I'm SHOCKED! $11,000 Mac Pro vs $11,000 PC!

The Mac Pro is basically the equivalent of lighting your money on fire and then shitting on the remains. Do you really expect us to be spending 50K plus for an overpriced calculator? Mac computer. We think of Apple today as an overpriced pile of ---- with less and less features every time. Then make a new phone and they add $100 more to the price. Yeah, look, Apple often gets dragged through the mud for overpricing their products, and I think a lot of the time it's fair. In the case of Mac Pro, spec for spec, its base model is an abysmal value at $6,000. Now, many staunch Apple fans will defend the high admission price of Apple's pro product lineup, stating that, oh, well, they're workstation grade. They're for professionals. But that's bupkis. Certainly when compared to other workstation PC competition, but even from within Apple's own lineup. Take, for example, the base model iMac Pro that also has an eight core Xeon chip. One that performs better, by the way. A significantly more performant GPU, four times the amount of storage, a gorgeous 5K display, which costs $1,300 by itself. And the iMac Pro still manages to underprice Mac Pro by $1,000, often more as it goes on sale frequently. So to fight with the, but it's a workstation fanboys, my Mac Pro shipped with a Radeon Pro 580X GPU, which is not a workstation card. It only has eight gigs of GDDR5 memory. It has a near identical board layout as the consumer RX 580 with the same die and an equal number of CUs. So what makes the Mac Pro's base 580X GPU pro over the consumer RX 580? Small driver tweaks. That's it. In fact, even in real world pro benchmarks, my gaming focused RX 580, which can be had today for less than $150, was every bit as reliable and actually marginally faster than Apple's pro workstation card. The CPU story is much the same. It's an eight core Xeon that has been crippled by Intel, only supporting RAM frequencies of 2666 megahertz, despite Apple shipping all Mac Pro models with more expensive 2933 megahertz memory. Why? Well, because the rest of the Cascade Lake Xeon chip support that, but not the eight core. Now, Intel does this because they justify its high price thanks to the AVX 512 instruction set support. Which many pros don't even think is important and allegedly brings this feeble eight core chip to its knees when enabled. It's clear most of the $6,000 Mac Pro is going to not those components. It's going to the case and custom parts tooling and the 1,280 watt power supply. The massive motherboard with a bunch of bells and whistles like eight PCIe slots, a PLX for PCIe lane switching, a removable I.O. card pass through display port over Thunderbolt for graphics cards and Apple's T2 chip, which despite everyone saying is the worst thing ever, actually does have good uses like H.264 and H.265 hardware acceleration, something that is notably absent from Intel Xeon lineup. Oh, and then I'm sure a lot of it goes to marketing. So look, the $6,000 Mac Pro is bad. Make no mistake. End of story. But what about a better equipped $11,000 Mac Pro? And how would it compare to a workstation PC of similar price point? I wanted to find out, but I also didn't have the budget to shell out an extra $11,200 for a new Mac Pro. So screw that. I'm going to upgrade my own. But wait a minute. That's also expensive. So what should I do? Wait, I've got it. A brand deal. Private Internet access is no stranger to those of us in the tech community. Now, whether you have a fancy Mac Pro or you're rocking an ancient mod book that probably runs on gasoline, you need to stay protected online. And it's no surprise why over 30 million people have tried PIA. Now, look, I know you've probably seen a million VPN ads on YouTube, but I try to only do ads about products that I actually like. And PIA was an easy yes, because I have been using and paying for private Internet access for a long time. On one hand, I know it keeps me protected when browsing on unknown networks. And on the other hand, it's a really great tool for IP cloaking. So you can convince companies that you are where you aren't. Want to stream that one TV show that's no longer on Netflix in your country? Well, PIA has got your back. Thanks to thousands of servers in 49 countries with dedicated apps for all platforms, a kill switch button immediately disconnecting you if your connection to PIA drops and no logging ever. It's no surprise why PIA is so popular. And you really ought to give them a try today. Go through my link to support my channel and get a 77 percent discount. And you're sure to love it. Or you can get your money back with a 30 day guarantee. Thanks to PIA for sponsoring this video. OK, now I've got enough money to buy the 12 core chip that Apple uses in its machines, the Intel Xeon W3235. Intel recommends that it be sold to consumers for a $1,400 price. But you can find it online for. Crap, $1,400 or more. OK, so no bargains there, but at least I end up with an 8 core Xeon chips that I can sell to some poor sucker for 600 bucks or so. Let's talk RAM. Apple's RAM pricing is absolutely ludicrous. And despite the fact that some Apple YouTubers say Mac RAM is special, it isn't. Mac Pro uses run of the mill DDR4 ECC memory. Now, luckily, the RAM Apple includes on the base model is already the fastest that the new Xeon chip supports. And so I can just add additional RAM to what ships with it. I got 64 gigs extra for $360, bringing our total RAM count to 96 gigs. Nice. Now, on the SSD front, I decided to ditch the 256 gig boot volume in favor of a two terabyte Samsung 970 Evo NVMe SSD with a passive form factor adapter. Last for our GPU, I decided to give the Mac Pro a real world scenario chip using Apple's own Vega 2, which is very, very expensive. And so it was graciously lended to me by Aaron of Zolotech for this video. Thanks, Aaron. So installing the RAM, the SSD and the GPU is a piece of cake, even easier than it would be to do for a comparable PC. Seriously, kudos to Apple for making this so simple. The CPU, however, well, socketed isn't intended, at least by Apple, to be user replaceable. Tough beans, though, because I'm doing it. Now, I've seen Linus Tech Tips and a couple of other tech channels suggest the CPU cooler be removed by loosening the backplate and removing the cooler with the mounting mechanism. But I really wouldn't recommend this at all because you are drastically increasing the likelihood of socket damage when refastening the socket tension screws. So I'm going to do things the same way I did in my original teardown of the Mac Pro back in December, which you should definitely check out if you're interested. By removing this aesthetically pleasing little fascia, we can get to two very long screw holes and with a very long screwdriver. Well, we can loosen them to remove just the cooler. Underneath, we've got a wire retention clip that we can remove to swap out our old CPU in favor of the new one. A new thermal paste application later and we're ready to put this puppy back on. And well, that's that's it. Compared to our initial $6,000 configuration, performance is drastically and I mean, drastically improved in synthetic benchmarks. We see nearly double the score in Cinebench R20 and a 40% improvement in Geekbench. Real world tests show similar results. The DaVinci Resolve benchmark timeline we use exported significantly faster than the base model configuration, as well as our Blender render test and our Metashape performance benchmark. It's no surprise that the CPU and GPU upgrade have both made a massive difference. But just because our new $11,000 Mac Pro is better than the already overpriced $6,000 Mac Pro doesn't mean that it's technically a good value. And so here is where the competition enters. This is an incredible piece of kit provided by Maingear. And while not a sponsor, Maingear did help make this video possible. Maingear is a systems boutique builder that does both entry level and high end PCs. This is their Vibe PC, which is a very nice midsize tower with support for full ATX boards. Our system is rocking an AORUS TRX40 Pro Wi-Fi motherboard. That's right. That means we've got a Threadripper chip and not just any Threadripper chip, but the mind boggling top of the line 64 core 3990X CPU. Oh, holy crap. It also comes with 64 gigs of 3600 megahertz DDR4 memory, a top of the line NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti GPU, a wicked fast Seagate FireCuda 1TB PCIe 4 SSD that puts the Mac Pro's SSD to shame and an extra 2TB SATA storage drive for games and video footage. All of this is powered by an EVGA Supernova 1200W P2 PSU, and it's wrapped up in Maingear's premium feeling Vibe chassis. It comes with a lot of RGB too. Now, typically, I recommend people go out and build their own PC rather than buy a prebuilt. But the great thing about Maingear is that you can specify exactly what hardware goes into the computer that you're building. And they also do one of the worst parts of building a PC, and that is custom water cooling. I learned a number of months ago when we built that Rise and Shine build that custom hardline water loops. They friggin suck. They are not fun, and they suck the souls out of aspiring PC gamers. And if you're tempted to do a complex loop, say goodbye to your friends and family for the next several days while you work on it time and time again, bending over and over and over. It's a nightmare. Now, Maingear's Apex water cooling system is awesome, not just because you don't have to do it, but because it integrates a pump, a reservoir and a distribution block all into one RGB covered stunner. It looks freaking awesome. I think they did a great job. And if you're interested in a Maingear Vibe system for yourself, check the link down below. As configured, our PC and keep in mind, this is like one of the most expensive builds Maingear can actually create because of that Threadripper chip is $10,670. That's still a full $600 cheaper than our upgraded Mac Pro. And this thing, by comparison, is freaking blinged out. But you can save a lot of money by ditching RGB and going with air cooling instead of a custom hardline water loop running Windows 10 Pro. This machine is out for blood. And when we run Cinebench R20, it is hilarious to see nearly four times the score. This trend continues through both Geekbench and our DaVinci Resolve benchmark. Frankly, it is embarrassing for both Apple and Intel both, but not really a surprise, right? I mean, did you really expect a different outcome? But wait, this video isn't for naught, because I think to compare PCs and Macs spec for spec has always been a bit disingenuous and dumb. I know that I sometimes have been guilty of this, but look, I know this is going to make a lot of the PC boys mad, but there is something to be said about optimization. A great example of optimization giving Apple the upper hand is mobile app development. Most Android apps are written in Java, and because they have to run on a lot of different hardware, some of which doesn't even share the same architecture, apps are run on Java virtual machine, which is not very memory efficient. iOS apps, on the other hand, are compiled to native code and executed on the hardware itself, making RAM usage much lower and management much better from app to app. It's the reason Apple's flagship iPhone still runs so great with just four gigs of memory, and many newer Android phones are shipping with as much as 16 gigs of memory. OK, back to the topic at hand. Macs also have a fair bit of optimization with all apps running to take advantage of 64 bit hardware and on an OS that has the security and stability of Unix. But the flexibility and consumer focus of a more popular OS like Windows Final Cut Pro, for example, has been known for years to frequently outperform other video editing suites, even when you're on much weaker hardware. If you're buying into the idea of a Mac, you're probably also buying into the idea of a software suite that is afforded by that decision. And suddenly, spec versus spec, it no longer matters quite as much. So let's try some new benchmarks. The Mac Pro versus the insane main gear PC, but each using the software that has been designed with that hardware in mind. We created the exact same video timeline in Final Cut Pro for our Mac Pro and then in DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere for our PC. And the results are interesting. More surprising yet, when we utilized Apple Motion, which is Apple's compositor and compared it to an identical project that we had created in Adobe After Effects, the industry standard on PC. Not only did we see that the Mac was a lot closer than initially expected, but it actually outperformed the PC despite the spec for spec difference. So at the end of the day, you really have to choose the machine that you think will work best for you and your workflow. All of the apps that I use on a day to day basis here at the office are better on Mac OS or Mac OS only. So that's what I choose. But my editor, Derek, on the other hand, doesn't have use for specific Apple software, and so we've chosen to utilize the raw power found in comparably priced PCs rather than go out and buy a Mac for his use. Besides, he's more comfortable using Windows anyways. And so at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Computers are tools that are supposed to help you get the work done as quickly, efficiently and as pleasurably as possible. Whatever system that is for you. Great. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like. If you didn't, well, that other button seems to work OK, too. Let me know down in the comments below whether or not you use a Mac or PC for your workload. But most importantly, and as always, stay snazzy.