to take stuff out. You unlock this big sliding full height pci slot, lock that they didn’t have to do, but they did and it’s sweet and they labeled everything. So if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing they’ve numbered the parts in the order that you should remove them to have everything slide in and out easily, so one is the thumb screws on the side. Don’T need a screwdriver for those you can just literally unscrew them to take off the bracket. Two is the bridge between the modules. So, if you have more than one, this just needs one screw you just pop it straight off.
Three is the screws. On the other side – and you can see they’re still connected to the bracket with a spring, so they’re not loose screws, so you can’t lose them without losing the whole bracket and you get that off and then the last step is the very satisfying lever to pull Out of the pci slot, and then your mpx module is free. Now these mpx modules inside also have no fans in them, which means they’re, passively air cooled and they rely very heavily on the airflow going through those front three fans and the heat sinks, and that has its pros and cons. The pro being.
No extra fans means no extra noise, but they also tend to be thicker than most normal parts, because the huge heat sinks are bigger than just putting in more fans. I mean look at the size of this gpu versus a typical high-end graphics card, but hey that’s. What they’ve built it around and they’ve even labeled the underside of the ram cover for instructions on where to seat your memory, depending on how many sticks you have so you can take best advantage of this multi-channel memory, we’re working with here a lot of this stuff. They just straight up, didn’t have to do so. They’Ve clearly paid a lot of attention to fit and finish so how about performance? Because that’s why you get a computer like this at the core and for me it’s been excellent, noticeably better for me even than the maxed out 18 core 12 000 imac pro that i came from before i was using this now here are my mac pros specs? So the machine that i’ve been editing on these last two videos you’ve been watching we’re made with and if you check through those options on apple’s site, you will see that i’ve given apple north of 40, 000 of my own dollars for a computer, so yeah christ. It should perform a lot better than any imac or any all-in-one ever now again, most people will never need parts like this.
I am a final cut pro editor, that’s my pro level workflow, that’s why i need the speed and power of these pieces, and for that it has been incredible, as i’ve noted with workflow examples in the past, and i think animators maybe high-end photographers can take advantage Of the power of the mac pro, but if most people watching this, you know video makers youtubers. Even if it’s not 4k, you don’t even need a base. Mac pro so just know that we have a couple other mac pros in the studio and the one that i’m using. Those are my specs, but we’ve tested a bunch of different ones.
I won’t bore you with the benchmarks. If you want a proper benchmark filled video with comparisons, i will link linus tech tips, his video, he did a great job and you should check that out for his mac pro review. This thing is clearly powerful. It is definitely not more than i can ever use, though it’s not invincible.
For all intents and purposes, i have a maxed out mac pro aside from the 768 gigs of ram um, which could be doubled. But essentially this is the best computer apple’s ever made and you can still watch it crawl to a halt. All you got to do is shoot an 8k red clip at a low compression ratio.
Maybe something like five to one then import it onto any large timeline. 4K or 8k suit yourself set playback to high quality press play and then observe, as the mac pro slowly starts to choke drop frames and become unusable. You can imagine, though, how like a macbook pro or an imac or imac pro would have handled that even worse, but i want to talk about that after burner card for a minute, though, because that to me is really interesting. So apple made a two thousand dollar pci decoder card that essentially just decodes, prores and prores raw, so photographers, don’t need it at all.
Coders anyone making apps developing, don’t need it, even if you edit in any other codec other than prores or prores raw. You will not benefit at all from an afterburner card, but if you do edit prores, it will decode those streams and let you effortlessly play back tons of high-res video streams. I think they’ve said up to 23 consecutive streams of 4k or 6 8k videos. At the same time, while it’s basically taking that load off of the cpu, but i don’t edit prores, i edit red code raw, so why did i get an afterburner card? Well, this afterburner card built around fpga is reprogrammable, meaning apple and red can work together to enable this afterburner to accelerate redcode playback and rumor is this is something that’s already in the works uh now i don’t have any proof on my end or any updates that Show that integration has come to fruition yet, but the potential is definitely there for even bigger video games and that potential exists for other codecs too canon raw re-raw. Whatever other stuff, you might be, shooting that’s, not prores.
Yet that may eventually be optimized for the metal and give you huge performance so maybe someday in the future. I will be able to play back five to one 8k red code and it’ll just seamlessly butter through it at high quality so overall to wrap up the mac pro. Let me put it this way: it’s not just that the mac pro is a really expensive computer. It’S more that apple chose to make a very, very expensive machine in the mac pro. Does that make sense like tons and tons of the choices they’ve made in this computer would not be found, or even noticed in many other desktop computers.
The completely cableless interior of the system, pretty sweet, but totally unnecessary. The crazy fan control the the pci lock. That’S really satisfying the system for the mpx modules.
The fact that every button in this mac pro is made of metal instead of plastic and there’s pins for them, every single little thing is carefully considered and taken to the max. So those other desktop computers are for most people, which is nice, but apple, decided to make the computer that took no shortcuts and took it to the max with premium things like build, quality and and performance. So i’m happy they did that because i’m in the very, very small sliver of the demographic, where that’s exactly what i’m looking for the downside is apple, just straight up, doesn’t make a thousand dollar modular desktop tower, like that’s, not a downside of the mac pro. That’S a downside of apple, that’s just a product, they don’t make.
There’S a ton of products i wish apple would make that they just straight up. Don’T i wish they would make like a mirrorless camera, because i already make some of the best smartphone cameras out there, but they just don’t make a camera desktop speakers, computer speakers. They don’t make that a multi-device wireless charger.
They don’t make that either. So add that to the list like 900 to 1200 tower, that’s modular apple just doesn’t make that either, but they do make this a silent killer and i’m really happy with it. And i’m really looking forward to it lasting me.
Hopefully, a decade and getting better over time. So that’s been it thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace also apple, the the 400 wheels they’re great, but they they really need locks. .