Gadgetory

when we ordered the iMac 2019 for our review we decided that it didn't really matter which graphics card we configured it with if we were willing to upgrade later using Thunderbolt 3 which then got us thinking this is after the review you know the MacBook Pro has Thunderbolt 3 ports too which means that for better for worse both of these machines actually have similar upgrade paths so maybe by evaluating the iMac solely as a desktop we missed out on another viable option I mean if you're giving up a lot of the traditional benefits of a desktop anyway given that both of these are running high-end core i9 processors are you better off with an iMac or a macbook well there's only one way for us to find out by sitting through this belabored segue to the message from our sponsor glass wire with glass wire you can instantly see your current and past network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device use offer code Linus to get 25% off glass wire at the link below so the first thing we'll need to give little Mack here a fighting chance against King Hippo is a graphics card now unfortunately NVIDIA is still in talks with Apple to get official GeForce support under Mac OS but it's not all bad news the Radeon 7 which we're gonna connect up via a razor core v2 enclosure is still significantly more powerful than the top end GPU configurations for either of these machines and armed with the beta of Apple's Mac OS moment and 14.5 we and by we I of course mean Anthony should be able to get it working now while Anthony is setting that up I want to answer the burning question that I'm sure is on everyone's mind right now these two computers here are fundamentally very very different so why compare them at all and that is a good point except for a few things one is that they're both actually aimed at a really similar market segment namely graphics artists and professionals thanks to their high resolution wide gamut dcpip 3 displays number 2 in both cases our bang for the buck recommended config includes a dedicated AMD GPU a radio on pro 560 ex in the case of the MacBook and a Radeon Pro 580 X in our iMac finally number 3 they both suffer from thermal constraints that affect their peak performance in ways that you can't easily read off of a spec sheet so what we want to know then is if they have similar purposes and design goals well which one of them should we choose a MacBook Pro with some upgrades and I don't know maybe a secondary display or something like that or an iMac which is running faster dedicated graphics and of course a larger monitor in the first place furthermore how did the costs pan out and is the mobile processor bottleneck going to cause real performance problems for professional work so what do you think well I think for compute we're probably looking at a much faster experience with the MacBook Pro just as a result of the much faster Radeon seven the imac has two more much faster cores so depending on how they thermal throttle it might be a wash or it might be a win for either of them really before we do that though we're gonna do a quick Cinebench run to get a baseline for the cpu performance it's worth noting too though that our iMac isn't equipped with the fastest GPU that it could have had the thing though is that paying for that upgrade to Vega 56 or something yeah I think I pro 56 yeah paying for that upgrade would have gotten us half of the way to a much faster external Radeon 7ne way so we just didn't think it made sense so I'm looking at somewhere in the 4100 range and whoof yeah 2340 on the MacBook Pro okay so as expected more cores is more better in a heavily multi-threaded workload and furthermore our MacBook Pro thermal throttled considerably harder than our iMac which widened even our anticipated performance difference but of note is the fact that a single threaded score between these two machines isn't that far off and often your single threaded performance is more important for light tasks like web browsing application launching and generally use yeah on that subject actually I also ran black magics disk speed benchmark and while it's not a great test since it only looks at sequential speeds it appears that Apple is using a similar class of SSD on both of these machines which probably contributes to the fact that I didn't really notice any chugging between them that being said the iMac is equipped with a fusion drive which is spitting rust along with the SSD meaning that after a certain period of time the caching stops and it becomes slow and that's kind of the thing about Mac OS isn't it for all its shortcomings it's really well optimized and most need a heavy load in order to tell the difference between one decently equipped Mac and another so with that in mind we're gonna go full opposite end of the spectrum and hit our machines with lux mark a GPU dependent 3d rendering benchmark and this is where things get really interesting so right out of the box with no upgrades to either machine there is a clear performance advantage for our desktop I mean we're talking double the horses here and $400 cheaper but that's not to say that if you ran out and buy yourself a MacBook Pro you are plumb out of luck if you can afford the graphics card upgrade it can inject a lot of fight into your portable machine so with the Radeon seven in tow our core i9 equipped model managed anywhere from three to even four times the performance of our all-in-one desktop it's worth noting though when our iMac is similarly kitted out with the Radeon seven it actually does a much better job of combining the power of both the onboard and external graphics which allows it to keep the performance advantage I'll be it a much smaller one next let's take a look at video editing Adobe Premiere whether it's related to the external nature of our graphics card or the beta version of Mac OS that we're running didn't actually benefit from our Radeon 7gp you upgrade so we had to pull it off which means that we're looking at a twenty to twenty-five percent performance difference in export times with what I would describe as pretty darn similar on timeline scrubbing performance and this is with pretty heavy footage but I think you can go a little bit worse this is only twenty to one footage if I recall correctly is that right Brendan yeah as for Final Cut let's go ahead and fire that up this is a tricky one to benchmark because Apple has a really cool feature that pretty much renders your video ahead of time in the background while you are cutting it together and this avoids the traditional long way times while your finished project exports what we can do though is we can cancel delete our rendering cache and then start off the rendering process manually as well as look at our timeline performance while doing the render cuz I've attached for looks to each of these yeah so it should be pretty so yeah it's it's smooth it's nothing over I'm getting really quick previews what's yours like I don't think I'm actually faster than you that actually does look a touch faster but I've got the fusion drive and these are large files that's true so that could be affecting me they're interesting also interesting when we actually did benchmark our renders we found that the iMac was about twice as fast as the MacBook Pro even with the external GPU so this seems to be pretty much purely dependent on multi-threaded CPU performance finally one more heavy thing that Macs are used to are pretty often these days is for programming work so I've taken the liberty of downloading the Mozilla Firefox source code onto both of these machines so we can put them head-to-head and see just how much of a practical difference those two extra cores on the iMac can make one thing that I had wanted to do was gather results on Windows for both machines but getting an external GPU running under my hobby's boot camp requires a quite a bit of extra setup and I'm not even sure if it'll work at all with at2 enabled Mac like our MacBook Pro right so there's no t2 in the new Mac yeah so that's a point in the I max favor in my opinion you lose the hardware encryption and secure Enclave features that Apple touts as benefits but you gain the ability to run Linux and you stand a much better chance of recovering your data in the event of a hard drive or a logic board failure it's kind of important when your machine is constantly overheating so since we've actually run this before and this is just movie magic I guess we've got enough data to draw our conclusion then add a price difference of about $400 between our core i9 equipped MacBook Pro over here and our eight core iMac 2019 it's clear you are definitely paying a mobility tax with the laptop you get two fewer and overall much slower course you're getting a weaker include GPU and obviously you're getting a smaller display furthermore if you were gonna buy the external GPU anyway the extra spend of about $1,000 for a Radeon seven plus an enclosure is less likely to be bottlenecked by the more powerful CPU in the iMac and at this time anyway it also happens to team up more cooperatively with the graphics cores it already has but and it's a big but the iMac isn't portable and if you need something that is then from our testing you're actually still getting a lot of bang with our tricked-out macbook pro so if you need a laptop anyway then compared to the prospect of buying a laptop and an additional desktop an external GPU upgrade looks like a great way to close the gap since it's a lot cheaper than even the entry-level iMac by the way guys just one last note we did it but to be clear we're not actually recommending running beta versions of your operating system on a machine that you use for professional apps those crashes are going to get you when you least expect it and for Anthony this video was quite a lot of hassle to get done what's not a lot of hassle though is our sponsor 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