Gadgetory

every so often and I hate to admit it even I run into some kind of an issue where the only viable solution is to use a Mac in my case it was that I was trying to work on a review of this archival tape storage backup system and the Windows software experience was to put it as politically correctly as I can awful so my solution some kind of Mac machine with 10 gigabit networking and getting that going on the MacBook Pro wasn't gonna be a thing because even though I found a network card with literally the exact same chipset that is in the iMac Pro and plugged it into an external enclosure Nach OS just wouldn't pick it up because whatever you Linus so I dug the iMac Pro boat and then I went alright the whole reason we were opening this stupid thing up in the first place was that I fix it sponsored us to do a video on how to upgrade it so I guess that's what we're gonna do we're gonna go from 8 cores and 32 gigs of ram to theoretically a hundred and twenty eight gigs of ram and 18 cores all while saving $1,000 sounds pretty good right let's hope it works oh you cut audio as well I did not cut out um but he did cut the audio so it's not gonna sound very good sorry about that step one of any upgrade is to run some benchmarks to establish a baseline okay it's done all right so this gives us some idea of where we're starting here's our 32 gigs of ram we've got as yon w 21 4 TB so this is fairly similar although not exactly the same as the 21:45 that's worth about $1,100 so our base imac pro upgraded compared to buying a top-of-the-line model from apple in the first place gives us a difference of about two hundred and fifty dollars and we're still gonna have an eight core processor and 32 gigs around to flip on Craigslist we'll be using our iFixit kit along with one of their guides to complete our upgrade starting with cutting the adhesive around the edge of the display and disconnecting the three ribbon cables before carefully putting it aside and all without breaking it take not after me that's okay he knows what he did first order of business is we remove the fan you just need to turn them counterclockwise until they start making that noise and they're gonna be retained by the little rubber washers that are in there now there's two little connectors here one right there one right there those power of the fans you can just pull these out be very careful around this power supply no touchy you could actually die next we're gonna pull out Apple is excellent what I find hard and we're gonna stash those screws along with this handy-dandy little shield right about there is that it now all we got to do is pull some of these other cables out and they're covers and we can go ahead and pull this board out and all these little antenna connectors these guys are gonna come off - these are really fragile RF shield or something no no no that's getting in my way I don't I could make my life easier by making it temporarily much harder it's old its peak bro it's kind of new as I say not as I do moment we're having right now high boards out and I didn't get that so now that we've got this opened up for our upgrade we can talk about what exactly in the iMac pro is upgradeable because frankly it's not much over the years Apple has gone from with the original Mac Pro being very upgradable PCI Express cards CPUs GPUs RAM storage pretty much everything just like the normal Tower to the new Mac Pro the trashcan Mac Pro that theoretically had upgradable GPUs but I don't know if they ever actually followed up with anything newer pad upgradeable ran and had upgradeable CPU and storage if you were willing to put a lot of work into it to this iMac Pro we're even so the GPU is actually baked right into the motherboard here so that's where our Vega 56 is so that will not be upgradeable to the storage so the storage theoretically can be pulled off and replaced but because of this t 2 encryption chip is actually tied into the motherboard in such a way that if you swap them out it wouldn't work and pretty much only the CPU and RAM are upgradable and I mean the CPU is even a theoretical one I don't know if anyone has actually done a CPU swap on it yet it's possible that they've even locked out the BIOS so I'm not a hundred percent certain if that aspect of this upgrade is going to work so let's find out shall we we have to take off these stickers here that were the problem and the reason that Apple refused to give us their replacement pricing on the logic board so technically it's not that they're denying us warranty service but they were definitely treating us differently whether it is legal for them to treat us differently because of a sticker having been broken or not is something that is very much an ongoing debate and something that if you're done in the US you should probably contact your local congressman old representative about so there's eight screws that we're gonna have to pull off wow there's a lot of tension on those mounds I'm having fun you never fun oh yeah good times it was right metal on PCB how interesting so you might not think that we'd have to remove the screws from the GPU here but the reason that we do is actually because the entire cooling unit is one piece so it's connected by heat pipes between both CPU and GPU to these metal cooling fins here holy crap okay I did not see that one coming what the heck Apple so they don't use the retention mechanism for the CPU that is normally part of the socket design I guess to save some space on the board which means that when you take the heatsink off just shoot Rip's the CPU right out of the board fortunately that came out clean so I don't think we're gonna run into any trouble and Apple expects even their authorized service providers to get boards with CPUs ran and SSDs pre-installed on them as a single unit even though they are socketed and they are not soldered so I guess this isn't supposed to be a problem for the end user but I'm still not a fan of designs like this the thermal paste it pulls the CPU out of the socket what good guy kidding anyway enough about that this is upgrade guide not complain about the process guide so right here around the CPU socket area is pretty much everything we can do so we're gonna pull out our eight gig sticks of RAM so we're gonna be careful here not to have them pop out of the slot because if they did they could accidentally bend the pins in the CPU socket then we're gonna go ahead and take our 18 cores currently Intel's highest end workstation chip there we go so they haven't done anything funky with the spec of the socket just goes in a little something like that now we get to crack open the seals on two grand worth of memory look at all the do you RAM packages on this thing find that bad boy up one foois the only thing I regret is using a green PCB so now we get to Pipitea pop our cooling solution back on I'm gonna have to I'm probably just gonna reuse the thermal compound for the GPU but this CPU situation might need a little bit of help I gotta like pry this baby out of here oh okay well I was easier than it looked like it was going to be ready so we're gonna put on some new thermal compound here what just pop that on just like that oh oh okay we made one small mistake we're gonna have to put in these two RAM sticks afterward hey don't blame me you guys subscribed to this mess pop that back in there alright let's go ahead and turn this over I'll get that bolted down now with our upgrades done we're gonna flip the machine back over now it is really important because of the way that CPU is just gonna pop out of the socket if we move the heat pipe cooler we're gonna make sure we hold that in place oh boy oh boy yep hold that in place against the board oh good our CPU didn't pop up then we're gonna go ahead and put our mounting bracket on the back back on now this is a little bit tricky here because there are two different kinds of screws you need to make sure you put the right ones in the right holes so the ones with the kind of built-in standoff on them those go the orientation we were looking at the board here top left and bottom right ones with the much shorter posts those go top right bottom left if you screw this up best-case scenario you've got kind of wonky mounting pressure worst case scenario you will damage your board boy this is a lot more pressure and I'm comfortable putting on a motherboard I hate these mounts okay go on yes now the GPU is not nearly as scary because there's no pins that you can accidentally rip the CPU out of and then accidentally put it in sideways and mangle them up or anything oh by the way I'm sorry off-camera I did wipe the thermal compound off the GPU and I did reapply but I'm not gonna pull this back off to show you guys that so to put our GPU cooler back on see these little cutouts right here so just look at these two holes here and then the shape of the components underneath them and you won't be able to screw up which one goes which way in this case all the screws are the same so we just go ahead and position these bad boys and then screw em down once again applying far more pressure than I am super comfortable with yeah beautiful that is our upgraded logic board and they said it couldn't be done now to put it together and find out if it works one thing we're gonna do to make our lives a little bit easier compared to when Lewis and I did this is we're gonna pull out the speaker's put those back in after we've installed the logic board there we go actually that should be fine all right one of the keys at this stage is making sure that you don't accidentally cover up some of the connectors that you're going to need to plug back into your motherboard now the last thing we want to do is accidentally scratch the PCB with one of these standoffs here while we're inserting the board this is one nice thing about the design they've got this rubber stopper here so you can't let it fall down anything now let's go around and do our motherboard screws I'm gonna arbitrarily pick this one to start with I want those as centered as possible because it can affect the alignment of your rear ports if you don't have the board in perfectly we're gonna need to lift up this side of the board here a little bit perfect I'm gonna do these power ones now there we go Oh beautiful okay one little trick guys this speaker connector right here has this little loop here so we're gonna go ahead and put that on just partway we're gonna plug it in shoot then we're gonna tighten it down while we're at it we can start connecting some of the back rub in cables go alright we're gonna check our rear port alignment at this point looking pretty slick alright now we're gonna throw in our other two power screws tighten those up you don't want to lose connection here there we go and we can start connecting the rest of the connectors on the back of our board okay we can go ahead and put our speaker back in at this point to house that cable managed feeling good now now we're gonna hook up all the antennas these are really fragile connectors please be careful now we're just gonna stick this shield into its little cable management slot here there we go it should sit on kind of a little hinge like that then we're gonna adjust these antenna wires and screw it in now this motherboard mounting screw we're gonna have to take out temporarily we're gonna put this little shield in place screw it back in part way screw in the other side being very careful not to drop it I'm doing all of the work we just did and we can go ahead and tighten down our motherboard screw all right now we're gonna throw the speakers in and we are almost home free where did this go yep now we've got a somewhat obnoxious task ahead of us because the display is glued on it means we've got to remove all of the old adhesive so this will take a little while dumb alcohol in there - all right so now that that's all off let stretch up my arm a little bit here all that is left is for us to put on new adhesive strips and put on the screen be really careful with these you don't get two cracks at them so you can see they got this little hole up here for alignment or whatever it's for nailed that one next these last two along the bottom are the trickiest just because this kit was designed as far as I can tell with the original retina iMac in mind and there might be just some slight ever so slight differences so you're gonna have like this little tab doodad here that kind of doesn't really go anywhere it's not a big deal I don't know maybe it goes along this thing here that really doesn't matter there boom minor detail guess I better put the cooler back in hello well and also these two screws right there now the trickiest part removing the adhesive strips putting the display back on we're gonna put on these three cables first though Apple's gonna be watching this video they're gonna be like we want to recruit - to be an Apple authorized service provider looks like it goes right there yep and then the latch down boom looks like that one went in super easy miss Kay Boop never a problem no no this is not attached this is very scary but I want to know if this thing powers on before I waste my adhesive and an hour of my life peeling it all back off and reapplying it again so let's go ahead and get this plugged in and see how she goes there we go ha okay Jesus had me going for a minute there I don't use Mac's much I don't know how long they take - good huh whatever let's get this keyboard mouse up let's see how much performance we got well now we're not out of the woods yet there is a distinct possibility that some of our stuff might not have been detected so okay nevermind that ruins the the suspense and anticipation because there it is Intel Xeon w21 95 that's our 18 core processor with 128 gigs of DDR 4 memories so let's run our benchmark shall we so a quick google search online tells me it should be in the neighborhood of 50,000 come on show me the big score there it is so we just crushed our old performance we are right up there with the regular factory Apple iMac Pro with the 18 core but we saved ourselves a bunch of money and of course the expense of our time fantastic this thing is now officially tricked right out and of course this video wouldn't have been possible without iFixit sponsoring it so a massive thank you to iFixit for sponsoring this video sending over the ram upgrade sending over the adhesive strips their tool kit that was perfect had everything we needed in it you guys can check out ifixit.com they've got tons of great guides as well as of course their comprehensive lineup of tools replacement parts and all that good stuff at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video 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