Don't give Apple your MONEY - Mac Pro Upgrade Adventure

six grand starting price for this thing don't have pretty amazing specs an eight core processor by the time you kick this thing out with anything decent it's gonna cost as much as a car weight yeah no I'll just get the base model one and then scrape together all the upgrades are here on my own and show you how you can do it to save your time and save your money with story blocks video gets to do quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost at the link in the video description [Music] my necro isn't actually a base-model I got the afterburner card and a Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo so that I'd have two GPUs but also have an extra expansion slot if I ever needed four for some reason but it's also not maxed out to do that I'll be removing the asinine eight core processor this thing shipped with I'm throwing in a twenty eight cores beyond w3 275 a whole whack ton of RAM yes my friends that is 2 terabytes of memory a j2i drive cage a PCI Express SSD and apparently a Titan r-tx jessica's figuring out what CPU to buy is pretty simple you just grab any 3200 series intel xeon off of any reseller that you like as for how to install it well we could have found out ahead of time but we thought it'd be more fun for us to just go on that little adventure together so obviously we need to remove the heatsink now we praised the mac pro in our review for using mostly standard Phillips head screws but that's only for the things that most end users would actually need to access for something like I like a ram upgrade or a drive upgrade for things like the CPU that Apple doesn't actually expect you to change yeah it's gonna be towards next I think we're gonna have to pull our afterburner card oh I love these captive thumb screws back here with no risk of losing anything I really like this PCI Express lock oh boy we're already up to two different types of screws and all we've done so far is remove the Mac Pro nameplate and that might not have even been necessary because it seems like this is just a cosmetic cover for the for you shaped heat pipe cooler that we got going on here so let's move around to the back then now just pop the cover off of our two rated SSDs right there now we've got a couple more locks we don't actually have to expose the RAM now but we might as well just take them off and get them out of our way since we will be upgrading the memory later anyhow and then finally this guy I think there we go wait do you know what this does Anthony Oh for crying out loud here's six large Torx head screws that we're gonna remove carefully because Apple just like with the iMac Pro has not mounted the CPU into the socket with a retention lever it's just held on by the heatsink so once the heatsink pops off it'll just pull the CPU out of the socket wow these are these are tight boys I don't actually know that it's just gonna pop free for me oh it seems to kind of slide on rather than being able to lever it away top it up there yep there we go just need two hands yep there it is oh boy just like that let's see no problem alright so this is what I was talking about before here the CPU is kind of like fused onto it with thermal compound right see so you can see that's holding it on there's a bit of a cross pattern in the thermal paste that I don't know if it's due to the shape of the base of the cooler or if it's due to their application you can see they've done a pretty good job of actually covering the important parts of the IHS here without overdoing it on their thermal compound application not that that really makes a difference too much thermal compound does not contrary to popular belief tank your performance but still it's a nice touch putting on the right mount over on this side we get a good look at the socket so you can see there yeah it's just completely devoid of any kind of latching or retention mechanism the CPU just kind of sits in there and this also gives us a really good look down here they look just like the eight pin and 6 pin PCI Express connectors that you'd have in your desktop computer but they're mini so we'll need to adapt these in order to add expansion cards that need auxiliary cables well that was surprisingly straightforward want to hit me with that 28 core CPU all right here we go so to get this done we're gonna be borrowing a page out of the car mechanics handbook we're gonna kind of get under it you know Mac Pro 2019 has a convenient filming hole for performing CPU upgrades and shooting them at the same time just guide it in there give it a little wiggle not bad consulting our trusty gamers Nexus mod net I can't see the part about the thermal compound application so I'm just gonna put it all over the place you know what I'm just gonna put my cover back on now before my easy access to this thing and it is weird to me that they kind of reinvented the CPU cooler mounting mechanism that seemed unnecessary but you got to give Apple credit what is this six screws and two thumb screws later I have completely swapped out my CPU is that unprecedented for them yeah like outstanding oh we've got a good look at the guide that was making it so I couldn't accidentally wrench the cooler out the wrong way so there's a cut right here and just a nice thick metal here and then there's a couple of notched screws here that keep it from being inserted wrong okay good luck everybody tricky the only thing that makes this tough is that these Springs super difficult to compress and these screws that we took out are actually threaded inserts well that was painless almost makes the amount of work that we've spent building that hack Pro seems a waste of time alright so we're just gonna throw our speaker back in place assuming that we can figure out how the devil to get this thing on here come on get in there yeah there we go now we can't actually put our full two terabytes of RAM here this we got on our hands on for an AMD project and AMD epoch does support two terabytes of RAM but that's okay one-and-a-half terabytes of RAM ain't half bad so we will start by opening up our memory slots alright and consulting the handy dandy little population guidelines they've got there for you isn't that nice I mean a lot of manufacturers would just color code them but this is a good solution too and it means that everything gets to be black now we'll peel back all the tabs and it's time to go shopping now this is really important you can't use regular unbuffered dims in the Mac Pro that's a limitation of the Xeon CPU that's installed in it so you will either need ECC registered ddr4 memory or you will need a special kind of ECC server and called lrdimms or load reduced dims and memory is one of the most sensible upgrades that you can do it is much easier as you guys saw than accessing the CPU and the amount of money you can save is incredible for example for a 768 gig configuration you can expect to pay around $3,600 on Newegg for the RAM that you'd need for your Mac Pro that is close to a third of Apple's price of 10 grand and guys if you're more comfortable with like a matched set versus just buying your own individual sticks and chucking them in there o WC has a kit for forty nine hundred dollars which is still a fifty percent savings I just can't believe how simple it is we already pulled off the covers and now it's just a matter of lining up the notch in the memory with the notch in the slot positioning it like so pushing with both fingers on either end oh you want me to actually show you 12 times sure fine no problem we got this here we go for those of you wondering I'm using the same SK Hynix ddr4 2933 memory that I did for the two terabytes of chrome tabs attempts that we did a little while back man this is crazy each one of these sticks is 128 gigs of RAM it's nuts my one regret is that they had green these eby's I asked once how much does it actually cost to put a black PCB on it they're like oh I don't know like a buck you're like well why don't you just put black PCBs on all memory they're like you don't know anything about commodities do you might have been two dollars even but the point was that you like it matters for that particular product oh and there it is one and a half terabytes of RAM as I'm closing up the back I wanted to point out that while we are upgrading our SSDs today we can't actually remove and replace apple's little SSD cards that they've got pre-installed in the machine because these are tied into the t2 chip on the motherboard and it won't boot unless they're installed so we can add more storage and we can even boot to an add-in nvme SSD but it can't be at the expense of having removed these ones so they've got to stay in there do it Larry oh there you go these two kind of walk in together it's a little bit finicky a little plastic clip broke off from where I don't actually know oh this has already been glued once did we break it okay I did sure I'm not gonna throw anybody else on the boss even if they did it I did it guys seriously yeah Anthony I gotta stop trusting me with our Apple what do you have against Apple why do you break every Mac that comes through the store now let's talk SATA there's not a whole lot to this like really there's not a lot there there's two SATA ports and then that proprietary power connector that's all you get so if you want to actually install drives you'll need well an actual freaking drive bay which you will need to buy separately along with the adapter for that connector so Apple just happens to have one such thing available on their website and we went ahead and picked it up so it's from promised and looks a little something like this first we've got our power adapter that's reasonably elegant so there's your two SATA data cables you're a little weirdo connector there and then over at the other end you've got two of those handy dandy combo SATA data and SATA powers onto the enclosure it's actually pretty slick it's the same kind of feel of anodized aluminum as the rest of the chassis and it's gonna match it absolutely perfectly which I'm sure is not an accident ours came pre-installed with an eight terabyte surveillance Drive for whatever reason from Toshiba you know big complaints there it's not a problem they're not bad hard drives it's just weird and then yes this is kind of cool so all of these screws are pre-installed so all you need to do is remove these wing nuts in order to expose them if you want to install a second drive and if you don't want to install a second drive this is pretty slick too so you go ahead you plug in your one just like that and you put your second one just right there so that it doesn't waggle around inside your case just kind of clips right into place if you do want to install a second drive you just remove that screw and then it'll actually pull this plastic bracket thing off and then you go ahead and plug that into your second drive just like that pretty handy dandy as with the CPU the whole process involves shockingly few screws so we just take out this little piece of placeholder or aluminum here that this is written on by hand somebody put a B on there did we do that weird written Brennan yeah it's written in pencil align these slots just like we saw on the CPU heatsink with these little posts right here so rather than just screw them in no no ha ha there's little posts on the back of this spacer here that sit in there like that and then you put the screws back in and now it's locked into place can't fool me with your weird non-standard Drive mounting mechanism easy-peasy that ain't going anywhere now we just need to plug these in I could make my life a little bit easier by removing the i/o card there but now it's time to really have some fun so before we put our afterburner card back in which was in this slot I'm gonna pull out one of these extremely gorgeous PCI slot covers solid aluminum it's real late patter these machined out of a single block man that is overkill anyway anyway sorry sorry sorry I'll go ahead and throw an intel opting SSD in here this way we could run a secondary OS like windows or something like that without resorting to boot camp if for whatever reason that mattered to us then we're gonna throw a Titan r-tx into this bottom PCI Express slot now has their own approach to auxiliary power and they use this extension to the pci express slots over here but because this is just a standard PC card we are gonna need some power cables heavy with them a little high that's fine strangely these are not available as an apple first party accessory but thankfully Belkin has a kit already ready to go at launch so we're gonna go ahead and use that so cable set one PCIe aux power eight pin to dual six pin nope cable set to eight pin to six plus two pin okay that we could use eight pin to six plus two pin six position Wow and that's adorable I got your baby eight pin and your daddy eight pin nice and load profile too so that if you have long cards they can sit over top of them we can go ahead and install a real graphics card in here I really do wish that applet and video would bury the hatchet but I don't think they ever will next time Jensen or Tim Cook does an AMA you just all need to spam them with when are you guys gonna kiss the makeup okay look at that no sag cuz it's supported by the other GPU sweet this looks very out of place in here I'm gonna have to fold these down here in order to get my afterburner card in I got to say I had to light these supports here to keep the card stable love that alright and everything is locked in so that mechanism just gorgeous love or hate Apple you gotta just appreciate some of the little things they do that slide action it's beautiful alright let's fire this up oh there we go how long was that that was like at least three minutes you don't think it's three okay I don't know it wasn't well over a minute but we wrap okay oh alright one pitfall you got to watch out for guys if you want to max out the memory in the system is while you're shopping for your CPU make sure you get one that supports the amount of memory you're installing not all of them can handle 1.5 terabytes of RAM speaking of things that we can't necessarily handle let's have a look at our PC I cards this is actually really cool so the Mac Pro allows you to either automatically or manually assign your PCI Express slots to two different pools a and B to make sure that you don't over do the PCI Express Lane allocation within each pool so if we were to move here watch this if I move them all to a you can see that I've overdone it and it's unhappy whereas if I go like this look at that everything is perfectly balanced absolutely love it I'm gonna just switch it back to auto mode because we don't really need to do that but it does mean that all of our PCI Express devices are showing up and have the correct number of lanes and we're gonna go ahead and initialize our OP teen SSD it's showing up as an external SSD you have any idea what that would be okay so guys we've got beat Pro display back there can you see that running okay so I'm gonna have to kind of operate the computer from here we're gonna see if we can get an output on this puppy do we know that this is gonna work has anyone tried this yet Microsoft basic display adapter okay so it definitely does not have drivers Nvidia control panel went and installed itself so it looks like Windows grabbed some drivers while I was waiting for that download did you display settings are not available hey there it is nice oh yeah it is really dim oops oops what the okay how do I get to brightness oh okay well whatever I'm just cranking the brightness sound care now that's curious this actually ain't running great Anthony yeah I think it might be you're using the Radeon Vega 2 Pro duo turbo etc there we go that's better still 60 Hertz but it's way better I guess yeah way better that's the theme of today's video this was a heck of a lot easier then our previous experience upgrading max if you guys are looking for another video to watch right now by the way our iMac pro upgrade video series is definitely worth a watch but yeah this was by comparison great I mean there's still things that Apple could have done better and two slots drive bay included standard that would have been pretty neat a cooler bracket that's not super weird and proprietary but still I mean the fact that this is even possible let alone officially sanctioned by Apple as a minor miracle and lets enthusiasts shops get out ahead of the game by getting the kitted out Mac they need for a price they can much more easily afford so all that's left to say at this point is happy modding ladies and gentlemen that's an RT X Titan gaming on a Mac Pro what do you guys want for me it's brilliant massive thanks to story blocks video for sponsoring today's video story blocks video has a massive library of high quality footage After Effects templates music and more sword block saves you time and especially money's because you can use their stock footage instead of shooting your own all the content is royalty-free for both personal and commercial use and we use them often for tech quickie since we're trying to make videos as fast as possible so you don't always have the time to shoot all the footage you need new clips get added regularly so you don't have to worry about using clips that are like 10 years old and already all over the internet so check them out today at story blocks comm slash Linus tech tips we're gonna have that links down below so thanks for watching thanks Apple for actually listening to your customers we really do appreciate it I am a customer I mean just cause like I don't use it voluntarily doesn't mean I don't actually give you my money so that's good good job

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 5,773,856

Rating: 4.9144573 out of 5

Keywords: apple, mac, pro, mac pro, upgrade, diy, CPU, RAM, memory, ECC, LRDIMM, Xeon W, Intel, GPU, Titan RTX, Nvidia, Boot Camp, HDD, hard drive, enclosure, SSD, guide

Id: zcLbSCinX3U

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SoftBaconWarmBacon]

As controversy as the design of Mac Pro 2019 to us can be, I got to emit that PCI slot cover is hot

[u/BertMacklenF8I]

It’s pretty good for looking at.