The $10,000 Mac Pro Killer

Apple's latest Mac Pro is an embarrassment. It doesn't even have their latest gen M3 Silicon. It costs $3,400 more than a Mac Studio that has the exact same specs. And their prices on storage and RAM upgrades would seem to suggest that they're made out of gold rather than Silicon. The worst part though, it's not even that good. Yeah, here we go. Final scores, 3000 and change, 1900 and change. Wow, wow, 50% faster on CPU. But showing you all the results right away is no fun and not very helpful.

So let's talk about our choices while we work together to build the PC Pro 2. Yeah, if you remember, this isn't the first time we've done this. And last time, the PC wasn't a clear winner, unlike our sponsor, MSI. If you don't have time to go through the process of picking out parts and building your own PC, MSI's Aegis RS Gaming Desktop comes pre-built with powerful components like a Wi-Fi 7 enabled motherboard, and it has the benefit of being easily upgradable. Check it out at the link down be

low. Right out of the gate, this PC Pro build is gonna be a bit more of a challenge. While our Mac Pro comes in at a whopping $11,800, the old one was like $30,000. So, bargain? Well, it all depends on what you're getting, right? There are two different M2 Ultras, one with 60 GPU cores and the other with 76. We've gone with the latter, meaning that that machine is as fast as it can be. Meanwhile, the PC Pro is getting something a little, I don't know, newer, faster, wider? How about all of the a

bove? The AMD Threadripper 7970X features AMD's latest Zen 4 architecture with a monstrous 32 cores and a boost clock of 5.3 gigahertz, all while drawing 350 watts. And that's before you turn on PBO or precision boost overdrive. More on that later, but there's a potential drawback of our machine compared to that one. This isn't a top of the line Threadripper or anything. That would have cost us more than half of our budget by itself. But I'm still confident that this CPU is gonna have no issue.

I'm still confident that this bad boy is gonna run circles around that thing. Now, unlike the Mac Pro with its soldered CPU, our chip needs a motherboard with a socket to go in, specifically the Gigabyte TRX50 Aero D. There's only a handful of TRX50 motherboards out there right now, and we settled on this one primarily due to the spacing of its PCI Express slots, which is gonna make a bit more sense later. It also, conveniently, is the least expensive TRX50 board while still including great feat

ures like dual high-speed LAN ports, Wi-Fi 7, and a whopping four quad-lane M.2 slots, three of which are PCIe Gen 5. Now, hold on a minute, Linus. This is regular Threadripper. How is this machine pro? That is a fair point. Compared to Threadripper Pro, we've got fewer PCIe lanes, so you can't connect as much stuff to it, and limited RAM capacity across half as many memory channels. But then I ask you this, how do we stack up to the competition? Compared even to this non-pro system, the Mac Pro

has fewer PCIe lanes still, supports less RAM, has limited support for professional applications outside of video and photo, and doesn't support ECC memory at all. It does have faster memory, but we'll have to see how much of an advantage that's going to give it. Let's talk about memory. The base model Mac Pro comes with 64 gigabytes of unified memory, and unified memory is legitimately super cool. Apple RAM is directly on the SoC package, which increases bandwidth to both the CPU and the onboa

rd GPU. Not only is it fast, but if the CPU completes a task and needs to hand it off to the GPU, that GPU has immediate access to it, rather than having to wait for it to be transferred between system memory and traditional GPU memory. Apple's RAM also supports dynamic caching, meaning that the CPU and GPU can partition the system memory dynamically to best complete their respective work. Or at least the M3 can. It sucks that this Mac Pro is still stuck with the M2. And what also sucks even mor

e is the price. We added another 128 gigs to our config, which cost us 1600 US dollars. On the PC side, okay, sure, it's not unified, but boy, do we ever get a whole lot more for our money. I am talking double the capacity at 384 gigabytes. These are Micron's 96 gig, 5600 megatransfer per second DIMMs. They're registered ECC, meaning they should be beautifully stable. And we're gonna fill all four slots here, maxing out our motherboard. It's kind of funny we ended up with exactly double the RAM

because there was that clip that circulated of an Apple employee erroneously stating during an interview that- Eight gigabytes on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16 gigabytes on other systems. I guess that's why it costs twice as much. Another sore spot that Apple users have been complaining about more and more lately is storage pricing. To go from the stock one terabyte in that machine to eight terabytes will add $2,200 to your bill. $2,200. For that price, you could buy a whole othe

r computer. You could buy one of every screwdriver on lttstore.com. Twice. Or you could do what we did and pick up two of these. The Cybert Rocket 4 Plus eight terabyte. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Twice as much storage. Hey, Apple, is your eight terabytes equivalent to our 16 terabytes? Is that a thing? We're gonna find out. Yeah, we sure will. Now, our board doesn't support M.2 RAID, so we weren't able to use these drives for redundancy or extra speed, but what we can do is just have double the

capacity, whether it's for projects, videos, games, or whatever we want. One advantage for Apple, though, has been, and maybe always will be, sex appeal. I mean, look at this fine ass cheese grater. That's why people keep buying this thing. For us, we've gone with, well, it's fine. This is the Define 7 XL. It's not a new case by any means, but it's compatible with high-end hardware, fits lots of storage drives, and hopefully won't be too constricted when it comes to air flow. Worst case scenario

, we'll drill some holes in the front, bring back that cheese grater aesthetic. For cooling, we've gone with an NZXT Kraken 360, because, well, we had mounting hardware, and with this triple radiator, it was able to handle our 32 CPU cores under full load, at least at their default speeds. The system does support overclocking, but it's really not something that we would recommend for a pro machine in a production environment, anyway. Now, while you watch this delightful little montage of our coo

ler being installed, I'd like you to think back to when I said this motherboard has the PCIe slot spacing we needed. That is because for our build, we're using not one, but two of MSI's RTX 4090 Supreme cards. Yes, my friends, Apple is what it took for NVIDIA's pricing to finally seem so reasonable that you can just put in two. However, there's a twist. The keen eye among you might've noticed that one of my cards is air-cooled, and one of them has water cooling. That, my friends, is because we c

ouldn't find any combination of motherboard and case that could fit two air-cooled 4090s. And then, well, when we wanted two of the liquid-cooled ones, we found out, gosh, darn it, AI rushed in China. There's now a 4090 shortage. So we asked our trustworthy bro, Ryan, from the LTT Store support team if we could borrow his air-cooled variant, and we used our one remaining liquid-cooled variant. That way, we've got two of the same cards, but with slightly different hats. Now, since the shortage, p

rices for these have gone up a fair bit, but I still think we're gonna end up looking pretty good by comparison. Let me deal with that. Anyhoo, to power this mess, we went with the Silverstone Hela 2050R Platinum, or SST-HA2050R-PM for short. It costs a whopping $670, which only sounds like a bad deal until you compare it to the Mac Pro. Ah. Reasonable. Now that the build's done, all we gotta do is fire it up and run some benchmarks. Now, our final price, not that far off, but for fun, we're gon

na include results with both GPUs as well as with only one GPU because a little bird told me, bird named Elijah, that it'll still win even with just one GPU. Yes. Good job, bird. Spoiler alert. I stuttered. I'm sorry. I fucked up the shot. No, I loved it. It was great. I had her to please cut around and make me look good. Can you please freeze frame? Cut around him. Put me on a beach. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like make me look good. Give him like a Tom Selleck mustache and like, you don

't know who Tom Selleck is? He's the Seleckian one. What does that mean? Couldn't help noticing Elijah. We're off to a pretty bad start here. Our system didn't even boot up. Error code zero D. You think you've seen little PP energy? That's zero PP energy. And they're booted. Ah, finally. PCs. Yay. But which one's faster? Classroom. And go. Wait. That's, what? Is it F12? I don't know. I don't know. Is there a hotkey to render? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that. It is F12. There you go. Go. I got a hea

d start. F12 on a Mac. What is this? Command option F12. Oh, I don't know. I was just guessing. I give up. If anyone should have had the head start, it should have been you. Spoiler. Are you done? No, I. Oh, no, it's still going. Yes. I am going much faster than you though. Oh, wow. Yes, you are. All right, I finished. I'm not even halfway. You started late. You started late. Let's give it the benefit of the doubt. We'll let it heat up, catch up, you know. I started like five seconds after you.

So quiet though. It sounds like it's barely doing anything. Wait. Since we're still waiting for the Mac anyway, why don't you run a GPU intensive test and see if they spin up? Yeah, sure. We'll run Cinebench. We'll see what it can, what results it can give us. Oh, you finished. Did I finish? Yeah. Total time. Oh, 246 was the end result. Yvonne's so proud of me. Here we go. Boom. It's starting. Oh, hey, you've got to run it on the Mac too. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. GPU start. Hey, my fans are s

pinning. It's definitely louder. Is it? Yeah. No, I mean louder than the Mac. Like this thing is silent. Yeah. I mean, that's what happens when you hook a Raspberry Pi up to a heatsink this big. It's not a Raspberry Pi. It's a powerful computer. It's an Apple Pi. Yeah, don't feel bad. Your computer's really powerful. Good boy. Okay, this is rendered this multiple times. We're getting about 65,000 points, give or take. It's doing it over and over and over. Preparing? It hasn't even started. Let's

just run it like four times. Remember the first gen when Apple was all, our GPU was like, mm, yeah, mm, mm, mm, mm, mm. And Nvidia's like, what are you even talking about? Okay, that was the 3090, if I recall correctly, not the 4090, but still. It has done this multiple times while it's trying to finish this one. It's kind of insane how it's just crushing it. There it goes, it finally finished one. 9,500 points. We are over six times that. What was our difference in price? Give or take like a c

ouple hundred bucks depending on sales of parts. But final cut, the ecosystem. I get my Windows phone back. Please bring it back. Dozens of people are so upset right now. Is the noise difference enough that you would prefer to buy the Mac over this? No, this is still a really quiet machine. We should put the side panel on in fairness though. Oh yeah. Apple's side panel game on fleek. Kids don't say that anymore. How would you know? You're old now. Let's do the CPU version of Cinebench first befo

re we completely write this thing off though. And they're off, coming out of the gate strong. We've got nobody. Nobody is coming out of the gate strong. Whoa, hold on a second. This is actually closer? Yeah. This may be a competition. Oh, okay. Oh, PC Pro 2 is picking up speed. It's coming out ahead around the first turn. So I'm going to stop that now. Yeah, please do. Yeah. This one had like a moment where I thought, hey. Yeah. Hey. Yeah. No. Hey, yeah. What? Cause you said, hey, yeah, it's a s

ong. Oh, I don't get it. Do we have scores yet? Yes. 3,000, 2,000. Oh, this one's not even done still though. Oh, does it give preliminary scores? Yeah, I think it's estimating what it's going to be. Oh, okay, well. It's almost done it's, or it's like halfway done it's second one though. And this one's not done it's first. It took a bit to spool up. Yeah, here we go. Final scores. 3,000 and change. 1,900 and change. Wow. Wow. That's like 50% faster on CPU. Apple Silicon has been a huge win for t

hem in mobile. Mac mini. Yeah. Super cool machine. The studio as well. Cause we're not, we're just dissing this one because it's the same spec, but it's like what? $3,400 we said. You're basically, you're paying $3,500 US for a fancy case and some PCIe slots. You don't even have expandable RAM in it anymore like you used to. And that's the problem. We like Silicon because of its efficiency. And you know. We love Silicon. Can't say that. Apple Silicon. Oh, we love Apple. Silicone. What? Nobody is

talking about that. They're different. What? Silicon. Yeah. Is an element. Okay. Silicone is a compound that contains Silicon. So they're the same. No, that's like saying that water is the same as oxygen because there's oxygen in it. I understand now. We got there, ladies and gentlemen. For LOLs gaming? Sure. Let's play a game. So CS2. Counter-Strike 2 it is. Oh, it's going really fast. Yeah, it's pretty fast. How fast could you download the game? Delete it and reinstall it. All right. Manage.

Uninstall. Here we go. 1.5. 1.6. Is the Mac gonna win the game download benchmark? Oh, did we beat it? Three. Yes, we passed it. Okay, we beat it for 3.1. One thing I will say that is a W though, that boots way faster. Yeah. That was a problem we had with the last Mac Pro Killer as well, was that one took a while to boot. Workstation platforms on PC tend to be poorly optimized. But hey, you can download games at 3.4 gigabit per second compared to 2.8. Wait, is Counter-Strike 2 not available for

Mac? Did you check? It's not available for Mac. So it's trying to get you to launch it. Oh, for crying out loud. I didn't even realize that. Okay, Rocket League. Rocket League's not launching either. Are you sure this is? It doesn't work on the M Silicon. Okay, were you just trying to make a point that nothing works? Or were we supposed to compare these? I was trying to make a point that it's very difficult. There's very select games that, you know, you may or may not get to play the ones you wa

nt. Were you? Or did you think they worked? I totally was doing it on purpose. It is one of my favorite. Whoa. Sound Boomer enabled. Okay, very cute. Sound Boomer is not a real thing. What speaker is that? Is it just playing off the boom speaker? That sounds like it, eh? Is that a thing? I didn't know that was a thing it could do. Well, where's your PC Pro built-in speaker at? Hey, fine. I guess you got me on that one. All right, I don't have a speaker embedded in my computer. To be clear, Linux

is a piece of... Windows is a piece of... So when I say macOS is also sometimes problematic, don't get upset. You know, why can't I type right now? You know, I'm clicking this box. I'm highlighting this text. It's not that my keyboard's not working. Oh, look, spotlight. Oh, good. Wait, I think I figured it out. Keystroke receiving. Dusk would like to receive keystrokes from any application. So like clicking? I don't. Is that what it's asking? So it wants access to the keyboard to play? I'm exha

usted just trying to open one stupid game. Oh, wow. This mouse is really laggy. Imagine the bottom charging port not being the worst thing about it. Hey, wave two. Shotgun, let's go. I mean, it looks kind of smooth. I can't tell what you're feeling with the mouse though. Does it feel rubbery? Oh, no. Well, the mouse is terrible, but the actual game is fine. Okay. Yeah, it's running super smooth. Yeah, so why don't I have an FPS counter? Dumb question. Did it actually enable? I don't know. Okay,

I'll tell you what. Elijah's gonna find at least one game that runs on both of them. We're gonna have a little graph right here, but spoiler alert, it's not gonna be pretty because the raw horsepower of the GPUs in the PC Pro 2 is vastly greater. And remember that in games, we aren't even able to make use of both of them because NVIDIA no longer supports NVLink or SLI at all for that matter on consumer cards. Jerks. Okay, Linus, we hear you. Apple is expensive and none of their products are good

. But that's not what I'm saying. There are some arguments, strong arguments for many of Apple's products. There's the power and portability of the MacBook, the efficiency of the Mac Studio, or my personal favorite, the Mac Mini. That thing is a powerhouse. Or the convenience of AirPods, which I happen to daily drive. It's just that the Mac Pro is so bad that Apple will almost certainly can it, by which I don't mean turn it into a can again. I remember that. I mean, discontinue it. I mean, even

Apple's most ardent defenders are starting to realize that Apple's pricing, especially with halo products like this, just doesn't make any sense anymore. If you search for the M2 Ultra Mac Pro, almost every article or video reaches the same conclusion. It's dumb. There are some things that it does do well. I mean, like the Mac Studio because it's the exact same machine. The single core performance was actually on par or even better than our PC Pro 2 sometimes. And its efficiency is outstanding.

I think its overall power consumption is closer to one of these GPUs than it is to this entire system. But for the price of this thing, you can get a fully kitted out Mac Studio for your home office and still have enough money to buy a refurbished M2 Max MacBook Pro from Apple's certified refurbished store. Or if all that seems like a bad idea, you could buy this fancy Segway. Now with $700 reels to our sponsor. Ground News. They want to change how we engage with news by helping us better unders

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cess vantage plan today. If you guys enjoyed this video, go back and watch the first time we did this. That one cost over $30,000 and it actually wasn't even a clear winner. So, I don't know. Hey, at least Apple's cut the price since then.