nearly a year ago, i published a video abouthow the $4,000 mac pro was incredibly antiquated and couldn’t edit 4k video to the caliberthat i required, so i moved to windows. it’s now 2017 and apple still hasn’t updatedthe mac pro—since 2013—despite the fact it’s still sold in apple stores at fullprice. i’ve recently moved from adobe premiereto final cut pro; which means i need a mac
apple stock price in 1984, again. i bought the fully-loaded $4,000 2016 macbookpro, but it’s price tag couldn’t justify the bugs, under clocked cpu, and dismal gpuperformance; so i returned it, and decided to do something crazy—tear apart my oldmac pro, upgrade the cpu, ram, and add an
external gpu so that i could outperform thebest 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—andit turns out, there aren’t many. the highest-end compatible cpu is the intelxeon e5-2697v2 which is an ivy bridge 12-core 2.7ghz processor with 3.5ghz turbo boost. apple charges a whopping $3,000 upgrade, butthere 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 newone in. i also decided to upgrade the ddr3 ecc memorywhich has come down in price significantly. i bought 32gb of compatible ram on amazonfor $160. apple charges $400 for this upgrade. my last upgrade was ditching my dependenceon the crappy, outdated dual amd firepro d300 graphics cards in the machine. the new macbook pro uses an amd radeon 460which is built on the new polaris architecture which means macos now natively supports thelatest-gen amd graphics cards—like the $250 rx 480 i chose to use.
no weird drivers. no heavy modification of system files, itjust works. and that’s spectacular. i jammed the gpu, modified akitio pci-e tothunderbolt 2 dock, and an overkill 350w power supply into a makeshift fractal design node202 pc case. i used nice fractal fans which makes for adead-silent operation. keep in mind, the mac pro uses the old thunderbolt2 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 othermac 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 asthe loaded mac pro, the benchmark results are the same. in geekbench, the new macbook pro has a fastersingle-core score due to the low clock-speed on the 12-core cpu in frankenmac, but multi-coreperformance crushes both the stock mac pro and the loaded macbook pro. in cinebench, the cpu pulls ahead yet againclocking 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 stockmac pro and 35% faster than the $8,000 mac pro. in unigine heaven, the rx480 did much poorerthan 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 aboutreal-world performance? in final cut pro, a demo project i exportedcompressing 4k prores footage to h.264 with frankenmac was 275% faster than the base macpro 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 anythingelse apple makes.
