 So here's the thing, 18 cores, if you're a performance fiend is pretty darn good in spite of the iMac Pros woefully inadequate cooling. But come on Apple, is this really the fastest Mac that money can buy? The iMac Pro? I'm glad I asked because in fact, no, no it is not. How do we know? Because we, and by we, I mean mostly that guy, built the real fastest Mac on the planet for ourselves. And it's time for us to take it for a little spin. Get it? I don't wanna move it that much, I don't wanna break it. Speaking of things I don't wanna break, this transition to our sponsor, Private Internet Access. That's exactly what you'll get with PIA, a safe and protected IP. And it's got loads of other features as well. Check it out at the link in the video description. Okay, so let's begin by going over what we've done here. This is our ASUS Dominus Extreme motherboard. And hanging off of it, we actually have, wait, Anthony, is that two power supplies? Yeah, even though the 1000 watts of Sonic Prime that's on my bench right now has more than enough wattage to handle all of this, the actual load of all these VRMs during power up, it's just way too much for it. It trips the protection and I had to put the second power supply on there. Speaking of things we needed to do, we needed to go with RGB memory of course, right? Well, of course, yeah, so it's not ECC, but it does support it if we wanted it. Okay. Instead it's just six matching sticks of DDR4 3000, which is faster than the 2666 we have in our iMac Pro. We could go faster, but we don't have that many matching sets lying around. So he mentioned that we could go with ECC memory. And that's because the coup de grace is that underneath this Noctua U14S cooler here is the biggest, baddest Xeon W workstation processor on the market. The 28 core, 56 thread, 3175X, which means that we've actually got a solid 20 more threads on our system than we do on our upgraded iMac Pro. And what's more, not only do we have more RAM slots than our iMac Pro by a factor of two, we can also add more modern graphics cards like our Radeon 7 here. So just to be clear guys, we have crushed the iMac Pro in every possible performance metric, but that Radeon 7 does mean that we needed to get the latest version of Mac OS working. Yeah, that was a pain to get running. And before I talk about it, I just wanna stress that this is not a tutorial. So first I used Foxlet's new Mac OS Simple KVM as a jumping off point. After trying a couple of different approaches, including running Linux logical volume arrays with Optane acceleration, which didn't work, I eventually settled on the current setup. 27 cores, 54 threads, 42 gigabytes of RAM and two one terabyte Samsung 970 Pros in Apple Raid Mirror. Because apparently this wasn't complicated enough for me as it was. Now, unfortunately, while I wanted to set up Optane, the reason that didn't work is because the Mac OS installer straight up refused to boot with Optane in it, even our SSD 800Ps that I tried to use. So just with Optane anywhere in the system, the Mac OS installer is just like, no. Yeah, no. All right. Okay, then other than that, it was pretty much a standard install? Yeah, basically. There's some extra setup and some pitfalls with running Apple Raid on Mojave, but I worked through them and got the latest beta installed. They ended up doing direct pass through of not only the two 970 Pros, but also the Iquantia 10 gigabit NIC that's in here and our Radeon 7. And all of it just worked because it's all got drivers in Mojave. All right. So I think we've teased you guys enough at this point. Let's do some benchmarks. So why don't we start with a staple Apple benchmark, Geekbench 4. Okay. So our iMac Pro got a very respectable multi-threaded score of over 53,000, but our Hackintosh creamed it by over 20,000 points. To put that in perspective, that's almost as much as adding an entire Core i9 MacBook Pro to the mix. And when we look at OpenCL and Metal Perform, okay. So that's interesting. Here, our Radeon 7 actually managed worse performance than the Vega 56 in our iMac Pro. Now, given that when we threw the Radeon 7 on the iMac Pro, we got similar numbers, it looks like aside from, yes, losing some of our performance thanks to overhead from our hypervisor, the Radeon 7's driver just isn't optimized for whatever Geekbench is throwing at it here. I mean, I guess that's why this version of Mojave is in beta. To further investigate then, we wanted to fire up another GPU test. So let's hit it with Luxmark. Now that's not bad. Now we've at least doubled our performance over the Vega 56, which is quite impressive, considering that the Radeon 7 is a 64CU part. And considering that our iMac Pro gets the same level of performance out of a Radeon 7 when connected via an external enclosure. So again, this seems to point to driver optimization rather than raw performance. Now let's change gears here and go ahead and hit our CPU with some good old fashioned Cinebench. Three, two, one, go. This is not even going to be a fair fight. Not really, no. I mean, there are so many extra threads on this thing. So to be clear, we actually gave up a full hyper-threaded core for our host Linux operating system, but that still leaves us with a very significant performance advantage compared to the 18 core iMac Pro. Not to mention that our base clock is actually much higher, which for a heavily threaded workload like this one makes a huge difference. Okay, we're done. Nearly 11,000 in Cinebench R20. And are you even done? Yeah, I just finished. 6,800. We're over a third faster than the fastest computer that Apple sells with macOS. With that said though, if we look at single threaded performance in Cinebench, the Achilles heel of our Xeon shows up. Because it's got so many cores, Intel had to do some careful tuning of the power profiles of this thing. And our fastest boost clocks are much lower than the iMac Pros, which means that without overclocking, we'll always be at a disadvantage in these kinds of single threaded workloads. That's a bit of a bummer, but hey, overclocking on this platform does actually happen to be a thing. For now though, let's move on to some more testing. Let's fire up Blender and give that a go. All right, ready, set. Ha ha ha ha. It's so funny. So you have to be the one that actually does all the work to build this thing. But then when we're like drag racing, I get to drive it. Well, I got to drive the faster one last time, so. That's true, you did actually. I noticed that. Ha ha ha ha. It's not actually a competition. We're just thrilled this thing works at all. It's interesting. There's actually not a whole lot of air coming out back here. Like there is, but it's like not super high. You say that as though you don't know that's just iMac things. Yeah, but this cooler is a lot better than the iMac. Yeah, but like, is it a Noctua? Okay then. That would be a fun video. Oh. Cutting open the back of an iMac and just going like full like, you know, muscle car hood scoop like. Yeah, yeah. Is that a video? Do you guys want to see that? Anyway, in the meantime, let's get back to this. Blender was not a good time for our poor iMac Pro. We are just over 40% faster with our Hackintosh on both the BMW and classroom test, which is actually, what's weird is this is better than you'd expect looking at the thread count alone. And again, that's our higher base clock in action here. Finally, let's round out our testing with a little bit of handbrake. So we fired up a float plane video here and we're gonna go ahead and use our LTT fast preset. Let's face it, the small head start I had isn't gonna make a difference at the end of this. Nope. So here's the thing. Even though there's diminishing returns when it comes to H264 transcoding and adding more cores, our Hackintosh still pulls off a very respectable 40 second lead over the iMac Pro. Bringing us then to our final test, Final Cut Pro. Now that is the only actual clear loss for our Hackintosh today. As it turns out, Final Cut's background renderer is not highly threaded and is very bursty. That is to say it results in regular spikes of CPU utilization which means then that our iMac Pro's higher boost clock wins the day by a wide margin. And it only adds up as more and more of those spikes have to happen on our Xeon W3170X. Again, something we could potentially overcome with some overclocking. Before we go any further though, we need to do something to validate our approach here because in theory, you're not losing a ton of performance using virtualization at most, you know, one to 3%. But we don't have any real world validation of this. So what we need to do is shut this down and compare the results that we just got in macOS to our bare metal hardware running in Windows in as many cross-platform benchmarks as we can find to see how big the difference is. Unfortunately, when we did this testing, it was all over the place, even with the two extra threads that our bare metal machine has available. So on Windows, occasionally we're eclipsing our macOS score in CPU tests like our handbrake transcode and in Cinebench. But then our Windows machine drops off significantly in Blender and V-Ray, which you would think would be very similar benchmarks to Cinebench. As for our more GPU focused tests like Luxmark, well, that shows that there is a bit of performance left on the table even with direct pass-through, although this again could be down to driver optimization. Yeah, it kind of smells to me like it's a little bit of a scheduler issue in Windows. It's something we've seen before. So ironically, that means our real world performance is actually better in the VM. Now, to be clear, we're not saying that there's magic performance that you get by running your operating system in a virtualized environment. In fact, quite the contrary, it's just that what we've discovered is that unless we run this bare metal hardware as a hackintosh, we're not gonna be able to quantify the difference in macOS. Now, I'm not saying that's impossible. It's just that part of the reason that we had wanted to do it this way with a VM in the first place was we wanted to avoid the fragmentation of hardware and the way that Apple is constantly updating macOS in ways that can brick compatibility. Now, a VM could still have the compatibility bricked, but at the very least, it's just one set of things to maintain instead of every motherboard on the planet. Anyway, bottom line is this is very experimental right now. This is not something that we're recommending that you go do for yourselves unless you've got a ton of time to kill. I mean, this motherboard has a market segment composed of a few dozen people at best. And when Anthony said this was a complicated setup, he wasn't kidding. I'm like, I'm just gonna let this list of pitfalls and problems scroll by. Wow. But there is still even more potential here because unlike our iMac Pro, we can overclock, we can add more memory, and, well, if this GPU slot wasn't dead, we could even add more than one graphics card to our Hackintosh. But since support for the Radeon 7 is still as of filming in beta, we're not gonna press our luck any further than this. Besides, I think we've got enough future plans for this that there's another video in here. FreshBooks is the small business accounting software custom built for how you wanna work. It's a simple way to be more productive, more organized, and to get paid faster. With FreshBooks, whether you're a freelancer or a small business owner, you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster. You can see when a client has seen your invoice to put an end to the guessing games, and you get access to FreshBooks' unbelievable support. Like, literally, you call them on the phone and someone picks up. No support tree, no return call, nothing like that. Just friendly help when you need it. For an unrestricted 30-day free trial, just go to freshbooks.com slash tech tips. We're gonna have that linked below, and enter Linus Tech Tips in the How Did You Hear About Us section. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you like seeing the fastest Mac on the planet, then hit that Like button, 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 this one, and that one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.