- On this side with a 28 core CPU,
384 gigs of RAM, dual Radeon, seven GPU's
a liquid SSD and custom water cooling,
it's the fastest Mac on the planet, the Hack Pro!
And on this side,
also rocking 28 cores, 384 gigs of RAM
a Radeon Pro Vega II duo
and butt loads of Apple engineering,
the 2019 Mac Pro!
It's finally here.
The head to head battle you guys have been waiting a
(clears throat) year for.
Can we build a better Mac than Apple?
It's Hack versus Mac.
Linus versus Tim.
Pineapple on pizza.
(hand drumming) Let's go!
(upbeat intro)
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Let's start with the elephant in the room.
If our journey is anything to go on,
people who want the Mac OS experience
should just buy a damn Mac.
Like seriously guys, in fairness to our Hack Pro,
most of the issues we ran into were nothing to do
with just building a computer
and getting Mac OS to run on it.
The most recent months long delay ended up being caused
by a couple of capacitors that broke off the motherboard
possibly thanks to some questionable solder joints,
but even so, it does nothing to address
some of the real differences between hackintosh
and true Mac hardware.
iMessage for example, is still not working on our unit
even though some others have had success.
And not only did we fail to get Mac OS
to recognize our Thunderbolt 3 card,
we couldn't even get it recognized in the BIOS
on this motherboard, probably because Gigabyte
like other PC vendors doesn't feel like dedicating
any additional engineering resources
to this fringe use case, especially on a fringe motherboard
which is fair enough, I suppose,
except it is advertised as a feature.
And this motherboard costs over a thousand us dollars.
It's particularly painful because a lack of Thunderbolt
prevents us from easily connecting Apple's pro display XDR
with a single cable.
Instead we need a cable that adapts display port and USB
to a single USB-C connection that supports display
stream compression, not to mention that we lose
a couple of USB ports.
Any who, there are other premium content creation
monitors that use a regular display port connection.
So the biggest downside to our setup then
is that we're left to clumsily change color space settings
through the monitor rather than doing it seamlessly
through Mac OS.
It is kind of a bummer.
Enough about the disadvantages though.
Now that it's working, we can finally do what we promised
over a year ago, utilize the overclocking capabilities
of our DIY PC hardware to hopefully outperform Apple's own
top of the line, giving us the crown
for fastest Mac on the planet.
Now because of the motherboard issues we're having
(clears throat) we're only probably going to be able
to do about 4.1 gigahertz, enable XMP,
and we're not even gonna try to tweak any voltages.
Well we did, and it was bad.
So (laughs), it should still be faster though.
(hands rubbing)
Come on.
Come on Hack pro, go hack pro
Oh boy, those fans sure ramped up.
Now that is something that we could fine tune
but we didn't,
but hey, it's faster, which is what we promised.
Actually, we also promised quieter.
And it can be now that the test is done (laughs).
So what are our scores here?
We got 34,000 over here
and a mere 26,000 over on that side.
That's right, when it runs that fast,
(chuckles) 10 seconds is a big difference.
We crushed it.
What about thermals though?
Should we just not put industrial PPCs in?
That would have been easier.
Just put quiet fans in the first place.
Whew, 400 Watts package power.
How you doing?
240.
So it definitely comes at a power consumption cost.
Not to mention (clears throat) acoustics
since we didn't get the fan curve tuned.
I mean, our temps are downright chilly
considering we're drawing 150 more Watts though.
So that's pretty cool.
Not bad Hack pro, not bad.
After 10 minutes, it was still running at 4.1 gigahertz
and managed to be 24% faster than our Mac pro
while also running about 10 degrees cooler.
Though to the Mac Pro's credit, it was significantly quieter
even at the end of the test.
For our next trick, we're gonna fire up
a classic Apple benchmark, Geekbench 5,
starting in CPU mode.
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And we've got our results.
Our multi-core score predictably is significantly higher
on our Hack pro, but if you look closely,
our single core score is actually a little lower.
And I'll explain why that is.
On a modern CPU which is designed to boost
from its base clock speed
the lighter the load, the more it can boost
if it's just boosting one or two cores at a time.
So by overclocking the CPU in a more traditional manner,
just setting all of the cores to a highish clock speed,
we actually hurt this CPU's ability to boost
up an individual core in a lightly threaded workload
like this.
Not that much mind you, but it's there.
If we over clocked it more, well, yeah, that would help,
but we're not gonna do that, cause it's being really flaky.
(laughs)
Our GPU or compute run here is gonna be an interesting one
because there is no off the shelf equivalent
to the Radeon Pro Vega II duo that the Mac Pro uses.
It's two GPU's is on a single card,
but as far as we can tell, Geekbench only utilizes one
of those engines at a time.
By contrast, we're running Radeon 7's,
which at the time were the fastest cards that AMD had
on the market in our Hack pro.
And we can only use one of those at a time,
but looking at the scores,
we're not quite sure if that makes sense.
It actually kind of seems like this one is utilizing
both of them.
So we're gonna have to run a different benchmark
to see how an Apples to Apples (laughs)
where both machines are using both GPU's
result plays out.
Blackmagic raw speed test by contrast evaluates
only one aspect of system performance
but uses the entire grunt of the system
showing us that our Hack Pro is faster here,
which means that the performance disparity we saw before
has got to come down to optimizations that Apple and AMD
have made to the Pro drivers that are just not available
on regular Radeon non-pro drivers.
It's kind of like what you'd see with NVIDIA with a G-Force
versus a Quadro card.
Novabench is a full system benchmark,
but from what we've heard,
it leans a little bit more heavily
on single thread performance versus multi thread performance
which ended up giving our Mac Pro the edge
over the Hack pro, although not by a ton.
Overall then, the two machines traded blows
across our entire test suite, depending on what type
of performance the application required.
We wanted to make a music production benchmark
but unfortunately we didn't have time.
Though make sure you're subscribed because we are working
on something for you music producers.
The last thing that's really left to talk about
is IO and expandability.
It's straight up better on the Mac Pro.
This is one of the things that we really talked about a lot
in our review of the 2019 Mac Pro.
Apple did something that I never expected them to do again.
They made a totally upgradable user serviceable
professional grade desktop machine.
All that remains now is to see what happens
to that paradigm when it moves to Apple Silicon,
probably sometime in late 2021 or 2022.
The conclusion, then.
Don't do what we did.
Just use more mainstream hardware or use a virtual machine
or just buy a freaking Mac
the Mac Mini, like 2020 Mac Mini, it's looking pretty good.
If you guys enjoyed this video though,
check out the playlist for this build
because it is one heck of a rollercoaster.
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Thank God this is over.