 Our last Hackintosh video, an attempt to build the fastest Mac in the world, using virtualization to simplify the Hackintosh process, was a huge success. Except for the awkward timing where it ended up coming out the very day that Apple finally announced their new Mac Pro, which turned out to be faster than ours. But we're not beat yet, ladies and gentlemen. Hello? Yeah, it's time. So our goal now is to go bare-metal Hackintosh on the same 28-core CPU that we used last time, water-cool it, and overclock it before Apple releases their new Mac Pro to the public. Which gives us... What, three months or so? Well, considering that Apple's had six years to work on theirs, I'd say we've got a lot of work to do. I'm here. Alright. Let's get going. The exclusive Madrinas LTT Vanilla Cafe is a delicious blend of coffee with a sweet vanilla kick, and right now for 72 hours you can get 50% off your order with offer code Linus at madrinascoffee.com slash Linus. Just the usual reminder, we are not endorsing the use of macOS on anything other than a Mac in any way. No. Especially in a commercial environment. If you want to run Mac at work, buy a Mac. Oh, yeah, in that case it is much better to buy a Mac because then you actually get support. In order to build a Hackintosh that can compete with the new Mac Pro, we're gonna need to do a few things in preparation. First and foremost, we need a motherboard that is comparable in terms of expansion to the one that Apple is shipping in their new cheese grater, and also one that is likely to be compatible with macOS. Unfortunately, that means that our Asus Dominus board with its mere four PCI Express 16x slots is out. We turned instead to Gigabyte C621 Aorus Extreme. They refer to this thing as Monster Gaming Motherboard, and I think they're pretty close to the mark. It's rocking seven PCI Express slots for expansion and 12 DDR4 DIMM slots. This should give us plenty of room to maneuver, and if we decide to liquid cool our GPU setup, it'll actually potentially give us even more internal expansion than Apple's big passive GPU coolers will allow. One area where we will be making compromises though is external expansion. Our board does have a header to install a Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 card right around here, and if we were in so inclined we could pass through a DisplayPort signal from our GPU for the full Mac experience, but we're limited to just two of those. Right, instead of what is it six or something like that? Yeah, there's like two on the front and like four on the back. Another difference for us is our GPUs. So we are stuck with the Radeon 7, the fastest available card that's still compatible with the latest version of macOS Mojave. We intend to install more than one of these, but guys we're still kind of in the proof-of-concept phase here, so we're gonna grab one or two more when the time comes. Is this the slot you wanted for it? This one right here, perfect. Next up is the memory. Now our CPU falls well short of the up to 1.5 terabytes of memory supported on the new Mac Pro, but it still does pretty well, up to 512 gigs, and we want to have a pretty rocking config for it, but for today, well, we're just validating. So we slotted in six sticks of DDR4-3200 Trident Z RGB modules from G.Skill. That's more than enough for the tests that we're gonna throw at it, while also actually being a fair bit faster than what Apple will be shipping. For the final build, the plan is 384 gigs of the fastest 32 gig modules that we can get our hands on. Yeah, fully deck it out. Finally, for our CPU, we've got the Xeon W3175X from our previous video, but this time we're not allocating cores to our host OS or dealing with virtualization overhead, because we're going to boot Mac OS directly. To call this thing, well, we've got some plans for something really crazy that might take a little bit of engineering know-how from Alex, but for now, we've gone with the Noctua NH-U14S on top of the motherboard box, which is fine for a case, right? I mean, we didn't really have much of a choice, actually. It's, uh, the board is physically too large for any of the test benches that we have here at the office. Okay, so enough preamble. Are we ready to do it? I think we're ready. Okay, hopefully I didn't break off the SATA connector when I moved that around. That would be bad. Yeah. Punch it, Chewie. Theoretically, this just works and it just goes right to Mac OS, right? Yeah. All right. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Clover Boot Manager. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I think this is fine. It was supposed to boot up. Did you hit the keyboard by any chance? Hit the keyboard by any chance? No. Okay. What? You don't trust me? You need Brandon to validate it? Okay, so that's it. I'm a Mac. Bare metal. Okay, so if you guys are wondering how we got this done, guys, this is not a tutorial, but maybe walk them through some of the steps that we had to go through? Yeah, again, not a tutorial, but I found that using our previous VM-based Clover install as a baseline and gigabytes hardware and firmware here actually basically was compatible with Mac OS out of the box. Now, I did have to install using USB 2.0 and I had to grab fake SMC to get past some ACP-ers while booting the installer, but once we got it on there, everything basically just worked. Now, everything needs a bit of an asterisk. iMessage and FaceTime do not currently work on our Hack Pro, but we intend to solve that one way or another before the conclusion. All right, well, do you want to see us in a bit of a run? Yeah, I want to see a Cinebench run. What kind of question is that? Let's do it. I think last time we cracked 10,000. How high do you think it'll go now? I would expect it to be at least a touch higher because we're ditching the virtualization overhead and we got a couple more cores because we don't have to leave anything for our host OS. Yeah, so four extra threads. Okay, so we got 11,439. Yeah, we're looking at results that are about 5% faster in the multi-threaded test and nearly 20% faster single-threaded. So, as much as we love virtualization, we were actually leaving a fair bit of performance on the table. Yeah, well, why don't we fire up Geekbench next? Let's do it. Well, that number looks a lot higher than last time. That's nearly 80,000. Yeah. Multi-core. We're at about 23% higher in single-threaded and nearly 9% higher in multi-core. Like it's a big difference overall in CPU. Curiously though, our OpenCL and Metal scores don't look like they gained quite as much. So why don't we do Luxmark next and see what that's looking like. Okay, so now we've got a pattern here. It looks like in our GPU bound tests, our virtualization overhead wasn't hurting us nearly as much as it was in the CPU bound tests. Fascinating. So now we want to hit it with some non-synthetic CPU tests. Where do you want to start? Let's go with Blender. Blender. Sounds good. Wow. That's a lot of threads. There it is. So, 116. We saved a couple of seconds on the BMW test. But more impressively, we saved nearly half a minute on the Classroom. I think this is the fastest we've ever seen a Mac run these tests. And I did the Mozilla Firefox compile test off camera and it went 40% faster. Wow. It literally only took nine minutes. That's crazy. I think the only tests left to run from last time are then Final Cut Pro and Handbrake. Yeah. So let's fire up Final Cut. So this looks promising. Did we save... Sorry, three minutes on our Final Cut Pro test? Yeah. And nearly half a minute on Handbrake too. Which is actually really impressive when you consider that it took under six minutes to begin with. Wow. All right. So how about them apples then? Now, keep in mind guys that this is actually above the level of performance that we would expect out of the new Mac Pro for these workloads. Because while the Xeon W 3275 that Apple's using on the high end has a slightly higher single core boost clock, it also has a much lower base clock and a more conservative TDP with the same core and cache layout as our Xeon W 3175X. Oh, and don't forget that these tests were all done at stock clocks too. Our CPU only ever got to 80 degrees under Blender. While we boosted to 3.8 gigahertz all day long. If Apple's Mac Pro stops boosting basically at all, they lose on everything but memory capacity. So actually this is looking like a really good start to the project. It would appear that... Knocking on all the wood I can find. Well, I don't know if any of that... Yeah. It would appear that nothing's going to prevent us from seeing it through to the end. With that said, it's going to take some time because if we're going to do this thing right, we need to go all the way. I want a custom monoblock for this board, as much of the fastest RAM we can muster, at least one more Radeon 7, an all core overclock of 4 gigahertz minimum. I expect it to be damn near silent and... I want it all in a cheese grater. Stay tuned guys because success or failure, this is going to be one hell of a ride. Speaking of a wild ride, this crazy meandering segue to our sponsor. The Massdrop Control Keyboard features a solid CNC aluminum frame with a built-in switch plate. It's got RGB lighting, QMK firmware for customizability, and it's even got hot swappable key switches. So you can choose between Cherry MX, Kiwa, Halo switches, or heck, some combination of the three. It features a floating key design with dual USB type C connectors and weighs nearly a kilogram. The first users who sign up on drop.com can actually get $10 off this keyboard, so don't wait, head to the link in the video description at drop.com now. So, thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing. It actually has... oh yeah, this is one of our newest designs, the hard drive shirt. I think it's really cool. And our community forum, which is totally worth a join. This motherboard is almost the size of this thing on its own. Alex really thinks he can do this? That's what he says. He also said he could make a heatsink though.