 The Mac Pro, it's not a bad machine. Although choosing Xeon W at this point in time was an unfortunate decision, we'll review it later. Ladies and gentlemen, it's later. So to help you understand which model of Mac Pro you should consider and whether you should consider one at all, we got our hands on the eight, 16 and 28 core Xeon Ws and laboriously tore down and rebuilt our Mac Pro with all of them to find out where the sweet spot is. To make our testing more complete, we also built benches with both a Ryzen 9 3950X and a Threadripper 3970X to see if any Mac Pro is the right choice for a high-end workstation or if Apple made a big mistake going Intel this time around. Just like you'd be making a mistake by missing this segue to our sponsor, Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet is the sleek way to keep wallet balls down with its compact frame and RFID blocking interplates. Check out their new patterns and use the offer code LINUS to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping at the link below. This is awful. We'll begin with Cinebench where, oh dear, it's really not much of a contest, is it? I mean, sure, compared to the iMac Pro's last gen Xeon W, performance is up, but both our eight-core and even our upgraded 16-core Mac Pro get creamed by our consumer Ryzen bench that costs less than the base model Mac Pro. Unsurprisingly then, the Threadripper 3970X for its part embarrasses the entire lineup virtually across the board and, adding insult to injury, even that bench is less expensive than a base model Mac Pro. There are a few cases where Apple wins though. There's the Firefox compile test where the 28-core Mac Pro picks up a convincing win of about 50 seconds over Threadripper, and then there's Pugetbench for After Effects, a compositing benchmark where the 28-core Xeon W actually posts better overall numbers than Threadripper, though not by much, and the Ryzen 9 3950X is also in contention for top spot. Ouch. Now granted, our Ryzen 9 and Threadripper benches are equipped with much more powerful Titan RTX graphics cards, but the thing is, that card costs half of what the Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo in our Mac Pro does. Apple's beef with Nvidia is clearly hurting their competitiveness in tasks that call for GPU heavy lifting, and it doesn't always work to just throw more smaller GPUs at the problem. In case you guys were wondering, for games, the bootcamp drivers don't enable Crossfire, so performance, even on Windows, is about on par with just a standard Radeon 7. Now there's one other potential market for Apple that some of you commented on in our review that has absolutely no need of a GPU like that, and that is the audio engineer market where more PCI Express slots is more better. And yeah, I can see that for sure, especially with how many Mac-only audio packages are out there. It kind of doesn't make sense, so it's one of the many reasons why it's such a great option for audio and music production. You could theoretically cut a vocal or a voiceover like I'm doing right now, and it does not make a sound. But the thing is, that's clearly not who Apple is targeting with this machine, with the focus on their afterburner accelerator cards, dual Radeon Pro MPX cards, and massive system memory capacity. And for that matter, Threadripper outdoes the Mac Pro in PCI Express as well, with 88 Gen 4 lanes compared to Xeon W's 64 lanes at Gen 3 speeds. There's just no way to sugarcoat it. Apple, as far as we can tell, should have gone with Threadripper or Epic here. I mean, just look at what Blur Studio did with Threadripper on Terminator Dark Fate, where in an interview with Post Perspective, founder Tim Miller says, the difference for the artists is that instead of working here until 1 a.m., they're going home to put their children to bed. Something that normally would take five minutes was taking five seconds. You're just not gonna get that level of performance out of any of these Xeon W's. And with this reality, I can't see many of the Apple holdouts holding out for much longer. Maybe Apple simply wasn't aware of what AMD had in the pipeline, or maybe they just didn't wanna optimize their software for AMD's unconventional chiplet CPU architecture. But whatever the reason, Apple's in a position now where not only their price, but even their performance isn't industry leading on this machine. But let's say you're a Mac-based VFX outfit, and you're overdue to upgrade some machines, as you probably are. If you're stuck in the Mac ecosystem, what trim level do you go for? There may not be a single definitively right answer here, but there are definitely a lot of wrong ones. So let's walk through it. We know that Apple's base model Mac Pro costs $6,000 US, and for that, you're getting a laughable 32 gigs of RAM and eight of Intel's Cascade Lake CPU cores. It's worth noting that this RAM configuration is suboptimal, not only for how little you get in a machine costing this much, but also because it's only four sticks, meaning that you're not fully taking advantage of the six channel memory controller on your Xeon processor. So regardless of any of your other choices, you want at least 48 gigs of RAM, or you're gonna be leaving performance on the table. That's a $300 upgrade if you get it from Apple, putting us at 6,300 US dollars. But we actually still recommend sticking with the base model as far as memory goes and installing your own third party memory. It's shockingly fast and easy, and I couldn't believe how much cheaper it was. It's important to note that just like on a PC, additional memory will not improve your system performance unless you regularly run out of memory. So guys, if your workload doesn't demand more, system performance will be just about the same, going from 48 gigs all the way to one and a half terabytes. Bumping the CPU up to a 16 core Xeon W3245 means that you're out another $2,000 from Apple. And it is worth noting that because this is not an M series CPU, you're going to be limited to 768 gigs of RAM. Only the 24 and 28 core models are capable of handling the full memory loadout. That is so much memory though, that unless you're doing 8K raw compositing, you probably won't need it anytime soon. Speaking of the 28 core, that's a $7,000 upgrade from stock. And as some of you rightly pointed out, as an M series Xeon, these do command that price from Intel, not the $4,000 price. Apple actually are not the ones who marked this one up. And that M distinction is important for two reasons. One, if you're upgrading for yourself, you need to make sure it's an M series CPU that you purchase in order to get that extra memory capacity. And two, this is cool. If you don't need one and a half terabytes of RAM, you can actually get away with the standard Xeon W3275 for a lot less. We tried it and it works fine, even though Apple doesn't offer that option themselves. As for the GPU, there's really only two choices that make any sense right now. Compared to the single GPU Radeon Pro Vega 2 card, the Duo gives you a better upgrade path in the future. So we would go that route if you need the performance today. If you don't need the performance today, you can get the stock Radeon Pro 580X and then replace or augment it with an off the shelf Radeon 7 or even RX 5700 XT while you wait for the Radeon Pro W5700X to come out. That MPX module, while it's not yet available, is Navi based, which should mean a significant performance uplift over the current factory options and support for a display stream compression while still providing you with additional GPU provided Thunderbolt 3 ports. Now only you know how much SSD storage you need and only you know whether or not the afterburner card's sole function of decoding up to 8K ProRes RAW makes any sense for your workflow. But what I can tell you is that you're a sucker if you buy the wheels. Okay, yes, the feet are kind of hard to get off, but you can remove them on your own, which means you can install your own wheels if you really want to and probably for a lower cost in time and RAW cache than the wheels cost at $400. Besides, it's not like the feet are unusable, so we'd recommend saving that money and celebrating all the IO on this thing with a T-shirt. Lttstore.com. Any other upgrades like internal drive bays or Rade controllers have to come after sale. So we won't get too much into those other than to say that they are available and we've got a video showing how to install them. And besides, for expanded storage, I would really recommend a NAS in this day and age anyway. Remember guys, you've got dual 10 gig NICs in here. So even if you don't have a 10 gig switch, a 10 gig equipped NAS can be directly attached without forcing you onto wireless connectivity if you really need the speed. So with all that in mind, here are a few sample configs that might make for a good jumping off point if you're in a situation where buying a Mac Pro makes sense for you. Follow these guidelines with your use case in mind and you'll be okay. It's not quite all there is to know though, so get subscribed so you don't miss our video on the rack mount version of the Mac Pro. For today, the final question though is this, should anyone who doesn't have to buy a Mac Pro, buy a Mac Pro? Based on what we've seen, oh hell no. The thing is, you're not the target market anymore. And frankly, no matter how elegant and innovative the machine is, and it is, after seeing these numbers, I just can't be convinced. So close Apple. 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