What's Inside the 2019 Mac Pro? Complete Disassembly and Analysis

it's finally here the new cheese grater that can't innovate anymore my ass round to the new Mac Pro now you've probably seen a lot of unboxings already of this thing on YouTube but this is not an unboxing because why take it out of the box when you can take the box out of it this is an unveiling let's pull this thing apart and see what's inside the case assembled in the United States of America is already a little bit unusual because there's a handle on the top where you can twist it and open the machine that's not something that most of us Apple users are used to including on Apple's other Pro products like iMac Pro but twist this handle you can and you see that the case actually raises itself up on the frame a little bit I'm a little bit disappointed it's kind of a scratchy rotation it doesn't feel quite as good as I would expect but the case lifts straight off and you were presented with the computer now that's the back side this is the front side and as you can see we got the base model the six thousand dollar version there's a reason we got that and I'll explain that later in this video and later in the week but if we go back to the main chassis here there's really only one thing this is a pretty dumb little aluminum box you'll notice that there's no dust filters interestingly Apple said that they didn't need them they've gone on record saying that so we'll see if that holds up and then you'll note that there's two Thunderbolt three ports but they're not actually in this part of the chassis they're mounted inside the frame you'll also note that there is a power button and that is something that communicates with the main case through this little copper connector right here as well as these four pogo pins that are on the case itself and so if the case of iMac of the Mac Pro is not closed the machine will not turn on so I'm going to need these for pogo pins that illuminate the power indicator allow you to turn the machine on and then you've got your two Thunderbolt three ports right there other than that I guess we started a where around back the stuff that you can actually replace pretty easily if there's anything that Apple has allowed end-users to replace in the past its memory or RAM and Mac Pro is no exception they're covered by these two little might be wondering why those are there and the answer is really quite simple cooling through these little holes cold air is sucked into the computer case along with the main compartment big large intake fans and then all of the hot air from the entire system is exhausted by this blower style fan in the back of the case so these are to help direct airflow but if you need to access the memory slots themselves you just pull this little lock latch and this little door swings open which you can remove and reveal one of 12 memory slots now the 12 memory slots can be populated against all of the CPU models that Apple allows you to configure your computer ask because I got the base model I only have four dims of 8 gigs each a pretty low-end spec but you can add more memory and Apple actually even shows you how to do it so that you can put them in the proper channel configuration on the back of these little shrouds which is pretty nice their own website actually tells you how to mix and match memory sizes as well if you choose to do that it was pretty nice it is 29 33 megahertz memory which is pretty high-end it's actually the the fastest clock speed that these Intel Xeon w chips support and my core model unfortunately only supports the lowest Ram speed but the rest of the models should support a higher speed now what you might not notice and what Apple doesn't really say is user accessible but technically from a physical level it is is the SSD which you can find right there now I only have one of them if you have a larger configuration you'll actually find that the drives are in raid 0 and therefore very very very fast and these are the exact same SSDs that are inside the iMac Pro now the reason I say they're not user accessible is because while I can get access to them and remove them they're keyed they're not soldered they are tied to the t2 chip and authenticated specifically to this machine what that means is if I go on eBay and find an old iMac Pro SSD it's not going to work the only way you can upgrade and replace these SSDs are directly through an Apple Authorized service provider which is really pretty annoying but I have a pretty sneaking suspicion that you're going to be able to upgrade storage on your own using these SATA ports and PCIe slots inside the case stay tuned for this and could subscribe so that we can kind of check that out later this week now this main compartment is really where stuff gets exciting because at the end of the day this is an open modular PC a weird one but a modular PC nonetheless it's weird in part because there are PCIe slots but not just any number of PCIe slots eight that is more than double the standard ATX motherboard in PC land this is a massive motherboard with tons of expansion capabilities one of the slots is pre-populated and this will be the case in all of the models by Apple's weird IO card so on this card you'll have two USB a ports two Thunderbolt three ports and a headphone jack then at the very bottom of the case you have two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports built into the motherboard right next to the power supply and then above that whatever GPU you configure from Apple and any other PCI slots that you decide to add on your own now what's unusual and a little bit interesting about the way Apple did this was that it's so in fact encouraging users to add their own cards and modify them that apple provides numbers on how to add and remove cards from their chassis now in classic Apple fashion this is done really really nicely there are captive thumb screws so you don't have to worry about cross threading or losing stuff it pops right out nice and easy and this is really where I think stuff is pretty special this latch not only is it cool because of the way it sounds listen to this it's not just because of that but it's also because of the way that it works on a standard graphics card or really any PCIe device in a PC you have this little hook here and this hook is there so that it stays attached to the PCIe slot inside your motherboard now on the PC they have these little shoes that come over the top but the problem with these shoes is that if you are in a really tight computer case or if you have a bunch of other cards on top or nearby it's oftentimes really difficult to access these little shoes to release the PC a device or graphics card from your computer it must appear that Apple thought of that because this switch is a master release for all of the PCIe cards and rather than hook from the motherboard itself it just uses these little hooks above to hook down into the graphics cards or PCA devices it's so Apple I mean it's not really anything inherently unique or well it is unique I don't know that it's special it's not that advanced of a system but it's just one of those things that only Apple would have thought about looking at a standardizing our everything why don't we do that better and they did this slot is awesome and I want all of my pcs in the future to have it I don't think that'll happen though now let's get to the other weird innovation in these machines so let's unlock that I could hit that switch all day that is so cool we have this little plate here which locks this side of the cards you might be wondering this side of the cards and yes by the way these are all captive thumbscrews that's because behind this plate is the MPX modules now in a standard graphics card you have one PCI slot B that PCIe X 8 or X 16 most modern GPUs are x16 but you have one PCIe slot and then if you need external power which basically all graphics cards require you need to power the device through external power headers or connectors now Apple in a surprising turn of events has actually supported this open standard so if you want to use your own GPUs you can you do need to buy what is an $80 cable kit from Belkin which allows you to use these power headers on the motherboard but there are molex power adders they look like really really tiny PCIe connectors that allow you to supply power to external graphics cards and other PC devices if you need power which is really freaking awesome but if you're using Apple's GPUs which most of us are let's release this one you ready so here's the number 4 we push this this little lever comes out oh that's a magnetic lever it's so over engineered but so awesome and if you pull it the card releases you can pull it straight out and you'll see our regular old Radeon 5 ATX graphics card well looks pretty weird and that's because here you have your standard PCIe x16 and then over here you have your MPX which is used for external power and then in the case of some of the higher-end GPUs that Apple has like the dual Vega 2 cards these are actually used for data as well as far as I'm away which is pretty unique and pretty excellent this thing is heavy as crap because it is just a big massive heatsink on top of the GPU there is no active cooling on this GPU unlike basically every other off the card graphics or off-the-shelf graphics card available which means that this thing really should operate silently like the rest of the computer if you look at the PCIe slots the MPX slots themselves there are 2 MPX slots some of the graphics card that Apple sells our dual height because they run so hot because they're quite literally to GPU dies on the same card they need a lot of cooling and so they'll actually be double height and cover one or two of these slots depending on your configuration but if you have the standard 5 ATX or a regular GPU you'll have access to seven technically because this i/o card will probably stay in PCI slots which is really really cool let's talk the power supply because that is also removable and it's also fully well if I can find this thing here there's one screw that's a little annoying it's fully replaceable by the end user and it's fully sealed which is nice the iMac Pro and the iMac have big open scary exposed power supplies which are very dangerous if you don't know what you're doing but this is not the case this slides right out and this allows you to well remove the power supply if it ever goes bad this 1,000 watt 80-plus Platinum power supply is available on every Mac Pro model and that's one thing that's important to note other than CPU GPU Ram and one other thing what was it o SSD everything is user upgrade or I should say everything is standard so whether you buy the six thousand dollar macro or the $52,000 Mac Pro all the hardware other than those four components CPU GPU Ram and storage are exactly the same power supply thousand watts and that's really really cool one other interesting thing is this is vented ported and presumably for cooling and there's a big gasket that connects it to this left compartment right where the blower style cooler is so all of the heat from the power supply will get sucked out of the PSU and exhausted out of the back of the case without it ever heating up this inside compartment because it's gasket at that's a really cool design you have your power connector here this PC is looking well pretty well empty but we can still remove more not technically under what Apple suggests users do but when have we ever done what users are suggested to do by Apple let's keep going active cooling and the Mac Pro is very unusual at least if you're used to building pcs rather than use active fans on your CPU cooler and on your GPU everything is passive save for the three intake fans in the front and the one blower exhaust fan in the back now these things are attached with six screws there's one here in the corner there's two up here at the top and then there are three in the back which are right here right here and oh right here once you've found these weird six seemingly randomly placed screws you can pull the fans straight out of the case maybe there we go and they slide right out now the nice thing about them is they are pressure fit there's no cables no connectors you have to worry about you just see them right there there and there now the actual fan design is really unique and look I'm not a thermal engineer so I couldn't explain why they did this but I would presume that part of the reason the fans were designed the way they are wherein the blades don't actually run against the shroud the whole entire shroud spins is to reduce the kind of vortex of air where you have really rapidly spinning parts which are rigid next to areas that don't make any noise generally in the PC crowd you'll know that the the less severe the pram the fan profile the quieter they are and I think Apple just mitigates this entirely by having the entire fan shroud rotate around the chassis it's a weird design but it is really freaking quiet and these things partially probably because of how thick they are bring in a lot of air through the case and exhaust out the back you put your hand in the back even where it's not exhausting air and there is a big heavy stream of air flow and the computer is basically silent but standstill the question is can it keep all of this Hardware cool and under its thermal constraints that I don't know but from a quiet standpoint passes the test I've been trying to decide how best to remove the CPU cooler to get to the CPU and in my hunt I have discovered this what is this thing it looks like another RAM module right well it isn't if you pull this very scary you pull it very firmly you can pull it straight out generally and what will reveal itself is none other than a speaker assembly fourth Mac Pro yes Mac Pro has a speaker and a subwoofer I don't know that it's there a lot of people said this the Mac Mini has a speaker two very very tiny one in people say oh well it's for the boots I know it isn't there is no boot chime in Mac OS anymore so this is truly just to listen to some crazy good tunes through your $6,000 speaker Mac Pro with the speaker all right so this is presumably the socket backplate or the Mac equivalent the thing is these are always a little scary because you can get your chip slightly misaligned when reinserting but this time around I found something that I haven't seen on any prior Mac and that is that behind this little shroud for the CPU cooler there are two very very deep screw holes that at the bottom house Torx t15 screws now I got a screwdriver that was way too large for this hole was the only one I had so please bear with me who needs the paint on the inside of those holes I mean doesn't affect cooling and let's get to loosening it and see if we can pull this cooler off and get to the chip underneath there's unfortunately no repair guide on this and that's really the problem with this Mac Pro is most of it as you can see is user well it's user accessible you can remove this stuff without much difficulty but apple's guides and instructions really only support replacing ram and the power supply and graphics cards beyond that you're basically expected to be on your own that's a little bit unfortunate with a machine that's so easily accessible and with an architecture that's intended to serve pros why not let the pros get what they want and provide full service and instruction manuals for them there you go we got our beefy cooler to come up it's basically the LTT Black Edition the Noctua what does that call NH 15 it's a very beefy cooler and you can actually see that there are eight heat pipes throughout this this chip so this is a very beefy probably overkill cooling solution for this eight core chip that we have but it will definitely come in handy for the 24 and 28 core variants and there it is the CPU let's get a closer look rather than a traditional heavy duty socket door that you would find on a PC we kind of have this wire system which I've actually seen in a few server installations before so Apple wasn't the first to invent it but if you pull that off then we have access to the chip itself and holy moly this thing is a monster this is probably the largest least efficient eight core chip their efforts now let's look at the actual model number because the whole Intel Xeon w lineup is a bit weird Apple seems to have chips not available to other manufacturers and also chips that Intel doesn't even have listed on their own site alright it looks like this chip is the Intel w3 2 to 3 the Intel Xeon lineup has to eight core options this is the lower end of the two making it just about the bottom of the barrel and Intel Xeon w lineup this chip the tray price is about $750 you better believe Apple paid a lot less than that but the good thing is is that there's nothing too inherently special about this chip or others and so you should be able to basically drag and drop any of the chip supported by this chipset into Mac Pro and not have any other issues I did this with our Mac Pro it worked great next up we have something that kind of surprises me we're on the back of the machine again and we have this fairly substantial heatsink and I thought surely underneath it must be the Intel chipset for this CPU but it's actually not that's on the front of the motherboard this is marked but when you do a web search for it not much information comes up on it I presume it to be either a PCIe switch for your devices or a power controller since all of the external power is routed through the motherboard rather than handled directly by the power supply unit interesting nonetheless there's not much left inside of this machine all we have left is this tiny little door cover and the purpose of this is pretty simple it's covered by these very very small torques t-50 which is a pressure fit mount for these ribbon connectors and these ribbon connectors just go up to our little module which holds the Thunderbolt three ports as well as the power LED and power button so that's all the bandwidth for those those are just flush mounted you can pull those up with a spudger and then that's basically it we just have to remove the motherboard ladies and gentlemen I present to you the 2019 Mac Pro it's a little bit of flex in that motherboard partially because the motherboard is gigantic I've seen a lot of desktop PCs in my day and none as big as the motherboard in here this is truly the size of a server motherboard it's it's ginormous not just because of ace 8 PCI slots but because all of the power is controlled through the board as well it's quite beautiful and there's a number of interesting chips that you might well want to take a look at so behind this little heat spreader I suppose is a number of CPU VRMs this doesn't seem like a great way of spreading heat but I don't know I guess it does then again Apple is never really focused on vrm cooling but they are all right here down here you'll note that there is an Apple t2 chip so this is the obviously the SSD controller and it also handles some of the Thunderbolt throughput it handles boot security and a number of other things you have your Intel C 621 chipset right here this is obviously the motherboard chipset next to the motherboards CMOS battery you have your power headers we talked about earlier there's a two down here to up here and then one at the very top and then over here you have two SATA ports which are easily accessible inside the case which is kind of cool but unfortunately you also need to say to power when running a hard drive or an SSD and it uses this weird 10 pin proprietary connector that it seems at least a point of recording Apple only sells with Pegasus hard drive caddy insert which runs $400 there's also a USB 2.0 header and this is for a lot of Pro applications like avid and other pro workflow apps require a hardware serialized key or lice and it's rather than having that hang off and dangle off the back of your computer you can just insert it here and forget about it on the back well there's not that much we have that chipset that we talked about earlier that needs to be actively cooled again I'm not really sure what this is I fix it didn't know either they call that a PC icon controller and that's probably accurate I also expect it to be a power controller given that it's actively cooled and a couple of other just minor small things over here these are your 2a quanta 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN chips that need to be cooled they're cooled passively through the frame of the case and then you have your 12 Ram slots right here and other than that that's basically all of the important stuff on the motherboard a large motherboard it is but it better be given the large price of this machine Apple announced a little hilariously during the keynote that this computer would be available with wheels not such a bad idea for a computer that's so heavy but when the order page went out people found out that the wheels cost $400 I obviously didn't buy them I'm sure many people didn't but what's even crazier is that if you didn't buy the $400 wheels when you purchased the computer you would have to send it in to Apple if you ever decided to upgrade your wheels most people myself included thought that this meant that the entire frame was either created with wheels or without wheels and a full computer disassembly would be required that's not the case there's just a four millimeter hex screw that you can remove yourself and then pull the foot right out these are definitely user removable and now I have the whole entire computer disassembled if you had it all put together you could still do it there's enough clearance in a a regular hex wrench but it is a little bit of a hassle but are the feet removable you bet you I hope I can put this thing back together this machine is absolutely overly engineered to give you a good example of this this is a PCIe bracket cover from a high-end server in fact what was a $30,000 server a couple years ago this is just stamped steel and watch this Benz immediately the one Apple uses is milled aluminum it is half the weight of this thing and I'm not I can get it to bend barely after an extraordinary amount of pressure it's just absolutely absurd because when you look at the sum of the parts this machine's price starts to make a little more sense now I'm not saying that it's a good value I'm not saying that if you're gonna spend six thousand dollars like me you should go get this back you probably shouldn't and you would likely be better served with an iMac Pro I'll talk about that in an upcoming video soon Apple charges more to upgrade the CPU than Intel recommends that retailers charged for a brand new one Rama still extraordinarily expensive this is not a budget computer and it's not a great value but if you need a Mac Pro a really high-end one not only is this a decent twenty thousand thirty thousand fifty thousand dollar computer but it's a really cool one well folks that's all for me if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't that other button seems to work okay too we have some crazy as this thing sits in pieces we have some crazy videos planned for this machine assuming I can get it back together so stay tuned and get subscribed and as always stay snazzy see you later folks

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 838,325

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, mac pro, apple mac pro, 2019 mac pro, mac pro disassembly, mac pro teardown, mac pro nvidia, mac pro afterburner, afterburner, mac pro vs pc, pc vs mac pro, hackintosh, mac pro stand, mac pro wheels, wheels, computer, apple mac, imac pro, gpu, nvidia, amd, intel, computer build, expensive computer, fpga, hedt, pro display, pro display xdr, analysis, workstation, apple, macos, mac, mpx, 2020 mac

Id: xQGfVFpMpuQ

Length: 23min 22sec (1402 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/LondonLiliput]

I don't understand what the target group is with this. It's clearly geared to non casual users, but wouldn't someone with expertise just build themselves an equal PC for possibly half the price?

[u/juicy_chicken100]

r/applesucks

[u/VEC7OR]

The can was really creative, this one the other hand is completely mundane, yeah, its nice, quality, blah blah blah, but its meh.