 When we reviewed the iMac Pro, we didn't really touch on its gaming potential in spite of Apple's inclusion of their fastest GPU ever in an iMac. And the reason for that is, let's be real here. That's a 5K display paired with what is still a Vega 56, a card that's optimized for half of that resolution. But... could there be a way around it? Could there be a way to game on the iMac Pro? Let's find out. Right after we find out who sponsored today's video. Ah, yes, Thermaltake. The Thermaltake Core P90 tempered glass case has an angled, open-frame design featuring 5mm thick glass, 3-way placement layout options, vertical GPU mounting with a riser cable included, and more. Check it out at the link below. So there were a few questions that we needed to answer before we could make any value comparisons. One, how much does a custom setup with the same basic spec as our base model iMac Pro cost? Two, does that setup perform better or worse? And perhaps most importantly, three, could we optimize that $5,000 budget to get better performance without sacrificing all of the features that make the iMac Pro special? So this is what we ended up with based on pricing from PC Part Picker. Our first build adheres as rigidly as possible to Apple's spec sheet. Like, we couldn't find a Vega 56 variant of the Frontier Edition for a true Apple to Apple's comparison, while our second build treats gaming as an equal priority rather than as an afterthought, using a less expensive Core i9-7900X and a much faster Nvidia Titan XP. So we give up ECC memory, Thunderbolt 3, a nice case, and wireless peripherals, but we still have a high resolution, albeit 4K, DCI-P3 display, workstation-level CPU performance with many cores, support for up to 128 gigs of RAM, and access to more professional code paths in the GPU driver compared to a consumer-grade 1080 Ti. Running directly off the hardware, right away our choices are far superior at this price point, with the iMac Pro pulling worse numbers than equivalent hardware in Deus Ex Mankind Divided in both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. Middle Earth Shadow of War seems to be better news for Apple, and then CSGO actually has it above our equivalent, but then below our custom build. So it should be noted that even for developers like Valve, who have made OpenGL a priority, Windows is still way ahead for gaming. So gaming directly on your iMac Pro, not the worst experience, but not a great choice, especially since in our review we saw that the cooling isn't capable of handling full load for long. As for productivity, we've got significantly worse numbers again for CPU rendering in Blender, but we actually saw far better results with most of SPECviewperf, giving us a look at the pro aspect of Apple's Vega 56 solution. Drivers, and in some cases frame buffer size, can make a big difference, because remember that these results are in spite of the throttling under sustained workloads that we've come to expect from the iMac Pro. Let us know by the way in the comments if you'd like to see a separate, deeper dive into the iMac Pro's cooling. For today though, the focus is gaming, so let's have a look at some of the other solutions we came up with, starting with an external graphics card. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3, we can use a Razer Core or something similar to slot in a variety of aftermarket GPUs, from a very similar Vega 56 all the way up to that Titan XP from our build, and the question here is, how much are you going to give up by using an external solution? With a Titan XP, our results are obviously worse than a normal internal PCI Express slot, especially in DirectX 12, but they're still quite a bit better than the stock GPU, and CSGO didn't seem to care that much anyway. As you might expect, our external Vega 56 results were generally disappointing, providing us with bottom tier performance in almost every test. We even lost the pro driver code path in spec view perf, giving us much worse productivity performance. So you wouldn't want to upgrade your iMac Pro with a standard Vega 56 in other words, but as new GPUs arrive on the market, it's good to know that a system performance upgrade should be possible via these means. But bringing it back to gaming again, considering the cost of an enclosure, it's possible that you may be better off just having a second utility PC in the house. Bringing us to our next solution, streaming. Steam in-home streaming lets you be like me, and have a gaming PC in your closet or somewhere out of the way, while you use your super clean setup for both work and for play. And thankfully, it actually works a treat on macOS. And for those of you who don't want to deal with the upfront cost of building a separate tower, there's actually a Mac Beta now of Nvidia's GeForce Now cloud gaming service. So when we tested GeForce Now over a year ago, the experience was already pretty impressive, and I would only expect it to have improved since then. However, your mileage quite literally may vary, because the performance of GeForce Now is highly dependent on your physical distance from Nvidia's servers. So let's summarize what we learned today. First and foremost, while Apple's pricing is actually good for its choice of hardware, a different configuration, like if they were willing to use Nvidia graphics, for example, would have the potential to achieve much better performance, with our station's obvious trade-offs being the lack of ECC memory support and Thunderbolt. And we also learned that thanks to third-party devices and services, gaming on the iMac Pro doesn't have to be limited by its own hardware. Though, like with anything on a Mac, that comes with an additional cost, your choice, whether it's upfront or monthly. What we didn't learn, we already knew this, is that if you do plan to game on your Mac, you will need to buy better peripherals. Even ignoring the accidental weapon switches while moving the mouse due to the scroll gesture, the mouse is an ergonomic nightmare. Has, like, has anyone but me ever noticed all those web 2.0 companies out there with their $800 chairs and apple mice? Sorry, anyway, I digress. If you take anything away from this follow-up video on the iMac Pro, it should be that your expectations need to be tempered when dealing with a form factor like this one. You're getting beautiful and actually surprisingly powerful hardware, but the configuration is a touch mismatched and it ends up getting choked by its insufficient cooling. Speaking of getting choked, have you dropped your phone and broken your screen and are you choked? Well, iFixit can help you because they really like teaching people how to take stuff apart and fix it. They are leading the charge in the electronics repair tools industry with their iconic black and blue ProTek Toolkit, and it's now only $60. It's got tons of features like their 64-bit driver kit, a wide variety of opening tools, spudgers and picks so you can safely poke and pry, suction cups with a fancy new handle to remove display assemblies, iFixit's own rubber-handled Jimmy pry tool, a set of metal spudgers, ESD-safe tweezers, and an ESD safety strap all backed by iFixit's lifetime warranty. So check out the over 25,000 free repair guides over at iFixit.com and visit iFixit.com slash Linus to snag the fully loaded ProTek Toolkit. Now just $60. We're gonna have that linked below. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. 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