Nearly a year ago, I published a video about how the $4,000 Mac Pro was incredibly antiquated
and couldn’t edit 4K video to the caliber that I required, so I moved to Windows.
It’s now 2017 and Apple STILL hasn’t updated the Mac Pro—since 2013—despite the fact
it’s still sold in Apple Stores at full price.
I’ve recently moved from Adobe Premiere to Final Cut Pro; which means I need a Mac
again.
I bought the fully-loaded $4,000 2016 MacBook Pro, but it’s price tag couldn’t justify
the bugs, under clocked CPU, and dismal GPU performance; so I returned it, and decided
to do something crazy—tear apart my old Mac Pro, upgrade the CPU, RAM, and add an
external GPU so that I could outperform the best iMac, MacBook Pro, and even the $8,000
Mac Pro.
It worked—and it only cost 1,000 bucks.
The first task was finding a compatible CPU—and it turns out, there aren’t many.
The highest-end compatible CPU is the Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 which is an Ivy Bridge 12-core
2.7GHz processor with 3.5GHz Turbo Boost.
Apple charges a whopping $3,000 upgrade, but there are a ton of retired server CPUs on
eBay for around $600.
I bought one, disassembled the Mac Pro—which, by the way, was surprisingly user-serviceable
for an Apple product—and popped the new one in.
I also decided to upgrade the DDR3 ECC memory which has come down in price significantly.
I bought 32GB of compatible RAM on Amazon for $160.
Apple charges $400 for this upgrade.
My last upgrade was ditching my dependence on the crappy, outdated dual AMD FirePro D300
graphics cards in the machine.
The new MacBook Pro uses an AMD Radeon 460 which is built on the new Polaris architecture
which means macOS now natively supports the latest-gen AMD graphics cards—like the $250
RX 480 I chose to use.
No weird drivers.
No heavy modification of system files, it just works.
And that’s spectacular.
I jammed the GPU, modified Akitio PCI-e to Thunderbolt 2 dock, and an overkill 350W power
supply into a makeshift Fractal Design Node 202 PC case.
I used nice Fractal fans which makes for a dead-silent operation.
Keep in mind, the Mac Pro uses the old Thunderbolt 2 which means we’re not getting the full
performance of the graphics card; however, the 60% bandwidth that I was able to achieve
using the RX 480 FAR supersedes any other Mac that Apple sells.
Don’t believe me?
Let’s look at the benchmarks of my new FrankenMac!
Since the CPU in FrankenMac is the same as the loaded Mac Pro, the benchmark results
are the same.
In Geekbench, the new MacBook Pro has a faster single-core score due to the low clock-speed
on the 12-core CPU in FrankenMac, but multi-core performance crushes both the stock Mac Pro
and the loaded MacBook Pro.
In Cinebench, the CPU pulls ahead yet again clocking in at nearly 3 times faster than
the 2016 MacBook Pro.
Now, we get to the graphics card benchmarks.
FrankenMac’s AMD RX480 is 40% than the stock Mac Pro and 35% faster than the $8,000 Mac
Pro.
In Unigine Heaven, the RX480 did much poorer than the NVIDIA GTX980 Ti I tested on the
Mac Pro last year which clocked in at 51 FPS, but the RX480 still outperforms the other
cards in Apple machines.
That’s all well and good, but what about real-world performance?
In Final Cut Pro, a demo project I exported compressing 4K ProRes footage to H.264 with
FrankenMac was 275% faster than the base Mac Pro and 2016 MacBook Pro.
A base Mac Pro can be found used on eBay for
about $1,500.
So, for $2,500, you can build your own FrankenMac.
Is it faster than comparable $2,500 PC hardware?
No.
But it’s a heck of a lot faster than anything else Apple makes.