hey guys it's max max sack we have been getting a lot of questions about what
exactly is upgradeable on the Mac Pro so today we're not only gonna tell you
what's upgradeable we're actually going to show you how to do it and also let
you guys know which parts are compatible and what we would recommend just a
little bit on later in the video now we have right over here a new graphics card
that we're going to be adding in we have extra storage that we're gonna add in
and some accessories and tools that we need to do it everything is also linked
down in the video description Apple made it extremely easy to open up the Mac Pro
all you have to just make sure it is unplugged twist the top and pull the
whole casing off and automatically disconnects the power supply internally
to make sure everything is safe so that is great and we're gonna start off with
probably the easiest upgrade in the upgrade that I would recommend to almost
everybody and that is to install your own Ram and we already made a full Ram
upgrade guide along with a lot of recommendations for different use cases
so we'll go ahead and leave a link to that in the video description but just
to show you guys how you press down on this little lock and then these little
classic covers come right out in here I have a hundred and ninety two gigabytes
of RAM that we upgraded ourselves and this cost me just under $700 compared to
Apple which charges a three thousand dollars for this upgrade and it is
extremely easy to do just like that you pull it out and then as long as you have
it aligned properly just push down and it is locked in next let's talk about
the SSDs and this is where it gets a little bit disappointing now yes as
these can be removed it is really easy to do so I'll show you guys exactly how
I'm gonna take off this top cover and I'm gonna squeeze this fan port down to
unlock it you just want to be a little bit careful and then we're gonna push on
this front cover and then at the same time you just want to lift straight out
that way you make sure you don't break any clips or anything like that we can
set that aside and then right here we're gonna pull out the SSD cover and right
under the cover we see our two SSDs that run in raid zero and you just unscrew
them and remove now as you can see this SSD is tiny
there are other SSDs that are similar form factor but the actual connector
here is proprietary so at least at this time you can't go out and buy an SSD
like this now goes even further because these SSDs are actually linked to the t2
chip inside of the system for security purposes meaning that if somebody steals
your system they won't be able to unplug them and plug-in them somewhere else and
take your data but the unfortunate part is that you will not be able to upgrade
this by yourself you're gonna have to go to an Apple store and have them upgrade
it and link it to the t2 chip but don't worry you could still add more storage
to your Mac Pro by yourself you can save money or even get storage that is two to
three times faster I'll explain exactly how and also show you but first a huge
thanks to our sponsor Micro Center for making our Mac Pro content possible
Micra Center has 25 stores nationwide with an impressive variety of
electronics from gaming VR computer parts like processors graphics and
everything else needed to build or upgrade a PC or Mac Micra Center has
been an authorized dealer since 1980 they have a dedicated Apple Department
with highly trained Apple sales associates
aside from iPhone Micro Center carries the full lineup of Apple products and
they have the largest selection of third-party parts and accessories come
into a local Micro Center today and talk to one of their Apple experts to order
the specific Mac Pro configuration that best suits your needs check the link in
the description to find a local Micro Center near you or to browse their large
selection of Apple products so how do you go about adding extra storage to
your Mac Pro well Apple does sell an MP X module that has a huge rate system but
that is very expensive and they also have a caddy that you can plug in right
up here that will hold two regular hard drives but apart from that you can
actually add in your own SSDs even ultra-fast m2 SSDs with an a PCI card
like this now the Mac Pro has a ton of PCI slots and even with our After Burner
card and one of these huge MPX modules we still have a lot of ports left over
and one of these cards will only need a 4x port so you can plug it in here at
the top and as you can see once we open up the little case screws and insert
this PCI m2 adapter in turn Mack it shows up right there on the
desktop and then we can format SSD and use it just as extra space now this card
right here just holds a single m2 but you can actually get them to that
support two of them and even up to four m2 s and that can actually make use of a
full 16 X slot meaning if you put it in the fastest lot you can get speeds of up
to 10,000 megabytes per second now we haven't personally tested out
this card just yet but somebody did say that they ran it under Mac OS but you
just want to make sure that whatever you get is listed to work with Mac OS and
this one right here will link in the video description works out of the box
without having to do any drivers now a lot of you guys also asks us about a
host of different cards from audio cards to a lot of different add-in components
and all of those should work just fine as long as you need two different things
either it has to be supported with Mac OS or you have to be able to have
drivers you can download and install to support whatever card you're adding in
to PCI Express slots and then the other thing you got to make sure is that you
have a way to power it now this card right here doesn't need additional power
but there are some cards that do need it and the Mac Pro doesn't have a regular
set of power cables coming out of the power supply everything is going through
the motherboard so right here I have a Belkin power supply cable kit that plugs
into the custom power supply ports and right now it's mainly set up to support
either six or eight pin cards a lot of which are graphics cards but I think in
the future you might have some other cables to give us maybe molex or SATA
power now let's talk about graphics cards in the system we have the Radeon
pro Vega 2 graphics card and that is the first upgrade from the base 580 the
problem is this graphics card costs two thousand four hundred dollars and that
is a whole lot of money but you can add in graphics cards yourselves
even with this graphics card install that takes up four slots and the
afterburner card we still have to 16x PCI slots here so I could add in two
very powerful graphics cards in addition to the system and still have two more
slots available for extra storage other plugging cards stuff like that so right
now let me show you exactly how we put this in Apple makes it extremely easy to
remove some thumb screws right over here you can use a screwdriver if you would
like to but it's not required and then on the left hand side you do need a
Phillips screwdriver to remove the little cover that holds all of the
graphics cards in next we're going to go up here to the top and we're going to
toggle the MPX module lock and now at the bottom of your included graphics
card you press down which will reveal this little lever and then that allows
you to pull out the whole graphics card now just like you pulled that one out
you can insert this one into the bottom slot make sure it aligns properly with
the PCI Express connector and then you can push down and you can actually put
the graphics card into any of the 16x slots or even the 8x because most
graphics cards will work just fine in those slots I'm gonna grab two of the
six to eight pin cables from the Belkin power cable kit and then right here next
to the graphics card we're gonna plug in the smaller connectors into the
motherboard and then the larger connectors into our graphics cards I'll
go ahead and leave a link in the video description on Apple's article on the
graphics cards that are supported in this system now let's take a look at the
CPU and yes you can upgrade your processor yourself not only in the
future but you can actually upgrade your processor right now and save some money
so to do so I'm going to go ahead and remove the afterburner card just have
easier access to our CPU and right underneath we have two screws that hold
the CPU cover then we'll pull that off and expose the heatsink now to unscrew
the heatsink bolts we need a t15 wrench which is slim in at least four and a
half inches long or else it won't fit we'll go ahead and leave a link to one
in the video description you do have to apply quite a bit of force but don't
worry as long as it's seated properly it will work and you want to make sure you
don't unscrew the first bolt all the way just loosen up a bit and then go back
and forth between them to evenly remove it and to finish remove the two bolts
that are at the top holding the heatsink to the chassis and make sure to hold the
heatsink so it doesn't just fall down after it's unscrewed
if you're gonna be installing a new CP you want to make sure you clean this off
with alcohol and clean off your new CPU before applying more thermal paste now
for this part you want to be extremely careful and it's best to lay the Mac Pro
down we're just keeping it up for video recording purposes because you can very
easily bend a pin on the CPU so there you have it you could see that yes the
CPU is socketed and it is upgradable now I don't think a lot of people are going
to upgrading their CPU right off the bat I think most people are gonna be waiting
two three four or five years down the line and then upgrading and at that time
a cpus are gonna get much less expensive for example right now Apple is charging
seven thousand dollars for that twenty eight core and I think that three years
down the line you should be able to buy one for about fifteen hundred dollars so
that has a massive savings to get extra performance later which is a huge
benefit with the Mac Pro and if you don't believe me the previous Mac Pro
had a twelve core processor that Apple charged three thousand five hundred
dollars for and now you can actually buy one for a hundred and ninety dollars
that's slightly faster than what Apple offered and it works perfectly fine now
if you want the ultimate performance right now there's also another twenty
eight core processors just slightly slower it fits in the same socket and
that one actually performs better than Apple's twenty eight core processor
because it has a faster base clock speed now there is one caveat with that CPU
and that's that it runs in four channel memory just like the eight core and it's
limited to 512 gigabytes of RAM but I think that's enough for most people you
can get that processor right now for $3,000 so that's a savings of 4,000 -
being able to resell your a core so you can definitely get some great deals on
performance if you're willing to swap out your processor yourself alright guys
so our Mac Pro is now upgraded we added in a couple different things we have
extra RAM in here and one thing you may notice that we don't have our LG 5k
display this is a 4k and that is because we found something out if you removed
the MPX graphics card the Thunderbolt 3 ports at the top of the Mac Pro and on
the back side they no longer work to support a 5k or a 6k XDR display that
means if you want to use a Thunderbolt 3 display you're gonna have to keep one of
those MPX graphics card modules in now right over here we can see that we have
our Xeon processor we installed it back in
and works perfectly fine we have 192 gigabytes of RAM right here it's running
at the full speed you guys can see the slots and we also have our additional
storage so I added in that PCI MDOT 2 adapter with that nvme SSD and then we
also have if we go to PCI slots we're using up the bottom slot just that 16 X
and we have our 5700 XT AMD graphics card and we also ran the performance
tests here this is Geekbench 5's metal score we got about 43,000 now another
thing that came up is the fact that some of these display ports we're not working
properly or as well as they should have they're running a 4k 30 Hertz now only
one was outputting 60 Hertz and then if you're plugging into a port that isn't
putting out the full performance then we actually saw about a 15 percent loss in
Geekbench 5's metal score you guys can see it
right there so I think that is a driver issue this is the newest latest AMD
graphics card that is the release that is supported so hopefully the drivers
get updated so all those ports work properly now I have another little bonus
for you guys that's stuck around we just got in two of these Radeon 770 animator
graphics cards with 16 gigs of HBM too so let's go ahead and pop one of these
in here and see what kind of performance we get so not only did we install one of
those Radeon sevens also put in a Vega 64 to see how they compare and here are
the results with the Radeon 7 we have almost 46,000 metal score which is
really quite low as I was expecting it to be much higher than that because our
Radeon Vega 2 graphics card that gets about 86,000 that's a massive difference
in performance for the Vega 64 that actually did quite a bit better 57,000
841 but still not as good as it should be so that leads me to believe that the
drivers that are designed for these graphics cards are not utilizing them to
the full potential the clock speeds and memory clock speeds are not as high
hopefully AMD is able to release their own Mac OS drivers that will optimize
their graphics cards if you add them in yourself at this point Apple is in
control of all of that and it seems like they're pushing out the full
potential to their own graphics and px modules but these other graphics cards
are not running as fast as they could so at this time if you want to upgrade if
you don't need more than 8 gigabytes of video memory I would suggest a Vegas 64
because we are getting the best performance with that and then if you do
need more than that go for the Radeon 7 you don't need that much performance if
you're doing simpler tasks that 5700 XT is actually the latest graphics card
isn't performing almost as good as the radio and 7 it has better encoding
options with the new encoder that's built into there and of course it is
much less expensive keep in mind that this is just one benchmark and we are
going to be doing a comparison between the $2,400 upgrade option for the vega
to compare to these other graphics cards to see how they compare in the real
world because there is a massive difference in price between them so
there you guys have it everything that you can upgrade on the mac pro how to do
it and our recommendations on what you should get from Apple and what you can
do yourself with which parts are the most worth it let us know if you have
any questions down in comment section below and click right above to subscribe
so you guys don't miss out on other videos and we also have links in the
video description thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video
[Music]