 We lost the battle. Apple launched their new desktop computer before we could complete our hackintosh Mac Pro killer over here. But the war is not over yet. We are nearing completion of our project and our goal for today is to get these two beasts up and running side by side. So step one is to fill the hack pro with water and boot it up. One moment, please. Yes sirry Bob. No problem at all. I don't know what that beep is, but we're green here. Okay, we've got a small problem. You know what is though? Our sponsor. You guys know about honey by now, but now they've got honey gold, which can be redeemed for rewards at stores like eBay, Walmart and Target. Get 10 bucks for every thousand gold you collect when you sign up at joinhoney.com slash LTT down below. Ultimately the no post situation was solved by BIOS update, but then immediately following that, the dang thing wouldn't let Clover boot. And after trying all the obvious solutions, we called in our secret weapon. Thanks Anthony, you're a hero. Now our solution still isn't perfect. Our liquid SSD uses a feature called PCI express bifurcation to split a 16X slot into effectively four 4X slots. And Apple does not allow you to boot to software raid. So we're gonna have to sub that one out for one with a hardware raid controller built in so we can get those juicy multi NVMe speeds. And so this is it. Mac OS Catalina running on what is essentially Mac Pro 2019 hardware. Again, yes, we're a little later than Apple, but in our defense, we had a few months and they had years, so come on. So check this out. 3.1 gigahertz, 28 core Xeon W, 384 gigs of RAM, AMD Radeon 7 16 gig graphics times two. Everything is actually being picked up exactly as we'd expected. Here's our storage. So you can see here, we've actually got four of these little M.2 drives on a single card, but three of them are running in a 2.4 terabyte raid zero, and then only one of them is set up as our boot drive. You can see we've got a map of our PCI slots that are used. Of course, it's not working properly because our Mac Pro contains different PCIe slots. Also of note is that our networking is working. So we've got a 10 gigabit ethernet connection, two extra one gigs, and we've got both wifi and Bluetooth working thanks to some add-in cards. With all of that said, it is important to note that we are not at feature parity with a first party Apple computer here. I mean, obviously all the caveats with respect to software updates and all of that that come with hackintoshing apply here. Also, we've got no Thunderbolt 3 currently. We are working on adding that in, but we've got a few issues with our motherboard not seeing our Thunderbolt add-in card. The maintenance on our water cooling loop is a clear disadvantage compared to a first party Mac Pro. Not to mention that serviceability of the machine in general is gonna be a disadvantage for us. Apple has actually done a truly magnificent job of making upgrades and maintenance a breeze on the 2019 Mac Pro. That's actually something we really did not expect to have to compete with. So compared to that, adding something like an expansion card or memory is a total nightmare on our machine. Also, our cooling system is a little bit janky in some spots. This fan right here is running over our 10 gig network card and our SSD. It ain't particularly elegant, but it actually does a great job of cooling those components. And the good news is that, like I said, it's all working and we're expecting it, especially under heavy load, to be quieter than Apple's Mac Pro, which if you'll recall, was one of our key design goals. So that's most of what's bad about our machine, but let's talk about some of the things that have actually been improved since last time we spoke. We've got a new radiator mount. So we actually modified the 3D model to account for the bracket and the screws that are up at the front here that hold the chassis together. So now the rad with the fan sits right up against the front pretty much, giving us the most possible space inside our system. We've also got a new reservoir mount. Can you hit me up with that old one, by the way? So you can see it's made of nice, thick aluminum now. There's basically no giving it whatsoever. So compared to our original one, that's a big improvement too. Our new power supply mount. Now it's not actually in here, but can I have that? The original one was kind of a proof of concept for whether we could fit the power supply in there, make the modular cables like kind of held in place and then detachable so we could pull the whole unit off of it. Well, this is the over-engineered final one. So I can show you guys how that works actually, if you'd like. I've actually kind of taken his word for this up till now. Totally turnkey solution. Everyone's gonna be building their own hack pros just like this one in no time. And then the idea is that we're gonna rip the locking connectors off of them so that installing the power supply is as simple as taking the whole unit and going plonk on top of the modular connectors. Now you'd never ship a system like that or anything like that, but I mean, it should hold in place well enough if you're just putting it on your desk next to you. Another improvement that's pretty small but makes a big difference to the usability is a new VRM block here. So our original one only had a single inlet and a single outlet. And what that meant was that there wasn't enough room for us to put full thickness fans on our rear radiator and our tubing runs crossed our dims so they were really difficult to get at even with the power supply pulled out. So now it actually goes in here, out here, back in here and back out here. And the cooling performance is spectacular. So it both cleans up the loop and makes it a little bit easier to upgrade the RAM. Ah, yes, this is another big one. I don't think we've shown this yet. The original locking bar is fully functional. So it actually holds the panel in place and when you pull on it, it lets the panel off. We're not gonna try and put it on right now because our power cord still runs through a hole in the middle of it, but minor details. The most time-consuming improvement of course though is the new back panel. I've seen a lot of hackintoshes done in this case and the vast majority of them use either off the shelf or self-fabricated back panels that are basically just plain ATX conversion kits. This is something else. We wanted it to look like it came from Apple and fit perfectly or at least as perfectly as our time constraints allowed. And the first one had some issues. Nicholas tried hard, but he ended up misjudging the curve at the top here and we ended up with a bit of an overshoot. This one took quite a bit longer, but as you guys can see, once we apply a little bit of bondo, touch of paint and stand back maybe, what do you think, four feet? This should look pretty darn convincing. Last little detail, we had a lot of people asking us, no, unfortunately there is no CD drive. It's just a blank plate here, it's glued in. We probably could have done it, but we would have given up like a third of our cooling capacity here in the front and it might've interfered with our graphics card. We might've had to move it or just have one graphics card. It just didn't seem worth it. Besides, what freaking year is it? It's not like the 2019 Mac Pro has an optical drive. Of course not. Now all that's left is to make sure that all of this hardware that's detected correctly is actually running correctly. Let's hit some geek bunch. Here we go, boys. There it is, 22,300. So let's go ahead and have a look at some comparison numbers here. There it is guys, 22,300 in the multi-core benchmark. Huh, would you look at that? It's nice to have water cooling, isn't it? Hit them boost clocks. We haven't even done, strictly speaking, any overclocking yet. Whoa, goal number two seems to have been achieved. Now, what we really wanna do is a side-by-side drag race between these two. But unfortunately, we ordered a base processor machine with the intention of upgrading it ourselves. And our 28-core processor isn't here yet. So make sure you're subscribed for the upgrade video and the final one in this series where we're gonna run them side-by-side and also show off the finished hack pro with its paint job and all of that. And here's the thing guys, this won't be cheap when we're done, but we are expecting it to be over $10,000 less than one of these costs at retail, no matter how much we spend on the paint job. So the value comparison is going to be interesting to see. For now though, there is a reason we've set them up side-by-side because there are some things that we can comment on. The biggest one is gonna be thermals and acoustics because if anything, running our 28-core against Apple's, what do we have in there, an 8-core? Something stupid like that? Yeah, against Apple's 8-core is going to be their advantage, not ours. Oh yeah, I guess I never even showed you guys. The front I.O. is kind of roughed in now. You can see it still needs some Bondo and it needs the actual USB ports that don't have like bent housings on them and stuff. And it needs the power button put back in. But yeah, that's gonna be in by the time it goes in for painting. Anyway, the biggest comparison that we wanna do today is thermals and acoustics. And that one, we're comfortable putting our mismatched machines up against each other in because if anything, us having a 28-core with two GPUs and Apple being equipped with just an 8-core processor and two GPUs, so we've got a single card with two GPUs. Well, that should be our disadvantage. So if we can get even close to the thermals and acoustics of the Mac Pro 2019, we're gonna consider that a pretty significant win. Well, that's not really as good as I was hoping. We're running folding at home. By the way, Linus Tech Tips Forum has an amazing folding team. Shout out to those guys and you can join at the link below. And we're getting full power out of these CPUs. So our 8-core is running at about 133 watts and our 28-core is running at 275 watts. But we're only beating the 8-core's temperature by about a half a degree. That's really less of a margin of victory than I had anticipated. And impressively, the real Mac Pro is nearly silent, even under full CPU load here. Mind you, we are in a fairly chilly environment. While our Hack Pro has a distinct fan hum to it. Not an undesirable noise. Remember, these are Noctua fans. They sound pretty good even at full bore, but it's definitely objectively louder. Small update for you guys. While we were changing the batteries in my mic pack, we actually extended our lead. We are now seven degrees lower than the actual Mac Pro. And I guess that makes sense because we've seen Apple tune their fan curves in this way before. Where if you have a short spiky load, it'll actually take quite some time for the fans to ramp up and it'll just let the large heat sinks soak up some of the heat and let the temperatures rise until it's like, oh, shoot, yeah, we actually need to cool this thing now. So that's very interesting. Now we're gonna kick things up a notch and hit the GPUs. Now, both of our systems have two graphics processors, but in very different configurations. So this is a Pro Vega 2 Duo. So it's a single card with two GPUs on it. And then this is two single GPU Radeon 7s. Unfortunately on Mac OS, we couldn't find a simple repeatable way to load up both GPUs with the same application at the same time. So instead what we're gonna do is fire up the Unigine Valley benchmark on one of the graphics cores and then run Geekbench on the other one. And it took a little bit of trial and error to make sure that we were running these benchmarks on separate cores, but it looks like we've got it. So as far as Unigine Valley goes, it looks like our Radeon 7 is a little bit behind, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20%. When it comes to compute though, it is way behind. So this is a combination of being architecturally different and AMD unlocking more of the professional compute options in the driver, but it is like 60% as performant. I'm eyeballing here, I'm eyeballing. It's really far off though. After running for about 10 minutes, we've got some results to share with you guys. So our CPU temperatures, even with both of our graphics cards running, are basically untouched over here. So we're in the neighborhood of 56 degrees. And curiously, they're basically untouched over here too. So our Mac Pro is running at about 66 degrees. As for our GPUs, unfortunately, we were only able to measure the temperatures on the real Mac Pro because our GPU die sensor is just not supported on Mac on the random Radeon 7s that we installed. So that kind of makes sense, I guess. So it's anywhere in the neighborhood of 56 to about 70 degrees, depending on which sensor you're gonna believe. And in again, these sort of chilly temperatures, the Mac Pro is still shockingly quiet. We're definitely gonna have to do some tuning with our fan curves on the Hack Pro in order to get those same results. The good news is that we've definitely got the thermal headroom since we've got about 10 degrees more to play with over here. For those wondering, the reason that we closed this up while we were doing thermal testing was that we didn't want to draw fresh air that wouldn't otherwise be available through our back radiator while we're doing thermal testing. And in the finished build, there won't be a power cable sticking through the side of it. So that'll actually be sealed up. Mind you, we're gonna have more cooling than we do now because the Eagle item you might've noticed that we've only got two fans on that front triple radiator. We can put a third one on, we just haven't gotten around to it yet. This is great progress overall, but what remains to be done? Our original goal was to as closely match the functionality of the real Mac Pro as possible. And we're gonna be able to pull off some more things than what we've shown today, but not all. iMessage and FaceTime are pretty standard Hackintosh fare if we can manage to guess a serial number, which Apple hasn't made more difficult yet, then we should be able to get those up and running. Our board recently got a BIOS update that gives it compatibility with the new 327528 core processor that the Mac Pro uses, as well as support for load reduced memory dims. So theoretically, once we get one of the new chips, we could try installing it in both of them. Because even if it means less CPU performance, cause we won't have overclocking support anymore, we might be able to bump up our RAM capacity to match the real Mac. We intended to have the same expandability as the Mac Pro, but we ended up using more of our PCIe expansion slots for our basic configuration than we wanted. Now we do still have some, and it is possible for us to throw in an afterburner card, though we haven't verified that that'll actually work. But compared to the Mac Pro, we're capped at two instead of four GPUs, cause that dual GPU monstrosity that Apple's using isn't available sold separately. And we've only got two slots that are still open right now here and here. The last thing is probably the biggest one. Without Thunderbolt 3 working, we have no way of connecting our Hack Pro to Apple's Pro Display XDR. Now there are other displays coming that claim to have comparable performance at a similar or significantly lower price. But Apple's is the only one that's here now. And there's no obvious way to solve this because Apple uses a custom hardware implementation to stream two display port signals over a single Thunderbolt 3 wire. It's actually pretty cool. So in the conclusion of this series, which is finally coming, the Hack Pro will be feature complete with its new paint job, fancy LTT logos on both sides, interior lighting, a light overclock, we hope, and all the little finishing bits done. We'll do our best to get AirDrop, iMessage, Handoff and FaceTime to work, but I can't guarantee all of them. And we're gonna have these two monsters go head to head with full performance, acoustic, thermal, and usability testing. We will either collude something to get the Pro Display XDR working, or we'll try and find something that's as equivalent as possible so we can do a true Apple to Apple comparison here. Manscaped created the world's first all-in-one manscaping kit that makes manscaping both safe and easy. Introducing the perfect package 3.0 kit, which includes everything you need to take your grooming routine to the next level, including their new Lawn Mower 3.0 waterproof body trimmer. 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