Can You Upgrade the iMac Pro?!

nearly a year ago I pulled apart my base-model 5k iMac I gave it a higher end CPU I upgraded the memory and I added some extra internal storage at the end of it all I had a faster machine than what Apple sold and I saved over 1,800 dollars in the process so naturally the minute I purchased my base model iMac Pro I had people clamoring at my door asking me to upgrade it as well and so here we are this video is made possible by dash line the best password manager around need proof I've been a pain user since before they ever thought to sponsor the channel go to - wane.com slash snazzy labs to try it out for free do it go I Mac Pro while a beast of a machine is actually a pretty good value now hold on my keyboard warrior PCMR friends I know yes you could obviously build a PC using prosumer hardware like in Intel I 970 980 Extreme Edition and I don't know an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti that would smoke even the most expensive $10,000 iMac Pro and for significantly less money however if you build a PC spec 4 spec using similar workstation hardware buying a base model iMac Pro is actually cheaper than building a comparable PC especially when you factor in the stunning 5k display which a rational PC fanboys always conveniently forget when drawing conclusions now the argument the most Apple haters will make is well nobody in their right mind would choose the hardware than Apple has 4 iMac Pro and while that may be true it doesn't change the fact that the iMac Pro is still cheaper than building a nearly identical PC especially when you get one during one of the frequent sales like I did for a thousand dollars off the five thousand dollar price tag this also meant however that saving a ton of money on a balls-to-the-wall upgrade like I did last year with my 5k iMac wasn't going to be likely I did the math and buying a base-model iMac pro upgrading the CPU to the 18 core Xeon variant and bumping my ECC memory up to a colossal 128 gigabytes saves me a grand total of 400 bucks [Music] which is not worth the risk of possibly damaging a nearly $10,000 computer especially when you can't even really get it friggin fixed if you accidentally break something sorry - now technically you do save more than $400 because you end up with an extra CPU and 32 gigabytes of ddr4 ECC memory which you could sell on eBay for about $1,700 total if you're really lucky then if you add an extra thousand dollars off on the frequent sales that go for the base model five thousand dollar iMac you're looking at about a maximum savings of three thousand dollars and again that's only if you're really lucky and the stars align perfectly now three thousand dollars is not nothing but is it worth voiding the warranty on a ten thousand dollar new unpredictable machine probably not so then what the heck is this video about well I'm going to upgrade my base model iMac pro but instead of jumping from the stock eight core CPU all the way to the 18 core I'm just going to upgrade to the ten core model which is widely considered the best value in all Brown performance if I do that my savings will be five bucks now don't click away there is a method to this madness you see Intel created special CPU SKUs specifically for Apple and for iMac pro on both the eight core and the ten core configurations the model numbers have the letter B at the end and if we take a look at the ten core model the W 21:55 B for Apple the chip is down clocked a whole 300 megahertz from the stock chip the W 21:55 that Apple sells to normal people why well I don't know you may think heat but both chips have the same TDP and the cooling assembly and I Mac Pro is the same whether you get the eight core or the 18 core chip if this is just a ten core so it shouldn't matter it shouldn't be heat at least I really only have two guesses number one and this one seems the most likely lower bin quality allows Apple to save money on cheaper chips that would otherwise be rejected by Intel all the while keeping the clock speed a little bit lower and therefore allowing the fan curve to say a little bit quieter classic Apple or number two the wimpy 370 watt power supply inside iMac Pro can't handle supply an adequate juice to a CPU Vega GPU and power-hungry 500 nits display under full load and peak brightness so the question is can you even use a regular ten core Xeon CPU in an iMac Pro technically I should be able to because it's the same chipset but nobody in the world has tried it and it is not a supported CPU and if I can get it to work are there any performance gains well let's find out first I need to take the screen off my new never vase amounted iMac Pro however I'm going to need to find something that will prevent the display assembly from jostling about how about ooh this Galaxy s8 plus I knew I would find a use for this thing eventually that was a joke it's a great phone calm down now I need to use the Handy iFixit iMac opening tool to cut away the tons of sticky tape that holds the screen in place and this process takes a while but with enough gentle prying the display finally separates just enough for me to yank the display cables and oh wow why Apple why do you have to make the inside of a computer that's glued shut the you don't ever want us to see looks frigging sexy [Music] now that we've removed the two blower fans that cool the entire machine we can pull out the motherboard which thankfully unlike the previous iMac I can be removed without pulling the power supplier speaker assemblies a fun fact the plastic black Apple logo on the back of the machine serves as the Wi-Fi antenna the more you know on to the mother port you can see here we've got the removable memory dims the copper heatsink which is connected to both the CPU and non removable BGA solder d'vega 56 GPU by unremarkable cooling blocks and heat pipes temps on this machine are okay better than Apple's normal affair but still not great and now I can kind of see why we've also got a view of the to proprietary PCIe 512 gigabyte SSDs that run together in raid 0 to create a single one terabyte drive capable of a whopping 3.3 gigabytes per second right speed and that's all controlled by the new ARM based t2 chip which handles hardware security and boot security on iMac Pro now it's time to remove the stock 32 gigabytes of RAM so that we can finally remove the cooling assembly and oh crap well I guess we better end the video here guys I don't want to void the warranty as we pull the cooling assembly off we can see the metric crap-ton of thermal compound that Apple applies from the factory and hey look we even get a free thermal paste covered fingerprint from the factory worker see you get your money's worth there's also surprisingly and perhaps a little frustratingly a little thermal paste that made it to the underside of the CPU that was haphazardly wiped away from the Pats now with a little prying I'm able to unstick the CPU from the block and holy Batman look at all that excess thermal paste looks like this is the same garbage that I found in my macbook - look at this this computer was manufactured in April with so what's that two months ago and the thermal compound is already almost rock-hard I seriously I don't understand why they use such crappy thermal paste better stuff would cost like a penny anyways out with the old and in with the new and let's see how this new 10 core beast performs that is if we can get the computer to boot sidenote this Mt Vega 56 GPU is just stunning it's also inconveniently permanently attached to one of the world's most expensive motherboards so hopefully that thing never breaks but before we put it all back together let's not forget the RAM all 128 gigabytes of it now each individual stick has as much memory as the whole computer did just a few moments ago holy smokes that stuff is pretty and holy smokes it is totally super overkill I don't need that much RAM and hardly anyone does that could cost half the price of the machine but I'll be darned if it doesn't look pretty good once I applied the extremely sticky and strong adhesive strips that hold this display in place I've got one chance to put it on right and there are no clips to help secure it in place so I've got to just eyeball the thing and hope I can get it right and look at that I may be an idiot mat user but holy smokes I nailed that install but will it boot again I think I'm the first knuckleheaded idiot on the internet stupid enough to put an unsupported CPU inside this machine and after an uncomfortably long moment of waiting these eons take a while to boot aha it boots just as it should not only do all 128 gigabytes of RAM show up but so does the CPU all 3.3 gigahertz of it awesome now it's time for the important part benchmarks and real-world performance now just for your reference I'm comparing all of these benchmarks to the stock eight core machine that well I just pulled apart as well as my friends ten core machine also configured with 128 gigabytes of RAM but from the factory from Apple untouched in Santa bench and whoo-hoo baby this thing flies the results between the snazzy 10 core and Apple 10 core are nearly identical no that's not great luckily in Geekbench it's a much different story my single core score was nearly 10% better and my multi-core score was a whopping 9% improved in fact it actually surpassed the average multi-core score for the 14 core iMac well obviously crushing that machine in single core results real-world benchmarks are where it really matters however and in the snazzy labs Final Cut Pro 4k export my machine does not disappoint with a 7% faster export than the 10 core iMac Pro so there you have it I built a ten core iMac Pro that outperforms apples by seven to ten percent all while saving five dollars in the process and you see that's the problem I'm Mac Pro is a very expensive machine with a very shallow support network and if you're going to go blow a bunch of money on a workstation grade computer you should probably steer clear of avoided warranty and just play it safe speaking of safe - 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Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 843,480

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, imac pro, imac pro linus, imac pro processor, imac pro upgrade, imac pro 2018, imac pro 2017, imac pro disassembly, most expensive computer, right to repair, apple support, apple, imac, repair, broken, fix, refused, service, servicing, computer repair, smashed, screen, apple store, apple authorized service provider, imac pro benchmarks, 5k imac, imac pro vs, ifixit, apple fail, louis rossmann imac pro, linus imac pro, ram, diy, pc build 2018, mojave

Id: Ku4WwRqJh_E

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 15 2018