Gadgetory

there's a lot to unpack after Apple's WWDC 2019 keynote but the biggest one for us was obviously the new Mac Pro now it's not often that Apple admits they were wrong but that's essentially what happened yesterday after five long years of waiting for professional users who simply weren't happy with the trashcan so let's take a closer look at it and see if we should be excited or if we should stay far far away you know what you shouldn't stay far away from our sponsor I fix it ever wonder why you're always missing a screw when you put something back together I fix this magnetic project Matt will keep you organized and keep your screws in place check it out at the link below so right out of the great there's a bunch of well great things sorry I'll stop that now about the new Mac Pro that I really have to give Apple credit for first up is their use of a mostly standard and even more importantly reconfigurable tower design according to apples figures it's got a ton of cooling capacity it's extremely easy to open and open it you will because it's also got a ton of expandability that's right count them my friends that is 8 PCI Express x16 slots with four of them being double width and it's also got 12 RAM slots supporting up to one and a half terabytes of six channel ddr4 memory and on top of the seriously impressive amount of internal expansion you get a pair of front Thunderbolt three ports with more of those on the back as well as dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet network ports whoo but let's slow down for a second and break it down a bit starting with the cooling both the CPU and the GPU coolers are passive in this design meaning that Apple is relying on direct airflow from the three chassis fans at the front of the tower now that's kind of unorthodox but it's also not unexpected after apples emphasis on decoupling their active coolers and their passive heat sinks on the trashcan Mac Pro's and if it works then well that's really cool the only rub that we have right now is that there's no mention anywhere of filtration which means that if there isn't any and so far Apple does not have a great track record for this dust is gonna get sucked in and it's gonna settle on the components over time hurting cooling making matters worse it's impossible to tell right now how good of a seal is made with the outer fascia so the sides might also be a point of ingress for dust and debris as well as potential sources of noise escaping the chassis with that said the ease of opening the new Mac Pro we'll make it a much more trivial task to clean compared to traditional Apple products so all this might end up being a total non-issue on the subject of opening it up let's talk about the expansion slots the only really obvious gotcha here is that the topmost slot is limited in length by the CPU cooler but if you dig a little deeper you will find some more with the Radeon Pro Vega to GPU option the passive cooler or coolers you can have up to two of those are so large that they obstruct their adjacent PCIe slots in spite of the double spacing so that's gonna drop you down to six or four other available slots depending on your config so there is another compromising utility for the sake of keeping all of the internal cooling passive it's not all bad though because those same Apple stock GPUs come on a new extended PCIe slot design that they're calling Mac Pro expansion or MPX for short it's basically like two PCI Express slots lined up right next to each other now the front of the slot the PCIe 16x part hasn't been modified so you can actually install anything that you want in there but that raises the question what's the rest of it for so apparently it's for power delivery that means up to a total of 500 watts per card with no messy cabling and routing DisplayPort connections to the internal thunderbolt ports now something that's nice is that if you'd rather install a non apple card there are actually auxiliary eight pin PCI Express power cables which give you up to 375 watts per slot just like a normal PC honestly that's pretty thoughtful of Apple even though they still haven't made nice with NVIDIA something that might have saved them the trouble of engineering an FPGA to accelerate video decoding you know just pop in RTX in there right anyway until that happens the afterburner card will actually handle offloading up to three 8k ProRes Ross dreams or 12 4k ones from the CPU so in fairness to Apple that is pretty sick but we'd still really like to see them get on patching things up with Nvidia because as nice as those dual Vega 2 options are they're not comparable to Titans or quad rose or are they actually there's a huge amount of capability here and we're pretty excited about these GPUs because a couple of them combined with AMD's ultra-fast infinity fabric offer nearly as much bandwidth as nvidia zen d-link as we've seen on their r-tx series of GPUs and since there are no multi-gpu single r-tx boards available right now and envy link can currently only combine to workstation cards that means that the dual vega 2 cards if you have two of them with a total of 4 32 gig frame buffers are the only way to achieve the massive 128 gigs of combined vram that Apple has assembled here so for professional rendering or animation workloads while an artist could throw for Titan r-tx cards or for quadrant II x8 thousands they still wouldn't have as much combined memory making the upcoming Mac Pro the only non enterprise solution for working on positively massive scenes in professional rendering or huge data sets for DP GPU tasks and much more than that oh and all of this is with HP m2 memory for even faster access times than GDD are 6 like I'm really looking forward to seeing the numbers for these monsters not that I'm sure which monster exactly to order Apple spec sheet for the new Mac Pro also has a lot to unpack because it's pretty weird and we're not sure how to interpret some of it so first up is the four memory sticks on the 32 gig spec machine is that because they're just gonna leave a couple slots empty and you can fill them yourself or is it something else are they using multiple motherboards for the Mac Pro with LGA 3647 on the high end with six channel memory and then LGA 2066 with quad channel memory on the lower end actually for that matter why even have a low end why do they need the 16 core and below skews as long as the iMac Pro exists or even just I don't know at all by the time you're spending that much money why would you do that it's probably the second most perplexing thing about this whole announcement is the base model with its eight core 60 and thread CPU that I guess would be some kind of variant of a xeon w21 45 ish which is far from a professional level cpu in the face of consumer chips that have that many cores running at much higher clock speeds it's one of those scenarios where the only real advantage to this pro product is ECC memory support and avx-512 instruction set support which I guess also brings me to I wonder why Apple didn't leverage their relationship with AMD for access to their thread Ripper or epic lineup of CPUs instead it could be that there's an exclusivity agreement or it also could be that they've just had this design in the works for so long that thread Ripper wasn't a feasible option yet it's hard to say right now but we would like to find out for you guys before we work on our review later this year for now let's change gears from the Mac Pro to the accompanying new Pro display XDR this thing is an absolute beast I guess at $5,000 it better be but man it ticks all the boxes short of high refresh rate we've got 6k resolution 10-bit color factory calibration proofing modes in standard def HD p3 HDR srgb and more 1,000 it's sustained brightness with a peak of 1600 nits I mean guys this monitor for pro work yes and it's just over an inch thick with a nine millimeter bezel yeah that's a bit thick but like guys you're also getting three USB type-c ports and a magnetic latch mount for the pro stand or a vase amount which are both sold separately this is I don't think I'm the only one who feels like at five thousand dollars for this display Apple shouldn't be NIC lling and dining like this the Beast amount adapter will be $1.99 and the pro stand $9.99 and like the Mac Pro they'll all be available in this in the fall though in fairness it's not really nickels and dimes we're talking about here the monitor doesn't seem to come with a stand at all and the prost end is a whopping $1,000 for a stand thank goodness it includes the cleaning cloth because lord only knows what they'd want for that I guess this leaves us pretty well into the other thing that I've got to address apples had this pattern for a while now but their computers actually aren't all that expensive compared to piecing together the exact same spec list for yourself yeah you might not make the same hardware choices so there's definitely ways that you can save a buck compared to buying a Mac but all things considered most base model Mac's to say nothing of the high cost for upgrades haven't been that big of a ripoff well I wish I could say the same thing here but unfortunately from what I can tell apples decided to throw that informal tradition to the wind this time around and charge an extortion eight six thousand dollars for the base level Mac Pro now that wouldn't be a problem if it had the horses to back it up but just to recap that $6000 mac pro is an eight-core 16 thread cpu a pedestrian 32 gigs of ram a 256 gig SSD what year is it and a Radeon 580 X sorry I think it's a Radeon pro 580 X isn't it ok sorry excuse me even so we can do some paper math here so Z on W 21:45 for 8 gig sticks of ECC memory high gig 256 giving nvme SSD but we're looking at about $3,200 all in so is a system bristling with Thunderbolt 3 ports and running Mac OS worth nearly a $3,000 markup let's put this into perspective this is Apple's most expensive Mac Pro ever the g5 started at 2 grand the 2009 Mac Pro is 2,300 and the trash can started at $3,000 even adjusting for inflation it's nearly double the price I mean maybe Apple needs to make back there rd no definitely Apple needs to make back their R&D but part of me wonders if they just cynically think that the people who want these are gonna buy them at any price anyway I hope for apples sake that they're right since given their usual upgrade pricing the top spec one is unlikely to be a better value option so the baseline price for a Mac Pro setup with the pro display XDR is going to be $11,000 12,000 for your display so we're gonna buy one but it won't be until we've spent some time with it that we can draw any sort of conclusion about whether it's actually worth the price we do have some guesses though speaking of guesses you probably guessed this was coming our segue to our sponsor Squarespace we use Squarespace no joke we actually use it both our Linus media group calm and LTX Expo 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