$7,000.
And that's just for the base model of the new Mac Pro.
I mean, in fairness, Apple has been true to their word here.
They have both completed the transition to Apple Silicon,
which they said they would,
and they've offered professionals who are invested
in the Mac Pro form factor some continuity
in a product line that has for 20 years
been in constant flux.
But I can't help but feel like this is a classic case
of malicious compliance,
where they're bringing this thing back to life once again,
only to prove their point that it should have stayed dead.
And I'm not the only one.
With the same class of hardware as the Mac Studio
that costs a little over half as much,
the Mac Pro has had a hard time convincing folks
that it has any reason to exist,
which won't prevent us from running
some interesting experiments on its animated corpse.
For example, Apple said you can't put a GPU in it,
but we tried it anyway just to see what would happen,
and we put it through a battery of tests
to search for some, any reason
for this computer to have been built.
We also searched for our sponsor, Setapp.
App stores have millions of apps,
but if I know you, you only want the good stuff.
That's why I like you.
Well, $9.99 a month gets you access
to Setapp's more than 230 carefully curated
premium feature-enabled Mac and iOS apps.
It's so you.
Try it free for seven days at the link below.
Like the new M2 Ultra version of the Mac Studio
that launched alongside it,
the new Mac Pro is externally,
essentially unchanged from its predecessor.
There's only a couple of subtle differences around back,
where the previous gen Intel Mac Pro
had its graphics cards mounted
at the bottom of the case, nearest the power supply
and the dual 10 gig LAN ports.
The HDMI ports for the M2 Ultra Mac Pro are up at the top,
just under the healthy bank of six Thunderbolt 4 ports
to go along with the two on the top.
That total of eight is less than the maximum
on the old Intel Mac Pro,
but hey, at least you get all eight,
regardless of the hardware configuration.
Once again then, it's all about what's on the inside.
Powering the new Mac Pro is Apple's top tier M2 Ultra SoC,
which is basically two M2 Max SoCs
glued together with Apple's UltraFusion interconnect,
which allows them to operate as one, which is cool,
but it happens to be the exact same chip
down to the maxed out 76 core GPU
that's in our new Mac Studio.
The only difference is that unlike our studio,
which we set up with 128 gigs of RAM,
our Mac Pro is equipped with the maximum
192 gigabytes of unified memory,
which sounds like a lot because it is,
but you've got to consider the customer here.
One of the biggest drawbacks to the Intel Mac Pros
was that some CPU configurations were limited to
only 768 gigabytes of system memory,
which again, sounds like a lot because it is,
but was also a legitimate reason for some professional users
to spring for the higher end chips
that could address twice as much.
So what I'm trying to say is that when it comes to folks
who are dealing with complex simulations,
machine learning, or any large data set,
Apple no longer has any option for them at any price.
Now, this smaller memory pool does have the benefit
of being unified, meaning that Apple's GPU
can address more memory than any PC GPU,
even ones that cost as much as this entire machine.
But we are talking about some pretty specialized workloads
here that what would benefit from a ton of GPU memory
that comes at the direct cost of having basically
no system memory.
So we're finding ourselves asking,
if the system configuration is identical to the studio,
and in some ways worse than the old Intel model,
what is the point of the new Mac Pro?
What is all this cooling for?
We can answer that with benchmarks.
A quick note before we begin,
Apple's product page pits the new Mac Pro
against the previous gen, both baseline
and fully kitted out, which is a four year old machine
that started for $1,000 less than this one.
But credit to Apple,
it's still a far better frame of reference
than their studio comparisons were.
Now, we don't have either a base model
or a fully kitted out Intel Mac Pro,
so our testing is gonna focus on current gen hardware,
including a PC bench with a Core i9-13900K
and an RTX 4090.
Starting with Octane, the Mac Studio is exactly as fast
as the Mac Pro and costs $3,000 less.
Not a great start and Redshift doesn't give us much
to celebrate unless you consider one second a massive win
over a machine that is already substantially more expensive
than the PC bench that is obliterating it.
Blender 2 shows the Mac Pro's GPU pushing mostly
the same performance on lighter renders,
but Gooseberry sees an eight second gap
between the two machines,
suggesting that extended GPU loads could benefit
from the extra cooling at its disposal.
I mean, they don't benefit enough to justify Apple's refusal
to allow their users to install more powerful accelerators
like the RTX 4090,
because our PC bench at a lower price
manages to beat both of them.
In our mixed 4K, 8K HDR timeline in DaVinci Resolve,
we ran into that same bug that cropped up
in our Mac Studio review that prevents us
from comparing these two units,
but what we can at least do here is see the performance
that the M2 Ultra is supposed to have,
regardless of which machine it's installed in.
Internally, we've investigated this bug a fair bit
and our best guess right now
is that whatever heuristics Apple is using
to determine power states and fan speeds
is preventing our studio from achieving max performance.
The SSDs are nearly identical between the two machines
with both of them dramatically outperforming
the encoding speed,
meaning that they will never be a bottleneck.
We did discover though,
the Mac Pro's SSD seems to have a minor advantage
in 4K reads, so point Mac Pro.
And another point for the Mac Pro
is in our Chromium compile where it shaved
just over two minutes off of the Mac Studio's time,
which sounds really impressive until you realize
that that works out to about a 4% performance improvement.
But hey, it does at least show again
that the additional cooling may be making a difference.
When we move to synthetics, however,
everything kind of falls apart again.
Performance test has the Pro in the studio
at about the same performance level
and Geekbench gives the Pro only a one to 2% lead
in the GPU and CPU tests respectively.
Cinebench surprisingly shows the Pro gain
about a 7% lead over the studio,
which is especially odd considering the renderer
that R23 uses is still Intel optimized,
but hey, it's something.
And something else is Blender's CPU renderer,
which might not be super relevant to most people,
but here is one more synthetic test
that sees real gains over the Mac Studio
with performance more closely matching
the PC bench in some scenes.
Perhaps the Pro's CPU cores are able
to more aggressively turbo or maybe the massive cooler
is preventing the system from throttling
when the studio otherwise would.
To test that theory, we set up our combined CPU
and GPU stress test and ran it at room temperature
where, oh, looky here.
While the GPU clocks are roughly the same
throughout the run between our two Macs,
it seems that the Mac Studio allows its CPU clocks
to drop down before the fans even get a chance
to fully ramp up.
That throttle point is visible right here
when we look at the temperatures.
For comparison, here's the more gradual ramp on the Mac Pro
without the throttling hump.
Curiously though, the fans didn't kick in for either system
until about the four minute mark of this load.
So the Mac Pro's ample cooling system seems to be
almost purely for show.
And given that at room temperature,
the Mac Studio's fans never approach their maximum 3500 RPM,
it's pretty clear that with an aggressive fan curve,
a Mac Studio owner should be able to reach
the same level of performance as a Mac Pro owner.
There's no additional special sauce in the silicon
and all while saving enough to buy 150
of the new mystery water bottles at lttstore.com.
As expected then, lowering our ambient temperature
to 10 degrees yielded no change in performance
and the Mac Pro's fans barely spun.
And at 35 degrees, same story,
except the fans finally broke a thousand RPM,
making the Mac Pro the perfect machine
for running heavy loads super quietly
in a really hot environment, sort of actually.
I'm not quite sure how this works
given their nearly identical performance,
but the smaller studio draws
just a third as much power at idle,
meaning that the Pro will actually
kick more heat out into your room.
And the Pro also reaches a higher peak power consumption
at 356 watts.
How much of this extra draws from the SOC
versus the extra boards and fans?
We can't say that for sure,
but what we can say for sure is that both machines
are substantially less power hungry than our PC,
both at idle and at full bore.
The Core i9-13900K and the RTX 4090 alone
can draw upwards of 600 to 700 watts
when both of them are running full tilt.
So the studio offers the same performance
with a smaller footprint and even less power draw.
Surely there must be something the Mac Pro does
that the Mac studio can't, right?
Ah, cracking open the chassis reveals a lot,
a lot of empty space that is.
The Intel Mac Pro had eight PCI Express Gen 3 slots,
usually with some expansion cards in them,
while the M2 model features a total
of seven PCI Express Gen 4 slots,
which sounds like not much of a downgrade,
but it's more than you would think.
While six of the slots are full length,
only the bottom two are wired up for the full 16 lanes
with the next four limited to half the total bandwidth
at eight lanes and the slot that's normally occupied
by the Apple IO card have began to a mere four lanes,
meaning that should you choose to use
one of your Thunderbolt ports as a DisplayPort output
and rip that card out and replace it with something else,
your options would be a little limited, more limited.
We're gonna get to that later.
First, on the subject of Thunderbolt ports,
you might think that you could remove that card too
and maybe get another internal expansion slot,
but you can't, the design is proprietary.
There's no key like a PCI Express slot would have
and the power is supplied on the edge card connector
in a shrunk down interpretation
of Apple's one-off proprietary MPX connector
for graphics cards.
This enables sufficient power delivery
without the use of internal cables.
Really does look pretty on the inside.
Now, because MPX is officially gone now,
these three miniature cable connections then
are the only way to get a total of 300 watts
of additional power if you need them
for your expansion cards.
Not all expansion cards need that, of course,
especially if you're not installing any GPUs,
but this arrangement means that expansion cards
like the four bay MPX hard drive module
that Promise used to sell are no longer compatible
with the new version of the Mac Pro.
That leaves hard drive expansion to just the upper chamber
where a sold separately two drive bay can be fitted
that makes use of the connectors just above the IO cards.
Good gravy, is there ever a lot of empty space in here?
Turning the computer around reveals
that the shrouded RAM slots are actually still here
from the previous model, complete with easy open locks.
Except instead of RAM, we get some heat sinks.
Bummer.
But wait, ooh, that's where the SSD slots are now.
All two of them.
But unlike the SSDs used for the Mac studio,
which are bare flash modules, Apple does in fact
still allow users to upgrade these.
So that's one major advantage over the studio.
That is assuming that you don't just kit out your studio
from the factory with all the money you saved
by not being a chump and buying a Mac Pro.
The other major advantage is back
with those PCI express slots.
So let's talk a little bit
about what we got working in here.
To get the obvious out of the way first,
the Radeon 5700 XT that did work fine
in an Intel Mac Pro was a no-go here.
It wouldn't output anything,
and while it is detected in Mac OS actually,
which is farther than I expected to get,
it shows that it doesn't have a driver.
Of course, that is what Apple said would happen.
They no longer offer support for GPUs, even for AMD ones.
So here's all the other cards we tested,
and we did find some surprises.
What wasn't surprising is the biggest issue by far
is driver support.
Companies like Blackmagic
have large professional Mac user bases,
and their products worked without much ado.
But others like Elgato and Avermedia, perhaps rightly,
feel that there's a larger Mac market
for external capture dongles
than there is for internal cards.
It was surprising to see the Mellanox 100 gig ethernet card
that we grabbed just pick up and run just like that.
I mean, I would have half expected Apple
to remove the driver to spite Nvidia
who acquired Mellanox in 2019.
Unsurprisingly then,
our Apex Storage X21 SSD carrier card didn't work,
in fairly spectacular fashion,
but then along came the Honey Badger.
Honey Badger don't give a crap.
Honey Badger does what it wants, and it wants to work.
Not only did Liquid's M.2 card
manage to make the SSDs show up in system information,
but we were even able to use disk utility
to create a RAID array on it.
Though, for some reason known only to Apple,
they are registered as external drives.
I mean, hey, at least we can install SSDs in the slots.
Yay.
And so between this and the 100 gig NIC,
you know, if the dual onboard 10 gig NICs
are not enough for some reason,
we might have found some of the only expansion cards
that really make more sense inside the Mac Pro
than in one of the six Thunderbolt enclosures
that you could buy for the difference in price
and install your expansion cards in with the Mac Studio.
Oh, there is another card that pros might wanna use,
Avids HDX.
It's $500 and we have no use for it, so we didn't buy one,
but apparently a driver does exist for these cards
and it does work on Apple Silicon.
It just requires you to relax
the startup security settings on your Mac,
which should be fine,
but isn't ideal.
The more I look at this thing then,
the more I'm coming to appreciate the Mac Studio, I guess.
As much as we ragged on that machine
for not living up to Apple's hype
and for not liking the way that they marketed it,
it's safe to say that it's more than enough computer
for 90% of the people who were looking for a Mac Pro.
And hey, at least it doesn't cost another $3,000
only to do almost nothing
to address the other 10% of users.
I don't know what to say
other than that this thing is an abject failure
and an absolute slap in the face
to Apple's professional users yet again.
Does anyone wanna buy a lightly used M2 Ultra Mac Pro
that got scratched while we were sliding it
out of the thermal chamber?
No?
How about a mention in a video?
Anyone wanna buy a mention in a video?
How about you, Guardio?
Here's the thing about phishing attacks and hacks.
Nobody, including us here, is immune to them.
As a result, it's a good idea to have fail safes in place
as the hacking landscape changes.
Guardio's browser extension is designed
to help protect you as you browse online.
Think about how much information you save on your browser,
like passwords, credit card info, addresses.
It's exactly the kind of thing
you don't want falling into nefarious hands.
And it would be wonderful
if having two-factor authentication was enough,
but let our recent hack be a lesson
that that isn't always the case.
So as hackers adapt, Guardio can help fill in
some of those security gaps.
They don't rely on block listing
and they're able to block malware, harmful sites,
and other cams preemptively.
So if you find your cursor hovering over a malicious link,
know that Guardio can intervene.
And it's super easy to get started
with a free security scan in under 30 seconds.
They've got over a million current users
and they're offering our audience 20% off
a monthly subscription.
So scan your browser for threats for free
by visiting guard.io slash linustechtips
to experience real-time threat removal.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out our review of the Mac Studio
for our critique of the somehow better of the two machines.