Is the cheesegrater Mac Pro still viable in 2023?

oh Mac Pro ladies and gentlemen it's the venerable cheese grater and today I bought this one for 93 dollars because I want to find out if the age of the cheese grater Mac Pro or at least the original one is finally over now if you followed my channel for a little while then you would know that I absolutely love these things I have done so many cheese grater Mac Pro projects but each passing year they're getting older and older and now with apple silicon it does beg the question is this massive Behemoth still the PowerHouse it once was now this particular one is a four comma one and the reason it was so cheap is I don't really know all that much about it now I did see from the listing photos that the RAM installed here at the front at least is four gigs and they all look the same so I think it's got 16 gigs of RAM and that is why I pulled the trigger because someone who's going to upgrade their Ram probably is going to upgrade some other components now the main reason that I don't know a whole lot about this machine is because as you might be able to see there's no graphics card and that is part of why I got this thing for so cheap but I basically had to use the original sticker on the back here to determine what the specs of this machine were now back here it says Mac Pro 2.66 qcx 3x2g gt120 640sdbt so if we decode that basically what this is saying is it originally shipped with the 2.66 gigahertz quad-core Xeon three two gigabyte RAM sticks the Nvidia gt120 graphics card and a 640 gigabyte hard drive and that's how you know that this machine is a 2009 that gt120 shipped with four comma 1 Mac Pros now the plan for this machine is very simple it definitely needs a little bit of cleaning and then I bought this RX 580 on eBay for 75 bucks those things are getting really cheap nowadays I also bought these PCI cables there's a weird PCI standard that the Mac Pro uses so you have to buy one of these adapters for like eight bucks and then I redeemed a good old Micro Center gift card coupon thingy and got this 256 gigabyte SSD for free which gives us an all-in cost on this Mac Pro of well less than 200 but the question is is it worth two hundred dollars let's find out so let's get started by giving this machine a makeover it's completely Caked Up In Dust We got to clear out those fans and get this machine looking good again but before we finish that a quick word from today's video sponsor today's video is sponsored by soundcore and their all-new Motion x600 Wireless spatial audio speaker this thing is an absolute unit let me tell you it's got three amps two woofers two tweeters and one full range audio driver good for 50 Watts it supports ldac codex uses custom developed spatial audio and offers up to 12 hours of audio playback while also being ipx7 water resistant Suncor has developed their own spatial audio algorithm that can decode stereo sound into three channels and uses an upward firing speaker together with stereo pairs to create depth and you can really hear it in action [Music] foreign [Music] you can use the soundcore app to customize your EQ or select presets designed to maximize your music and create your own personal portable home audio setup to learn more and experience the x600 for yourself check out the links in the description below big thanks to soundcore for sponsoring this video and now let's get back to it alright so let's finish cleaning this machine up it's not just a cosmetic thing by the way take a look at the fans on the interior these things are not going to be operating at their fullest potential because they're so caked in dust so let's get that taken care of [Music] foreign [Music] so this thing was pretty dusty I suspect like with a lot of these Mac Pros nowadays it has been sitting in storage for quite a while so it's good to get the dust off get it cleaned up and this thing is actually pretty nice it doesn't have any major dents or or collapsed Corners now all we have to do is assemble the machine and fortunately these Mac pros make that super easy this is the definition of a modular computer Apple thinks but they made a modular computer in 2019 well I just installed a CPU tray without a screwdriver so top that now the same is also true for the graphics card but first we have to use this special adapter because for whatever reason Apple decided it was a good idea when they built this Mac Pro to use these weird miniature pcie connections on the logic board now there's two of them and each one is capable of delivering 75 watts of power and what that means is when you combine that with the slot you've got I don't know like 200 or so watts of power now an RX 580 has no problem with that but as I did in a video four years ago if you do want to use a super powerful card you have to be careful because you can use an adapter like this and it'll basically just overload the logic board and you can actually cause a lot of damage all right graphics card is installed we'll just screw on this mounting bracket and lock it into place like that still no screwdriver by the way and now it's time for the SSD I love using these free Micro Center ssds they're pretty fast it's rated for 520 megabytes per second read and 430 right that is going to be more than enough for a machine like this at this price point all right job done screwdriver not needed we have now built ourselves a pretty solid Little Mac Pro or at least that is depending on what CPU is in here because I still don't know what it is now the other thing that we have to keep in mind is because I'm using a regular RX 580 we're not going to have the boot screen so you can get special graphics cards that have been flashed with apple firmware and that will allow you to start it up and have the regular boot screen the boot switcher if you have multiple installations and that sort of thing honestly I would like to have that but when you look at the prices on those cards it's just not worth it so we're gonna make do without that and I've got Mac OS Catalina Patcher here by dos dude one we're gonna hopefully get this thing installed with Catalina now this particular Mac does have a hard drive in slot one and I think that's going to cause some issues okay the display is now on and I'm getting a flashing light that looks like Windows someone may well have tried installing Windows on here the easiest way for us to get around this is going to be to shut the machine down like that and I think what we should do is pull this hard drive which hey it's a one terabyte that's not bad so we're gonna pull that out so now the only thing in here is a blank SSD which means that we should be able to install our Catalina USB here turn the machine back on and hopefully eventually once it doesn't find any bootable media it'll go to this USB so this might take a little bit more work than I thought because my Mac Pro has changed its mind about being a Mac this is the windows no bootable device screen unless I'm very much mistaken um so I guess somebody had been running Windows on this machine and removed their Mac driver partition and it's looking for Windows which explains why it's not using my Catalina installer so I have no idea what firmware is on here I don't know if this is up to date at all we're dealing with a complete mystery away with all of the installers here shoe we're going straight to the source so I took our SSD and I installed Mac OS High Sierra on it directly on another Mac now I initially installed El Capitan on here but I was reminded by dos dude who I talked to about this whole situation that those older versions of Mac OS aren't going to support an RX 580 which is newer than El Capitan I completely forgot about that so High Sierra will work on a four comma one Mac Pro and we'll work with our graphics card so now we should be able to put this in the machine and finally turn it on all right SSD in hit the power switch will you please work now oh finally and here comes the exciting part we get to figure out what CPU is in this machine oh nice we've got a six core Zeon 16 gigabytes of 1066 megahertz DDR3 and an RX 584 gigabyte and we do have all four of our memory slots populated so this is a pretty solid machine here for less than 200 now because I installed this copy of High Sierra I just went ahead and pre-loaded it with some stuff that we could use here the first thing I want to do is see how fast this free SSD is okay 256 megabytes per second right and about the same on the read speed so this is a great reason why you shouldn't spend a ton of money on a SATA SSD these old Mac Pros only have SATA 2 connections on them so you're not going to get the most out of a fancier SSD don't overspend just buy whatever's cheap now the next thing I want to do here is run cinebench now this has a Xeon X 56.75 the fastest that you can go is 3.46 gigahertz on a six core CPU or of course you can do 12 cores if you have the Dual CPU tray so let's go ahead and set that to run and we'll see how this machine fares in the modern world foreign so there you have it 3929 points on our 14 year old Mac Pro system that is very very solid multi-core performance but the thing you have to remember is that this is a 6 core 12 thread processor so when you throw more cores at the problem yes you're going to get that higher score but compared to a newer quad core Intel processor from like 2015-16 they're probably going to be that same exact score but the single core on this thing is atrocious and because it doesn't have integrated Graphics the already slow render times that you're going to experience on those older Intel processors well it's even worse on this but first things first with this Mac Pro we got to put our one terabyte hard drive back in and I'm gonna patch this thing over to Mac OS Catalina now you can put Big Sur on these machines but I have heard a couple of stories of it not being the the best experience so I'm gonna stick with Catalina just for simplicity's sake and then we're gonna see how well this thing performs in a video editing application because that's what these machines were very frequently used for back in the day so let's go ahead and do that now once I got Mac OS Catalina installed I set this machine a lofty goal and compared it to the M2 MacBook Air first off in blender using the classroom demo file I ran a CPU test which revealed the MacBook Air took 10 minutes and 9 seconds compared to 24 and a half minutes on our Mac Pro that's not exactly unusual and we see basically the same result on an unoptimized GPU test it's about 10 minutes compared to 24. so next up was Final Cut Pro six and a half minute 4K clip and as you might expect the M2 MacBook Air absolutely obliterates it whereas there are some disadvantages to Apple silicon and blender all of the advantages are on Apple silicon here and I mean it finishes rendering when the Mac Pro is still at under 20 that is how much things have changed in the past 14 years in fact when we skip ahead the Mac Pro finishes in just about 13 minutes that's 10 minutes longer than our M2 MacBook Air but look none of this should come as a surprise I mean this is a 14 year old system that I built with a free Micro Center SSD and a cheap graphics card for less than 200 and I'm comparing that to Apple's newest Apple silicon MacBook Air like yeah obviously this is going to lose it's a thousand dollars less expensive than the MacBook Air that's not really the point the point is that for the longest time these Mac Pros were actually faster than some of the brand new multi-thousand dollar Max that you could buy there was a not insignificant amount of time where you could spend eight hundred a thousand dollars is on a Mac Mini and not get close to this kind of performance at a fraction of the price because that thousand dollar Mac Mini I'm talking about well it's right here it's a 2018 Mac Mini and apple just stopped selling this thing this year in January when they introduced the M2 promac mini so this was a device that launched in 2018 and does not have any dedicated graphics can only go up to 32 gigabytes of sodium memory and it had a 6 core i7 that honestly performs very very similar to this old Xeon now obviously there are some advantages if you tried to run a final cut render this would be faster because it's a newer architecture with Intel quick sync but you can't put an RX 580 in it you had to get one of those external GPU boxes and by the time you did that it was over two grand so these Mac Pros were absolutely killer for the longest time because you could pick them up for a couple hundred bucks upgrade the CP use yourself put in some nvme ssds on a PCI card you can put in whatever graphics card you want they had the customization and they were more powerful and they were more affordable but now things are starting to change just a little bit I mean this system here for 200 I don't think is a bad value I mean you do get an RX 580 you can install boot camp and this thing would honestly make a half decent Windows gaming machine as well as being a half decent Mac so you can definitely look at it that way but it also weighs like seven tons the power supply uses a thousand watts of power not to mention that this thing being a four comma one doesn't come with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth card as standard you'd have to add that in and until you do you're not going to have airdrop you're not going to have Wi-Fi you're not going to be able to use Bluetooth accessories no continuity no handoff like you are missing out on some of those Mac OS features here so so there might still be a reason why someone might want to get one of these cheese grater Mac Pros but those reasons are diminishing fairly quickly and that's why they're getting super duper cheap it's definitely a little bit sad as someone who actually edited for this channel for over a year on a cheese grater Mac Pro just like this one but they it's harder and harder to justify them every passing year so I'm curious to know what you guys think do you think that this is a good build would you buy something like this for a couple hundred dollars let me know in the comments below thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 164,362

Keywords: Apple, Mac Pro, Mac Studio, Cheesegrater, Apple cheese grater, 2013 mac pro, Mac comparison, Tech, Apple comparison, Apple evolution

Id: 2jJSqLbK1BE

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat May 20 2023