The 2020 Mac Pro: A Silent Killer!

Hey guys, mkbhd here and this is the new

2020

Mac Pro cheese grater. There are a lot of things I could say about this over the two months I've been using it, but it mainly boils down to three main things: one. it's extremely well made to the point of being oversized, almost two, it's finally modular and three, it's really fast now, my typical review video of a piece of technology that's really good ends with something like it's really good, you should buy it, but with this, although it's pretty good, it's more like you probably shouldn't buy it, most people will never need it, but I'm really glad they did it, so this of course is the Mac Newest high-end ever made and the highest price you can get.

Paying for it also makes it the most expensive Mac ever made and you may remember that everyone had a good time with its headlines, but it's more than just that it's the most modular, highest-end tower computer Apple has ever made. manufactured in years and that is something that people Like me, we were waiting very patiently for a long time, so everything about the design of the Mac Pro and I want to say everything from the inside out is very well done, but to the point of being oversized as if it were unnecessary, it is the most engineered desktop. tower I've ever seen and most of this engineering is in the name of aesthetics and noise, so you may remember that Apple showed the world how much they really care about aesthetics and noise when they tried to make the latest Mac Pro was small. cylinder on your desk cooled completely by a large fan on top, but that didn't turn out so well, so although they have finally remade the modular tower shape, the fact we were waiting for it didn't stop them from making possibly the cleanest one.

The quietest desktop computer possible, like cheese, with a larger design with the holes in the front and the mesh piece behind, it is strange looking to the point where it is unmistakable, you know, like some other products from Apple this year, but it is also an airflow design. Like everything you see, the entire Mac Pro when you take off the case and look inside is designed to be passively air cooled, there aren't many fans on any of the internal components, there's no liquid cooling, there's just three huge fans on the back. frontal. here near the rear and a lot of heat pipes throughout, so the entire chassis is designed to pass as much airflow as possible through the system to cool everything, but the airflow is not

silent

and even you know that fans like these are usually not

silent

. and if you have all three fans like this spinning at the same rate, they amplify each other and make this grinding noise that you'll probably hear now, a lot of computers do this and it's fine, but Apple decided to make this computer quieter.

They would spin each of the fans at a slightly different rate so they don't all match up, but even when you do that, sometimes you end up with harmonics that amplify some of the sounds and still make them audible, which is why Apple's fan controller It literally modulates the speed of each of these fans and turns them up and down so they never overlap and they never study each other so you never hear it and it works. Another thing you may notice when the system is open is number one that you can't open the Mac Pro unless you unplug everything from the back, including the power, which is a little annoying, but I guess it's not a big deal.

Anyway, you open it and you don't see any cables, there is not a single exposed cable anywhere. mac pro just like you get it from apple there are now headers to plug things in if you want, but all the original stuff just plugs in with strategically placed pins, so in apple's ideal world everything everyone does is supported as modules mpx and they just slide. like theirs, they keep the world clean, matte black and easily modular. The only tool you need to make most adjustments on the inside is a Phillips head screwdriver and then to get things out you unlock this great full height sliding PCI slot lock that they didn't make.

I don't have to do it, but they did and it's great and they labeled everything so if you don't know exactly what you're doing, they've numbered the pieces in the order you need to remove them so everything slides in and out easily. One is the thumbscrews on the side, you don't need a screwdriver for them, you can literally unscrew them to remove the bracket. Two are the bridge between the modules, so if you have more than one, you only need one screw, just take it out. Right away, three are the screws on the other side and you can see that they are still connected to the bracket with a spring, so they are not loose screws, so you can't lose them without losing the entire bracket and you take it off and then, the Last step is the very satisfying pry to take out of the PCI slot and then your MPX module is free.

Now these mpx modules inside are also fanless, meaning they are passively air cooled and rely heavily on airflow. go through those three front fans and the heatsinks and that has its pros and cons - the fact that there are no extra fans means there is no extra noise, but they also tend to be thicker than most normal parts because the huge heatsinks are bigger than just putting more fans in, I mean look at the size of this GPU compared to a typical high end graphics card but hey that's what they built it around and they even labeled the part bottom of the RAM cover for instructions on where to place the memory depending on How many devices do you have so you can get the most out of this multi-channel memory that we're working with here?

A lot of these things just didn't have to be done, so they've clearly paid a lot of attention to making them fit. And finish, what about performance? Because that's why you get a computer like this at the core and for me it's been excellent, noticeably better for me even than the 18 core 12000 max imac pro that I came from before using this now here. it's my mac pros specs so the machine that I've been editing in these last two videos that you've been watching we're done and if you check out those options on Apple's site you'll see that I've given Apple north of 40,000 of my own dollars for a computer, so yes god it should work much better than any imac or any all in one.

Now most people will never need parts like this. I'm a professional Final Cut editor, that's my professional level. workflow that's why I need the speed and power of these pieces and for that it's been amazing as I've noticed with workflow examples in the past and I think animators maybe high level photographers can take advantage of the power of the mac pro, but If most of the people watching this know youtubers video creators, even if it's not 4k, they don't even need a basic Mac Pro, so know that we have a couple more Mac Pros in the studio and the one I'm using is my spec but we've tried a lot of different ones.

I won't bore you with benchmarks if you want a proper benchmark-filled video with comparisons. I'll link technical tips from Linus. The video of him. He did a great job and you should check it out. mac pro review of it, this thing is clearly powerful, it's definitely not more than I can use, although it's not invincible for all intents and purposes. I have a mac pro maxed out apart from the 768 gigs of ram, which could be doubled, but essentially this. It's the best computer Apple has ever made and you can still see it stopping. All you have to do is record an 8k red clip with a low compression ratio, maybe something like five to one, and then import it into any large 4k or 8k timeline.

Set playback to high quality yourself, press play, and then watch as the Mac Pro slowly starts to choke and become unusable. However, you can imagine how a macbook pro or imac or imac pro would have handled that even worse, but I want to talk. about that after burning the card for a minute because that to me is really interesting so apple made a two thousand dollar pci decoder card that essentially just decodes prores and raw prores so photographers don't need it at all , encoders, anyone developing applications, don't need it even if you edit in any other codec other than prores or prores raw, you won't benefit at all from an afterburner card, but if you edit prores it will decode those streams and allow you Effortlessly play tons of high-resolution videos. streams, I think they've said up to 23 consecutive streams of 4k or 6 8k videos at the same time, while it basically takes that load off the CPU, but I don't edit prores, I edit raw code red, so why did I get a afterburner card well this afterburner card built around fpga is reprogrammable which means Apple and Red can work together to allow this afterburner to speed up code red playback and this is rumored to be something that is already in the works, uh now I don't have any proof on my end or any updates to show that the integration has come to fruition yet, but there is definitely the potential for even bigger video games and that potential exists for other codecs as well. optimized for metal and gives great performance so maybe one day in the future you can play five to 8k code red and it will play it smoothly in high quality so overall to finish the mac pro Let me put it this way, it's not just that the Mac Pro is a really expensive computer, it's more that Apple chose to make a very, very expensive machine in the Mac Pro.

Does that make sense, like tons and tons of the decisions What have they taken on this computer? It wouldn't be found or noticed on many other desktop computers. The completely wireless interior of the system is quite nice but totally unnecessary. The crazy fan control. The PCI lock that really satisfies the system for mpx modules. The fact that every button on this Mac Pro is made of metal instead of plastic and there are pins for them, every little detail is carefully considered and taken to the maximum, which is why those other desktops are for most people, which is good, but Apple decided to create a computer that didn't take shortcuts and took it. to the max with premium things like build quality and performance, so I'm happy they did that because I'm in a very small portion of the demographic where that's exactly what I'm looking for.

The downside is that Apple simply doesn't do it. Not making a thousand dollar modular desktop tower like that is not a disadvantage of the Mac Pro, it's a disadvantage of Apple, it's just a product they don't make, there are a ton of products I wish Apple would make that they just don't make. I wish they would make a mirrorless camera because I already make some of the best smartphone cameras out there, but they just don't make a camera, desktop speakers, computer speakers, they don't make a wireless charger for multiple devices, they don't. do that, so add it to the list, like tower 900 to 1200, which is modular, Apple doesn't do that either, but they do make it a silent

killer

and I'm very happy with it and I really want it to last.

I hope a decade passes and it gets better with time, so that's it, thanks for watching, I'll catch you in the next one. Peace, also Apple, the 400 wheels, they are great, but they really need locks.