Gadgetory

so here's the thing eighteen course if you're a performance fiend is pretty darn good in spite of the iMac pros woefully inadequate cooling but come on Apple is this really the fastest Mac that money can buy yeah Mac Pro I'm glad I asked because in fact no no it is not how do we know because we and by we I mean mostly that guy built the real fastest Mac on the planet for ourselves and it's time for us to take it for a little spin speaking of things I don't want to break this transition to our sponsor private Internet access that's exactly what you'll get with PIAA a safe and protected IP and it's got loads of other features as well check it out at the link in the video description okay so let's begin by going over what we've done here this is our a soos Dominus extreme motherboard and hanging off of it we actually have wait is that two power supplies yeah even though the thousand watts see sonic Prime it's on my bench right now has more than enough wattage to handle all of this yeah the actual load of all these VRMs during power up it's just way too much for trips the protection and I had to put the second power supply on there speaking things we needed to do we needed to go with RGB memory of course right well of course yeah so it's not ECC but it does support it if we wanted it okay and instead it's just six matching sticks of ddr4 3000 which is faster than the 2666 we have in our hi Mac Pro we could go faster but we don't have that many matching sets lying around so you mentioned that we could go with ECC memory and that's because the CUDA grass is that underneath this knocked to AU 14s cooler here is the biggest baddest Xeon w workstation processor on the market the 28 core 56 thread 31 75 X which means that we've actually got a solid 20 more threads on our system than we do on our upgraded iMac Pro and what's more not only do we have more RAM slots than our iMac pro by a factor of two we can also add more modern graphics cards like our Radeon 7 here so just to be clear ties we have crushed the iMac Pro in every possible performance metric but that Radeon 7 does mean that we needed to get the latest version of Mac OS working yeah that was a pain to get running and before I talk about it I just want to stress that this is not a tutorial so first I used Fox let's new Mac OS simple KBM as a jumping-off point after trying a couple of different approaches my including running Linux logical volume arrays with octane acceleration which didn't work I eventually settled on the current set up 27 cores 54 threads 42 gigabytes of RAM and 2 1 terabyte Samsung 970 pros in Apple raid mirror because apparently this wasn't complicated enough for me it was now unfortunately while I wanted to piss that up obtain the reason that didn't work is because the Mac OS installer straight-up refused to boot with opting in that even our SSD 800ps that I tried to use so so just with obtain anywhere in the system the Mac OS installer is just like alright ok then other than that it was pretty much a standard install yeah basically there's some extra setup and some pitfalls with running Apple raid on Mojave but I worked through them and got the latest beta installed they ended up doing direct pass-through of not only the 2 970 pros but also the kawatche a 10 gigabit Nick that's in here and our Radeon seven and all of it just works because it's all got drivers in the hobby all right so I think we've teased you guys enough at this point let's see some benchmarks so why don't we start with a staple Apple benchmark Geekbench for okay so our iMac pro got a very respectable multi-threaded score of over 53,000 but our hackintosh creamed it by over 20,000 points to put that in perspective that's almost as much as adding an entire core I nine MacBook Pro to the mix and when we look at OpenCL and metal performance ok so that's interesting here our Radeon seven worst performance than the Vega 56 in our iMac Pro now given that when we threw the Radeon seven on the iMac Pro we've got similar numbers it looks like aside from yes losing some of our performance thanks to overhead from our hypervisor the Radeon sevens isn't optimized for whatever Geekbench is throwing at it here I mean I guess that's why this version of Mojave is in beta to further investigate then we wanted to fire up another GPU test so let's hit it with lux mark now that's not bad now we've at least doubled our performance over the Vega 56 which is quite impressive considering that the Radeon seven is a 64 CU part and considering that our imac pro gets the same level of performance out of a Radeon 7 when connected via an external enclosure so again this seems to point to driver optimization rather than raw performance now let's change gears here and go ahead and hit our CPU with some good old-fashioned Cinebench three two one go this is not even going to be a fair fight not really no there are so many extra threads on this thing so to be clear we actually gave up a full hyper-threaded core for our host Linux operating system but that still leaves us with a very significant performance advantage compared to the 18 core iMac pro not to mention that our base clock is actually much higher which for a heavily threaded workload like this one makes a huge difference okay we're done nearly 11,000 in Cinebench are 20 and are you even done I just finished 6,800 then we were over a third faster than the fastest computer that Apple sells with Mac OS with that said though if we look at single threaded performance in cinah bench the Achilles heel of our xeon shows up because it's got so many cores intel had to do some careful tuning of the power profiles of this thing and our fastest boost clocks are much lower than the iMac pro's which means that without overclocking we'll always be at a disadvantage in these kinds of single threaded workloads that's a bit of a bummer but hey overclocking on this platform does actually happened to be a thing for now though let's move on to some more testing let's fire up blender and give that a go all right ready set it's so funny so you have to be the one that actually does all the work to build this thing but then when we're like drag racing I get to drive it well I got to drive the faster one last time so that's true you did actually I noticed that it's not actually a competition we're just we're just thrilled this thing works at all it's interesting there's actually not a whole lot of air coming out back here like there is but it's like not super high you say that as though you don't know that's just iMac things yeah but this cooler is a lot better than the iMac is it an aqua okay that would be a fun video Oh cutting open the back of an iMac and just going like full like you know muscle car hood scoop like yep yep is that a video do you guys want to see that anyway in the meantime let's get back to this blender was not a good time for our poor iMac Pro we are just over 40% faster with our hackintosh on both the BMW and classroom test which is actually what's weird is this is better than you'd expect looking at the thread-count alone and again that's our higher base clock in action here finally let's round out our testing with a little bit of handbrake so we fired up a floatplane video here and we're gonna go ahead and use our l TT fast preset let's face it the small head start a head isn't gonna make a difference at the end of it nope so here's the thing even though there's diminishing returns when it comes to h.264 transcoding and adding more course our hackintosh still pulls off a very respectable forty second lead over the imac pro bringing us then to our final test Final Cut Pro now that is the only actual clear loss for our hackintosh today as it turns out final cuts background renderer is not highly threaded and is very bursty that is to say it results in regular spikes of CPU utilization which means then that our iMac pros higher boost clock wins the day by a wide margin and it only adds up as more and more of those spikes have to happen on our Xeon w31 70 X again something we could potentially overcome with some overclocking before we go any further though we need to do something to validate our approach here because in theory you're not losing a ton of performance using virtualization at most you know one to three percent but we don't have any real-world validation of this so what we need to do is shut this down and compare the results that we just got in Mac OS to our bare metal hardware running in Windows and as many cross-platform benchmarks as we can find to see how big the differences unfortunately when we did this testing it was all over the place even with the two extra threads that our bare metal machine has available so on Windows occasionally we're eclipsing our Mac OS score in CPU tests like our handbrake transcode and in Cinebench but then our Windows machine drops off significantly in blender and v-ray which you would think would be very similar benchmarks to Cinebench as for our more GPU focused tests like what's mark well that shows that there is a bit of performance left on the table even with direct pass room although this again could be down to drive your optimization yeah it kind of smells to me like it's a little bit of a scheduler issue in Windows it's something we've seen before so ironically that means our real-world performance is actually better in the VM now to be clear we're not saying that there's magic performance that you get by running your operating system in a virtualized environment in fact quite the contrary it's just that what we've discovered is that unless we run this bare metal hardware as a hackintosh we're not going to be able to quantify the difference in mac OS now I'm not saying that's impossible it's just that part of the reason that we had wanted to do it this way with a VM in the first place was we wanted to avoid the fragmentation of hardware and the way that Apple is constantly updating Mac OS in ways that can brick compatibility now a VM could still have the compatibility bricked but at the very least it's just one set of things to maintain instead of every motherboard on the planet anyway bottom line is this is very experimental right now this is not something that we're recommending that you go do for yourselves unless you've got a ton of time to kill I mean this motherboard has a market segment composed of a few dozen people at best and when Anthony said this was a complicated setup he wasn't kidding I like I'm just gonna let this list of pitfalls and problems scroll by Wow but there is still even more potential here because unlike our iMac Pro we can overclock we can add more memory and if this GPU slot wasn't dead we could even add more than one graphics card to our hackintosh but since support for the Radeon seven is still as a filming in beta we're not gonna press our luck any further than this besides I think we've got enough future plans for this 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