 Every so often, and I hate to admit it, even I run into some kind of an issue where the only viable solution is to use a Mac. In my case, it was that I was trying to work on a review of this archival tape storage backup system and the Windows software experience was, to put it as politically correctly as I can, f***ing awful. So, my solution, some kind of Mac machine with 10 gigabit networking, and getting that going on the MacBook Pro wasn't gonna be a thing, because even though I found a network card with literally the exact same chipset that is in the iMac Pro and plugged it into an external enclosure, Mac OS just wouldn't pick it up because, whatever, f*** you, Linus. So, I dug the iMac Pro out and then I went, oh right, the whole reason we were opening this stupid thing up in the first place was that iFixit sponsored us to do a video on how to upgrade it. So, I guess that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go from eight cores and 32 gigs of RAM to theoretically 128 gigs of RAM and 18 cores, all while saving $1,000. Sounds pretty good, right? Let's hope it works. ["Cut Audio"] Step one of any upgrade is to run some benchmarks to establish a baseline. Well, oh, actually, no, hey, it's done. All right, so this gives us some idea of where we're starting. Here's our 32 gigs of RAM. We've got a Xeon W2140B. So, this is fairly similar, although not exactly the same, as the 2145 that's worth about $1,100. So, our base iMac Pro upgraded, compared to buying a top-of-the-line model from Apple in the first place, gives us a difference of about $250. And we're still gonna have an eight core processor and 32 gigs of RAM to flip on Craigslist. We'll be using our iFixit kit, along with one of their guides to complete our upgrade, starting with cutting the adhesive around the edge of the display and disconnecting the three ribbon cables before carefully putting it aside. And all without breaking it. Take that, Anthony! That's okay, he knows what he did. First order of business is we remove the fan. You just need to turn them counterclockwise until they start making that noise and they're gonna be retained by the little rubber washers that are in there. Now, there's two little connectors here. One right there, one right there. Those power the fans and you can just pull these out. Be very careful around this power supply, no touchy. You could actually die. Next, we're gonna pull out Apple's excellent Wi-Fi card. And we're gonna stash those screws along with this handy dandy little shield right about there. Is that it? Now all we gotta do is pull some of these other cables out and their covers. And we can go ahead and pull this board out. And all these little antenna connectors, these guys I've gotta come off to. These are really fragile. RF shield or something down there that's getting in my way. I wonder if I could make my life easier by making it temporarily much harder. Let's pull this speaker out. It's kind of a do as I say, not as I do moment we're having right now. I'm not gonna give Apple's out of fight. Whoa, all right, board's out and it didn't get zapped. So now that we've got this opened up for our upgrade, we can talk about what exactly in the iMac Pro is upgradable because frankly, it's not much. Over the years, Apple has gone from with the original Mac Pro being very upgradable, PCI Express cards, CPUs, GPUs, RAM, storage, pretty much everything, just like a normal tower, to the new Mac Pro, the trash can Mac Pro that theoretically had upgradable GPUs, but I don't know if they ever actually followed up with anything newer, had upgradable RAM and had upgradable CPU and storage if you were willing to put a lot of work into it, to this iMac Pro where even so the GPU is actually baked right into the motherboard here. So that's where our Vega 56 is. So that will not be upgradable to the storage. So the storage theoretically can be pulled off and replaced, but because of this T2 encryption chip is actually tied into the motherboard in such a way that if you swapped them out, it wouldn't work. And pretty much only the CPU and RAM are upgradable. And I mean, the CPU is even a theoretical one. I don't know if anyone has actually done a CPU swap on it yet. It's possible that they've even locked out the BIOS. So I'm not 100% certain if that aspect of this upgrade is going to work. So let's find out then, shall we? We have to take off these stickers here that were the problem. And the reason that Apple refused to give us their replacement pricing on the logic board. So technically it's not that they're denying us warranty service, but they were definitely treating us differently. Whether it is legal for them to treat us differently because of a sticker having been broken or not, is something that is very much an ongoing debate. And something that if you're down in the US, you should probably contact your local congressional representative about. So there's eight screws that we're gonna have to pull off. Wow, there's a lot of tension on those mounts. I'm having fun. You having fun? Oh yeah. Good times. Wow, that back plate just goes right metal on PCB. How interesting. So you might not think that we'd have to remove the screws from the GPU here, but the reason that we do is actually because the entire cooling unit is one piece. So it's connected by heat pipes between both CPU and GPU to these metal cooling fins here. Holy crap. Okay, I did not see that one coming. What the heck, Apple? So they don't use the retention mechanism for the CPU that is normally part of the socket design, I guess to save some space on the board, which means that when you take the heat sink off, it just rips the CPU right out of the board. Fortunately that came out clean. So I don't think we're gonna run into any trouble. And Apple expects even their authorized service providers to get boards with CPUs, RAM, and SSDs pre-installed on them as a single unit, even though they are socketed and they are not soldered. So I guess this isn't supposed to be a problem for the end user, but I'm still not a fan of designs like this that just, thermal paste just pulls the CPU out of the socket. Whoa. Go ahead and cut. Kidding. Anyway, enough about that. This is upgrade guide, not complain about the process guide. So right here around the CPU socket area is pretty much everything we can do. So we're gonna pull out our eight gig sticks of RAM. So we're gonna be careful here not to have them pop out of the slot, because if they did, they could accidentally bend the pins in the CPU socket. Then we're gonna go ahead and take our 18 core CPU. Ooh. Currently Intel's highest end workstation chip. There we go. So they haven't done anything funky with the spec of the socket. Just goes in a little something like that. Now we get to crack open the seals on two grand worth of memory. Look at all the DRAM packages on this thing. Line that bad boy up. One. Two. Three. Four. The only thing I regret is using a green PCB. So now we get to pippity pop our cooling solution back on. Gonna have to, we're probably just gonna reuse the thermal compound for the GPU, but this CPU situation might need a little bit of help. I gotta pry this baby out of here. Oh, okay, well that was easier than it looked like it was going to be. All ready then. So we're gonna put on some new thermal compound here. What, just pop that on just like that? Oh, oh, oh. Okay, we made one small mistake. We're gonna have to put in these two RAM sticks afterward. Hey, don't blame me. You guys subscribed to this mess. Pop that back in there. All right. Let's go ahead and turn this over. Get that bolted down. Now with our upgrades done, we're gonna flip the machine back over. Now it is really important because of the way that CPU is just gonna pop out of the socket. If we move the heat pipe cooler, we're gonna make sure we hold that in place. Oh boy, oh boy. Yep, hold that in place against the board. Oh good, our CPU didn't pop out. Then we're gonna go ahead and put our mounting bracket on the back, back on. Now this is a little bit tricky here because there are two different kinds of screws. You need to make sure you put the right ones in the right holes. So the ones with the kind of built-in standoff on them, those go the orientation we're looking at the board here, top left and bottom right. The ones with the much shorter posts, those go top right, bottom left. If you screw this up, best case scenario, you've got kind of wonky mounting pressure. Worst case scenario, you will damage your board. Boy, this is a lot more pressure than I'm comfortable putting on a motherboard. I hate these mounts. Okay. Wow, gorgeous. Now the GPU is not nearly as scary because there's no pins that you can accidentally rip the CPU out of and then accidentally put it in sideways and mangle them up or anything. Oh, by the way, I'm sorry, off camera, I did wipe the thermal compound off the GPU and I did reapply, but I'm not gonna pull this back off to show you guys that. So to put our GPU cooler back on, see these little cutouts right here? So just look at these two holes here and then the shape of the components underneath them and you won't be able to screw up which one goes which way. In this case, all the screws are the same. So we just go ahead and position these bad boys and then screw them down. Once again, applying far more pressure than I am super comfortable with. Beautiful. That is our upgraded logic board. And they said it couldn't be done. Now to put it together and find out if it works. One thing we're gonna do to make our lives a little bit easier compared to when Lewis and I did this is we're gonna pull out the speakers, put those back in after we've installed the logic board. Let me see. There we go. Actually, that should be fine. All right. One of the keys at this stage is making sure that you don't accidentally cover up some of the connectors that you're gonna need to plug back into your motherboard. Now the last thing we wanna do is accidentally scratch the PCB with one of these standoffs here while we're inserting the board. This is one nice thing about the design. They've got this rubber stopper here so you can't let it fall down or anything. Now let's go around and do our motherboard screws. Gonna arbitrarily pick this one to start with. We want those as centered as possible because it can affect the alignment of your rear ports if you don't have the board in perfectly. We're gonna need to lift up this side of the board here a little bit in order to get that on there. Perfect. I'm gonna do these power ones now. There we go. Oh, beautiful. Okay, one little trick, guys. This speaker connector right here has this little loop here. So we're gonna go ahead and put that on just part way. We're gonna plug it in. Shoop. Then we're gonna tighten it down. While we're at it, we can start connecting some of the back ribbon cables. There we go. All right, we're gonna check our rear port alignment at this point. Looking pretty slick. All right. Now we're gonna throw in our other two power screws, tighten those up. Don't wanna lose connection here. There we go. And we can start connecting the rest of the connectors on the back of our board. Okay, we can go ahead and put our speaker back in at this point too. How's that cable managed? Feeling good now. Now we're gonna hook up all the antennas. These are really fragile connectors. Please be careful. Now we're just gonna stick this shield into its little cable management slot here. There we go. It should sit on kind of a little hinge like that. Then we're gonna adjust these antenna wires and screw it in. Now this motherboard mounting screw, we're gonna have to take out temporarily. We're gonna put this little shield in place, screw it back in part way, screw in the other side, being very careful not to drop it, undoing all of the work we just did. And we can go ahead and tighten down our motherboard screw. All right, now we're gonna throw the speakers in and we are almost home free. Oh, where did this go? Yep, I see where it goes. Now we've got a somewhat obnoxious task ahead of us. Because the display is glued on, it means we've got to remove all of the old adhesive. So this will take a little while. Dab some alcohol on there too, that won't hurt. All right. So, now that that's all off, I'm gonna stretch out my arm a little bit here. All that is left is for us to put on new adhesive strips and put on the screen. Be really careful with these, you don't get two cracks at them. So you can see they got this little hole up here for alignment or whatever it's for. Nailed that one, onto the next. These last two along the bottom are the trickiest, just because this kit was designed, as far as I can tell, with the original Retina iMac in mind. And there might be just some slight, ever so slight differences. So you're gonna have like this little tab doodad here that kind of doesn't really go anywhere. It's not a big deal. I don't know, maybe it goes along this thing here. That really doesn't matter. There, boom. Minor detail, guess I better put the cooler back in. Hello, well. And also these two screws right there. Now, the trickiest part. Removing the adhesive strips, putting the display back on. We're gonna put on these three cables first though. Apple's gonna be watching this video, they're gonna be like, we wanna recruit Linus to be an Apple authorized service provider. Looks like it goes right there. Yep, and then put the latch down. Boop. Oh, looks like that one went in super easy. And this guy. Boop. Never a problem, you know? Now, this is not attached. This is very scary. But I wanna know if this thing powers on before I waste my adhesive and an hour of my life peeling it all back off and reapplying it again. So let's go ahead and get this plugged in and see how she goes. Ooh. There we go. Huh. Okay, Jesus. Had me going for a minute there. I don't use Macs much. I don't know how long they take to boot up. Whatever, let's get this keyboard and mouse hooked up. Let's see how much performance we got. Whoa. Now we're not out of the woods yet. There's a distinct possibility that some of our stuff might not have been detected. So, okay, nevermind. That ruined the suspense and anticipation because there it is. Intel Xeon W2195. That's our 18 core processor with 128 gigs of DDR4 memory. So let's run our benchmark, shall we? So a quick Google search online tells me it should be in the neighborhood of 50,000. Come on, show me the big score. There it is. So we just crushed our old performance. We are right up there with the regular factory Apple iMac Pro with the 18 core, but we saved ourselves a bunch of money at of course the expense of our time. Fantastic. This thing is now officially tricked right out. And of course, this video wouldn't have been possible without iFixit sponsoring it. So a massive thank you to iFixit for sponsoring this video, sending over the RAM upgrades, sending over the adhesive strips, their tool kit that was perfect, had everything we needed in it. You guys can check out iFixit.com. They've got tons of great guides, as well as of course their comprehensive lineup of tools, replacement parts and all that good stuff at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, 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 this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. If you noticed that we had some audio issues for part of this video, you can thank David. You can thank him in the comments. Yeah, I can't be in the video. Can't talk about him. I can talk about whoever I want. I'm the CEO of the company. That's a good one, sorry.