Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here.
So this is a video on the new iMac Pro
and this is going to be a good two-part video.
I'm going to do a comparative
performance review between the iMac Pro and 3 other
powerful desktops that I've been using over the past a little bit.
And then, for the second part of this video, I want to talk about
the idea of this product as a whole. So for the comparison,
we have 4 desktops. So first is
this iMac Pro. It's the 10-core model,
64 gigs of RAM with the Vega 64 GPU.
And then we have a Threadripper, Alienware Area-51.
So this thing has 16 cores, 64 gigs of RAM, and
a pair of GTX 1080 Ti's and SLI.
And then we have a Ryzen 1700x build.
This is an 8-core CPU, 64 gigs of RAM,
a single GTX 1080, and then lastly, we have the
10-core "trash can" Mac Pro. Now, this thing is a little bit dated
as 4 years old at this point but before the iMac Pro came out recently,
this thing was literally the most powerful
Apple computer that you could get for multi-core applications.
Performance on the 10-core iMac Pro is very good.
Like if you ignore the price of this thing, and you only look at
the performance benchmarks, you can see that it's better than the 8-core Ryzen
by quite a bit, and it's a
noticeable step-up from the 2013 Mac Pro.
But as expected, it's not as good as the 16-core Threadripper.
So these benchmarks obviously don't assure us everything, because
this thing's running a Xeon processor with ECC memory,
but it does give you a general idea of how they perform relative to each other.
Now, I'm an Adobe user, particularly Adobe Premiere,
so I'm going to focus my performance review of these devices,
for Premiere. So these are the render times for my workflow,
which is 5K footage from a SCARLET-W camera,
and we're seeing the same kind of trend here. Performance on the 10-core,
iMac Pro is very good.
Not as fast as the Alienware Threadripper system, but it's
still very impressive. The thermal performance is also
really good, because cooling a 10-core CPU in a form factor like this
is not easy, and then doing it quietly is even more difficult.
And we're looking at very comfortable temperatures on idle
or load. Fan noise is also surprisingly quiet. It doesn't come on
very often, but when it does, it's very tolerable.
So yeah, there's a lot of good things about the iMac Pro.
I mean, it looks really good. The space gray is awesome. Space gray keyboard
is really cool, and the black Lightning cable, which
for some people is really important.
The 5K screen looks amazing with an improved webcam.
And the I/O is pretty good as well, you're getting way more
ports than the average Apple computer. And as you saw earlier,
the thermal management is quite good, but the thing that makes this computer special
to me, is the form factor. They're able to sake so much
great hardware into a relatively small
all-in-one package. And it's a very nice-looking package, in my opinion.
But the reason why I made this video and the thing that, kind of,
bugs me up this product is the price tag.
So this is an Apple product. Apple products tend to be a little bit more expensive,
and it's a professional Apple product, so you're going to pay a little bit
more over premium than normal.
But, you often see this argument being thrown around about
how this thing is "not overpriced", because
if you try to build this thing from scratch, like through your own parts,
the price tag would be not too different
from what Apple charges. But I don't entirely agree with them,
because I think most people, they're building systems with
Xeon processors and ECC memory wouldn't be pairing it up
with a 5K screen. So Xeon processors
are used for applications where it's just constant,
heavy use of the CPU. So if you're a stock trader,
or, just doing any kind of
application where you're doing complex calculations all day,
every day. You're running scenarios of something like that Xeon makes sense.
If your renders take, like, 18 hours to run, then yeah.
Xeon makes sense. And same with the RAM if your applications
require huge amounts of data to be transferred around in memory, and you just
cannot have any room for error, then sure,
ECC RAM is great for you. For most people,
for most professionals, they just,
they don't want this stuff. They want really powerful computers
and in 2018, we have the ability to buy
really powerful computers that are not Xeon processors and
do not require ECC memory.
And, it bugs me that Apple is putting
this type of equipment as the only option
for those professionals. So, most people,
most professionals, they want high core count. They want, like eight, ten, maybe
twelve cores, and for Windows users,
there's plenty of inexpensive options right now. We can get, like Ryzen CPUs,
i7, i9, even Threadripper's cheaper
than this stuff. With Xeon, you're paying a huge premium
for the processor with the architecture, and you're
forced to buy, just expensive components across the
board to make that stuff work. And with Apple,
you're locked into that ecosystem
just because to get high core count. So for certain content creators
that work with Apple applications,
this, kind of, make sense because it's really your only option,
but for people that work with applications that have
multi-platform abilities, like you can do it in Windows
or you can do it on Apple, like
the Adobe application, this product is, just, it feels
so overpriced. I really enjoy
the OS X or macOS (they call it that one). I enjoy macOS,
but this product just feels way too expensive
to justify its purchase. At least for someone like me, like uh, kind of
mid-tier content creator. So,
that's what we have, a very overpriced, I'm going to use that term,
overpriced product from Apple this year, that
fits the needs for very few number of people
but I think for most people, it should be a pass. Okay, hope you guys enjoy this video.
Thumbs if you've liked it, subs if you've loved it. See you guys, next time.