 Six grand starting price for this thing. Better have pretty amazing specs. Oh, an eight core processor? By the time you kit this thing out with anything decent, it's gonna cost as much as a car. Wait, unless, yeah, no, I'll just get the base model one and then scrape together all the upgrades I need on my own. And show you how you can do it too. Save your time and save your money with Storyblocks Video. Get studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost at the link in the video description. (*upbeat music*) My Mac Pro isn't actually a base model. I got the afterburner card and a Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo so that I'd have two GPUs, but also have an extra expansion slot if I ever needed four for some reason. But it's also not maxed out. To do that, I'll be removing the Asinine eight core processor this thing shipped with and throwing in a 28 core Xeon W3275, a whole whack ton of RAM. Yes, my friends, that is two terabytes of memory. A J2I drive cage, a PCI Express SSD, and apparently a Titan RTX, just cause. Figuring out what CPU to buy is pretty simple. You just grab any 3200 series Intel Xeon off of any reseller that you like. As for how to install it, well, we could have found out ahead of time, but we thought it'd be more fun for us to just go on that little adventure together. So obviously we need to remove the heat sink. Now we praised the Mac Pro in our review for using mostly standard Phillips head screws, but that's only for the things that most end users would actually need to access for something like a RAM upgrade or a drive upgrade. For things like the CPU that Apple doesn't actually expect you to change, yeah, it's gonna be Torx. Next, I think we're gonna have to pull our afterburner card. Oh, I love these captive thumb screws back here with no risk of losing anything. I really like this PCI Express lock. Oh boy, we're already up to two different types of screws. And all we've done so far is remove the Mac Pro nameplate. And that might not have even been necessary because it seems like this is just a cosmetic cover for the four U-shaped heat pipe cooler that we got going on here. So let's move around to the back then now. Just pop the cover off of our two rated SSDs right there. Now we've got a couple more locks. We don't actually have to expose the RAM now, but we might as well just take them off and get them out of our way since we will be upgrading the memory later anyhow. And then finally this guy, I think, yeah, there we go. Wait, do you know what this does, Anthony? That is the speaker. Oh, for crying out loud. Doom. Here's six large Torx head screws that we're gonna remove carefully because Apple, just like with the iMac Pro, has not mounted the CPU into the socket with a retention lever. It's just held on by the heat sink. So once the heat sink pops off, it'll just pull the CPU out of the socket. Wow, these are tight boys. I don't actually know that it's just gonna pop free for me. Oh, it seems to kind of slide on rather than being able to lever it away. Man, this thing's worth more than my life. Okay, just gotta prop it up there. Yeah, there we go. Just need two hands. Okay. Yep, there it is. Oh boy. Just like that. And see, no problem. All right, so this is what I was talking about before here. The CPU is kind of like fused onto it with thermal compound, right? See, so you can see that's holding it on. There's a bit of a cross pattern in the thermal paste that I don't know if it's due to the shape of the base of the cooler or if it's due to their application. You can see they've done a pretty good job of actually covering the important parts of the IHS here without overdoing it on their thermal compound application. Not that that really makes a difference. Too much thermal compound does not, contrary to popular belief, tank your performance. But still, it's a nice touch, putting on the right amount. Over on this side, we get a good look at the socket. So you can see there, yeah, it's just completely devoid of any kind of latching or retention mechanism. The CPU just kind of sits in there. And this also gives us a really good look down here. They look just like the eight pin and six pin PCI Express connectors that you'd have in your desktop computer, but they're mini. So we'll need to adapt these in order to add expansion cards that need auxiliary cables. Well, that was surprisingly straightforward. Wanna hit me with that 28 core CPU? All right, here we go. So to get this done, we're gonna be borrowing a page out of the car mechanics handbook. We're gonna kinda get under it, you know? The Mac Pro 2019 has a convenient filming hole for performing CPU upgrades and shooting them at the same time. Just guide it in there. Give it a little wiggle. Not bad. Consulting our trusty gamers Nexus mod mat. I can't see the part about thermal compound application, so I'm just gonna put it all over the place. Ah, I drew a smiley face. You know what? I'm just gonna put my cover back on now before my easy access to this thing ends. It is weird to me that they kind of reinvented the CPU cooler mounting mechanism. That seems unnecessary, but you gotta give Apple credit. What is this? Six screws and two thumb screws later, I have completely swapped out my CPU. Is that unprecedented for them? Yeah, like outstanding. Oh, we've got a good look at the guide that was making it so I couldn't accidentally wrench the cooler out the wrong way. So there's a cut right here and just nice thick metal here. And then there's a couple of notched screws here that keep it from being inserted wrong. Okay, good luck everybody. This part might be a little tricky. The only thing that makes this tough is that these springs are super difficult to compress and these screws that we took out are actually threaded inserts. Well, that was painless. Almost makes the amount of work that we've spent building that hack pro seem to kind of a waste of time. All right, so we're just gonna throw our speaker back in place, assuming that we can figure out how the devil to get this thing on here. Come on, get in there. There we go. Now we can't actually put our full two terabytes of RAM here. This we got our hands on for an AMD project and AMD Epic does support two terabytes of RAM, but that's okay. One and a half terabytes of RAM ain't half bad. So we will start by opening up our memory slots and consulting the handy dandy little population guidelines they've got there for you. Isn't that nice? I mean, a lot of manufacturers would just color code them, but this is a good solution too. And it means that everything gets to be black. Now we'll peel back all the tabs and it's time to go shopping. Now this is really important. You can't use regular unbuffered DIMMs in the Mac Pro. That's a limitation of the Xeon CPU that's installed in it. So you will either need ECC registered DDR4 memory, or you will need a special kind of ECC server RAM called LR DIMMs or load reduced DIMMs. And memory is one of the most sensible upgrades that you can do. It is much easier as you guys saw than accessing the CPU and the amount of money you can save is incredible. For example, for a 768 gig configuration, you can expect to pay around $3,600 on Newegg for the RAM that you'd need for your Mac Pro. That is close to a third of Apple's price of 10 grand. And guys, if you're more comfortable with like a matched set versus just buying your own individual sticks and checking them in there, OWC has a kit for $4,900, which is still a 50% savings. I just can't believe how simple it is. We already pulled off the covers and now it's just a matter of lining up the notch in the memory with the notch in the slot, positioning it like so, pushing with both fingers on either end. Oh, you want me to actually show you 12 times? Sure, fine, no problem. We got this, here we go. For those of you wondering, I'm using the same SK Hynix DDR4 2933 memory that I did for the two terabytes of RAM terabytes of Chrome tabs attempts that we did a little while back. Man, this is crazy. Each one of these sticks is 128 gigs of RAM. It's nuts. My one regret is that they have green PCBs. I asked once, how much does it actually cost to put a black PCB on it? And they're like, oh, I don't know, like a buck. I'm like, well, why don't you just put black PCBs on all memory? And they're like, you don't know anything about commodities, do you? Might've been $2 even, but the point was that like it matters for that particular product. And there it is, one and a half terabytes of RAM. As I'm closing up the back, I wanted to point out that while we are upgrading our SSDs today, we can't actually remove and replace Apple's little SSD cards that they've got pre-installed in the machine because these are tied into the T2 chip on the motherboard and it won't boot unless they're installed. So we can add more storage and we can even boot to and add in NVMe SSD, but it can't be at the expense of having removed these ones. So they've got to stay in there. Oops. Oh, get in there, yeah. There you go. These two kind of lock in together. It's a little bit finicky. Ah. Ah. A little plastic clip broke off from where I don't actually know. Oh, this has already been glued once. Did we break it? Okay, I did it, sure. I'm not gonna throw anybody else on the bus even if they did it, I did it. Guys, seriously? Man, Anthony, I gotta stop trusting you with our Apple. What do you have against Apple? Why do you break every Mac that comes through the store? Now let's talk SATA. There's not a whole lot to this. Like really, there's not a lot there. There's two SATA ports and then that proprietary power connector. That's all you get. So if you wanna actually install drives, you'll need, well, an actual freaking drive bay, which you will need to buy separately along with the adapter for that connector. So Apple just happens to have one such thing available on their website and we went ahead and picked it up. So it's from Promise and yeah, there's not a whole lot to this either. Looks a little something like this. First, we've got our power adapter. That's reasonably elegant. So there's your two SATA data cables, your little weirdo connector there. And then over at the other end, you've got two of those handy-dandy combo SATA data and SATA powers. Onto the enclosure. It's actually pretty slick. It's the same kind of feel of anodized aluminum as the rest of the chassis and it's gonna match it absolutely perfectly, which I'm sure is not an accident. Ours came pre-installed with an eight terabyte surveillance drive for whatever reason from Toshiba. You know, big complaints there. It's not a problem. They're not bad hard drives. It's just weird. And then, ah, yes, this is kind of cool. So all of these screws are pre-installed. So all you need to do is remove these wing nuts in order to expose them if you wanna install a second drive. And if you don't want to install a second drive, this is pretty slick too. So you go ahead, you plug in your one. And yeah, just like that. And you put your second one just right there so that it doesn't waggle around inside your case. Just kind of clips right into place. If you do wanna install a second drive, you just remove that screw and then it'll actually pull this plastic bracket thing off. And then you go ahead and plug that into your second drive, just like that. Pretty handy-dandy. As with the CPU, the whole process involves shockingly few screws. So we just take out this little piece of placeholder aluminum here that, is this written on by hand? Somebody put a B on there. Did we do that? Weird, check that out. Does that look handwritten, Brennan? Yeah, it's written in pencil. Align these slots just like we saw on the CPU heatsink with these little posts right here. So rather than just screw them in, no, no. Ha ha. There's little posts on the back of this spacer here that sit in there like that. And then you put the screws back in and now it's locked into place. Ha ha ha. Can't fool me with your weird, non-standard drive mounting mechanism. Easy peasy, that ain't going anywhere. Now we just need to plug these in. I could make my life a little bit easier by removing the I.O. card there, but I am not going to do that. Now it's time to really have some fun. So before we put our afterburner card back in, which was in this slot, I'm going to pull out one of these extremely gorgeous PCI slot covers. Solid aluminum. Man, are these machined out of a single block? Man, that is overkill. Anyway, anyway, sorry, sorry, sorry. Just, we'll go ahead and throw an Intel Optane SSD in here. This way we could run a secondary OS, like Windows or something like that, without resorting to bootcamp, if for whatever reason that mattered to us. Then we're going to throw a Titan RTX into this bottom PCI express slot. Now Apple has their own approach to auxiliary power and they use this extension to the PCI express slots over here. But because this is just a standard PC card, we are going to need some power cables. Hit me with them. Way a little high, that's fine. Strangely, these are not available as an Apple first party accessory, but thankfully Belkin has a kit already ready to go at launch. So we're going to go ahead and use that. So cable set one, PCIe aux power, eight pin to dual six pin. Nope. Cable set two, eight pin to six plus two pin. Okay, that we could use. Eight pin to six plus two pin, six pin to six pin. Wow. Isn't this adorable? Got your baby eight pin and your daddy eight pin. Nice and low profile too, so that if you have long cards, they can sit over top of them. Now we can go ahead and install a real graphics card in here. I really do wish that Apple and Nvidia would bury the hatchet, but I don't think they ever will. Next time Jensen or Tim Cook does an AMA, we just all need to spam them with, when are you guys going to kiss and make up? Hey, look at that. No sag, cause it's supported by the other GPU. Sweet. This looks very out of place in here. I'm going to have to fold these down here in order to get my afterburner card in. I got to say, I too like these supports here to keep the card stable. Love that. All right. And everything is locked in. Isn't that mechanism just gorgeous? Love or hate Apple. You got to just appreciate some of the little things they do. That slide action. It's beautiful. All right, let's fire this up. Oh, there we go. How long was that? That was like at least three minutes. It was a minute or two, yeah. You don't think it was three? Okay. Maybe it was three, I don't know. I don't know. It was well over a minute, but we're up. Okay. Oh, all right. One pitfall you got to watch out for guys, if you want to max out the memory in the system is while you're shopping for your CPU, make sure you get one that supports the amount of memory you're installing. Not all of them can handle 1.5 terabytes of RAM. Speaking of things that we can't necessarily handle, let's have a look at our PCI cards. This is actually really cool. So the Mac Pro allows you to either automatically or manually assign your PCI express slots to two different pools, A and B to make sure that you don't overdo the PCI express lane allocation within each pool. So if we were to move here, watch this, if I move them all to A, you can see that I've overdone it and it's unhappy. Whereas if I go like this, look at that. Everything is perfectly balanced. Absolutely love it. I'm gonna just switch it back to auto mode because we don't really need to do that. But it does mean that all of our PCI express devices are showing up and have the correct number of lanes. And we're gonna go ahead and initialize our Optane SSD. It's showing up as an external SSD. Do you have any idea what that would be? Okay, so guys, we've got the pro display back there. Can you see that, Brandon? Okay. So I'm gonna have to kind of operate the computer from here. We're gonna see if we can get an output on this puppy. Do we know that this is gonna work? Has anyone tried this yet? Microsoft basic display adapter. Okay, so it definitely does not have drivers. Nvidia control panel went and installed itself. So it looks like Windows grabbed some drivers while I was waiting for that download. And did you display settings are not available? Hey, there it is. Nice. Yeah, it is really dim. Oops. Oops, what the? Okay, how do I get to brightness? Oh, okay, well, whatever. I'm just cranking the brightness, I don't care. Now that's curious. This actually ain't running great, Anthony. Yeah, I think it might be using the Radeon Vega 2 Pro Duo Turbo, et cetera. There we go, that's better. Still 60 Hertz, but it's way better. I guess, yeah, way better. That's the theme of today's video. This was a heck of a lot easier than our previous experience upgrading Macs. If you guys are looking for another video to watch right now, by the way, our iMac Pro upgrade video series is definitely worth a watch. But yeah, this was by comparison, great. I mean, there's still things that Apple could have done better. M.2 slots, drive bay included standard, that would have been pretty neat. Cooler bracket, that's not super weird and proprietary. But still, I mean, the fact that this is even possible, let alone officially sanctioned by Apple is a minor miracle and lets enthusiast shops get out ahead of the game by getting the kitted out Mac they need for a price they can much more easily afford. So all that's left to say at this point is happy modding, ladies and gentlemen. That's an RTX Titan gaming on a Mac Pro. What do you guys want from me? It's brilliant. Massive thanks to Storyblocks Video for sponsoring today's video. Storyblocks Video has a massive library of high quality footage, After Effects templates, music, and more. Storyblocks saves you time and especially money because you can use their stock footage instead of shooting your own. All the content is royalty free for both personal and commercial use. And we use them often for tech quickies since we're trying to make videos as fast as possible. So you don't always have the time to shoot all the footage you need. New clips get added regularly so you don't have to worry about using clips that are like 10 years old and already all over the internet. So check them out today at storyblocks.com slash Linus Tech Tips. We're gonna have that linked down below. So thanks for watching. Thanks Apple for actually listening to your customers. We really do appreciate it. I am a customer. I mean, just cause like I don't use it voluntarily doesn't mean I don't actually give you my money. So, you know, that's good. Good job.