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Hands-On With Apple's New 2019 Mac Pro
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You can still get the Dune case or enclosure (or whatever's it called) and you'll still end up with a nice chassis.
That was interesting, I really appreciate you writing that, thanks for that. Just one thing that threw me, you said you might consider it when they release the rack mount, but I can't see how that would change all the other aspects you talked about?
Apple killing it with the ‘desperate to win an internet argument’-demographic.
No. I said that a gaming PC would, for my tasks, by faster, due to CUDA & RTX GPUs. That doesn’t mean I would use it for gaming. Big difference.
If anyone is serious about 3D modelling and rendering they should definitely be using GPU based raytracing. CPU rendering for previews should be the last thing on their mind. What Blender Eevee can do with an RTX card is mind blowing and amazing.
Apple are advertising the Mac Proas a high performance workstation. They mention tasks like 3d rendering and how it will be faster. Faster rendering brings a tangible benefit.
So now you’ve moved the goalposts, admitting that it wouldn’t get you any faster ‘from point a to b’. Good. That was all I was ever saying - so finally you agree.
You could have just said ‘yes the Mac Pro isn’t particularly fast, but it’s very nice in other ways’ and I would largely agree. For me, and I expect many others, those ‘other things’ just aren’t worth spending 5x the money for.
I car terms I see the Mac Pro more as a DeLorean. Very nicely designed using neat materials, but not actually very high performance. The DeLorean also has poor price/performance ratio when it came out in the 80s and ultimately flopped. Today it’s a cool collectors item.
No rumours that I'm aware of, but I'd guess March/April, as Intel released the W-2200 Xeon family (iMac-thermal-friendly) in October, and the lead time to market for Apple is about 5-6 months after an Intel launch.
It's definitely not going to be cheap though. The discounted iMac Pro being sold at the moment in some online stores is a great buy if you want to stay with macOS but don't need the power of the new MP. I expect the new iMac Pro to follow the same pricing strategy as the MP.
Most companies won't just go out and buy one without doing some research first. With all software developers in the pro arena announcing huge support of the system, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot to have that attitude.
Nvidia have had a monopoly on the market for too long, I say only good can come of some competition. ALSO what good is CUDA if we don't even know if there will be support for third party GPU's? IT's way too early to guess what will and won't happen, but CUDA isn't the only consideration with the purchase of this system.
Depends completely on the problem you are trying to solve. We bought $100k worth of servers with zero support for any GPU environment because the software they run isn't GPU-accelerated. Lack of CUDA is a real issue... for some.
That's a major reason for its success over OpenCL. It avoids write once debug/re-optimize everywhere. A lot of CUDA programs are technical and specific, so they can't afford the developer cost. It's cheaper to buy pricier hardware than pay developers.
It's a major problem with all the "Opens". Look at Chrome, it converts OpenGL (WebGL) into DirectX because everybody's OpenGL implementation was broken in different ways.
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The natural home for the MacPro is in a laboratory, a studio, or a high-end medical facility, and their idea of what constitutes expensive is very different from that of an average consumer. I haven't seen review which asks what ought to be a rather obvious question: prior to the release of the Mac Pro, what kind of gear would have been capable of batting in the same league? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that any such machine would have cost a good deal more, so from the point of view of a purchasing officer for that lab/studio/hospital the Mac Pro might seem like a distinct bargain.
Apple last week finally launched its long awaited 2019 Mac Pro, providing its professional user base with the high-end high-throughput modular machine they've always hoped for.
We picked up a base model Mac Pro and in our latest YouTube video, we unbox it and share some initial first impressions.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
The Mac Pro arrives in an absolutely massive box weighing over 85 pounds, so getting it out of the packaging is no simple task. There are tabs, lids, velcro straps, and more to contend with, ensuring the machine is secure in its packaging.
Even out of the packaging, the Mac Pro is a heavy duty machine made from quality components, and that "cheese grater" design looks great in person. In reality, the lattice look is functional and meant to maximize airflow for quiet performance.
We have the base model Mac Pro, priced at $5,999, with an 8-core 3.5GHz Xeon W processor from Intel, 32GB RAM, a Radeon Pro 580X GPU, and 256GB of SSD storage. We didn't opt for upgrades, but you can add everything from a 28-core processor to 1.5TB of RAM to 4TB of storage (soon to be 8TB), with a maxed out machine costing upwards of $52,000.
Luckily, this is a machine designed to be highly upgradeable, so most of the components can be swapped out later. iFixit gave the Mac Pro a repairability score of 9/10, and said it was a "masterclass in repairability," which is definitely a first for an Apple product.
We can swap out the GPU, add RAM, and take advantage of the eight PCIe slots, though upgrading the SSD will require Apple's assistance because they're tied to the machine's T2 security chip. We're going to be upgrading the RAM in our machine quite soon, so make sure to keep an eye out for that video.
Taking the casing off of the Mac Pro is a bit difficult because it's a tight fit and again, it's heavy, but once the casing has been removed, all of the internal components are easily accessible.
There are both single wide and double wide PCIe slots, with the half-length slot preconfigured with Apple's I/O card. The I/O card features a 3.5mm headphone jack, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and two USB-A ports. There are also two HDMI ports, a spot for the power supply, and two 10GB Ethernet ports. You'll find two additional Thunderbolt 3 ports at the top of the tower near the power button.
Going back to that lattice design, the Mac Pro is indeed as quiet as Apple promised. There are three fans on one side to optimize airflow, and the housing has been designed to act as a tight seal with internal ducts to maximize the thermal capacity.
The Mac Pro comes with a nice braided power cable, a Lightning to USB cable with the same braided design, nifty black Apple stickers, and a high-quality instruction manual. It also ships with a silver and space gray aluminum Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard, which is a design unique to the new Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro is an impressively built machine, and we're excited to put it through its paces and see what it can do. Stay tuned to MacRumors for more Mac Pro coverage, and let us know what you think of Apple's new machine.
Article Link: Hands-On With Apple's New 2019 Mac Pro
Well, it might not that developers are specifically supportting. At least from what I can tell, Metal is largely a reimplementation of Vulkan. Shaders are the only real difference between Metal and Vulkan. There's a piece of software called MoltenVK which can do the conversion, and there may be other programs by this point. The benefit of Vulkan is that it's supported by all GPU's and, perhaps indirectly in Apple's case, all operating systems. I think it's a lot more likely that developers are in favor of Vulkan, and Metal by extension. Otherwise, they'd be pigeon-holing themselves by supporting Metal, limiting their products to a single OS or otherwise significantly increasing development costs. Not to mention, during the hiatus between this new Mac Pro and its predecessor, a number of creative professionals have switched to Windows. Even before that, many film and animation studios were running Linux. Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, and the BBC all run Linux.
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I am sure I'll read up on how things fair with this everything that is old is new again Mac Pro. I don't get all excited about having a configurable Mac Pro. I merely say - about time given it should have always been the most configurable of the Mac offerings.
The design is pretty, it is functional and it reminds me (internally) of the HP Z workstations which were in their release considered a real class act in internal layout and function.
After years with a Mac Pro, 3 iMacs, a few Mac Mini (pre neutered) and I am on my last Mac - MBP 2015. I don't see a Mac Pro in my future again but perhaps if at all a Mac Mini. I certainly would welcome a 3x height Mac Mini that was a "junior" Mac Pro and had some flexibility. Call it the system that gamers might want and the rest of us would use for work and art.
The design is pretty, it is functional and it reminds me (internally) of the HP Z workstations which were in their release considered a real class act in internal layout and function.
After years with a Mac Pro, 3 iMacs, a few Mac Mini (pre neutered) and I am on my last Mac - MBP 2015. I don't see a Mac Pro in my future again but perhaps if at all a Mac Mini. I certainly would welcome a 3x height Mac Mini that was a "junior" Mac Pro and had some flexibility. Call it the system that gamers might want and the rest of us would use for work and art.
Would you mind PM'ing or listing what hardware you bought and guide you used? I've been toying with that idea for many years but it seems like every hack thread Ive read ends up with annoying stuff broken, like wake from sleep.
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But but but I was explictly told Threadripper is not a workstation CPU!!!
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Well, for smaller studios that aren't making Marvel movies and that use Vray, Maxwell, Arnold or Corona render engines, fast CPUs and lots of cores are what is needed. Not everyone uses Octane or Redshift for GPU rendering. Some in fact, avoid these engines as they are not 100% physically accurate. Very good, but they can't do everything perfectly. Granted, some of the other engines are now adding GPU support and many are trying to add AMD GPUs as well, which is great. The more the merrier. Plus many, like me, utilize their own little render farms or use commercial render farms for bigger jobs. Whatever makes you happy and gets the job done.
First post here. We'll see if I regret it.
Speaking for myself, and only myself, there's more to my work life than raw CPU and GPU power. All these people saying I'm a chump for using a Xeon-powered Mac Pro for 3D animation and motion graphics (a Threadripper would be one million times faster) rarely note that you can only install Threadrippers on Windows machines.
And I really dislike working in Windows. Obviously it works for tons of amateurs and professionals, but I'm willing to pay a $4-$5K Apple "tax" to stay in the ecosystem within which I'm most comfortable.
My wife and I just finished our 20th year in business running a small motion graphics and 3D animation studio here in Portland. We work out of a home office. Our first workstation was actually a Umax Mac (Power PC) clone on which we ran After Effects, Lightwave 3D, Premiere, etc. We later upgraded to the G3, several G4s, and eventually three cheese grater Mac Pros. I do pretty much all of the After Effects and Cinema 4D work, and we manage to make a comfortable living with our stable of clients. Most of our stuff is corporate work for HP, Intel, etc, with the occasional national commercial or PBS documentary series. I wouldn't call the stuff I do cutting edge.
For the past seven years I've been doing that work on a 2012 dual 6-core Xeon Mac Pro. While increased CPU speeds allow you to render preview frames faster, when it comes time to render my draft and final 3D animations I send those to Pixel Plow (as was noted earlier in this thread with Rebusfarm).
A few years ago a client sent us a dual 12-core Xeon Windows workstation in case we needed the horsepower for a complex immersive project, and we still have it. It's more than twice as fast in 3D rendering (Arnold CPU renderer) as my Mac Pro, but despite that I still use my creaky Mac Pro for 90% of my work. I'm constantly jumping between C4D and AE and PP to my email to Safari to Messages. I use Quicklook all of the time. I like a cohesive and intuitive interface. I like being able to sort EVERYTHING by date (not folders by date followed by individual files by date). I like being able to name my hard drives whatever I want, not with some letter. (It's possible some of my issues with Windows could be improved with third-party apps or whatever, but I haven't felt compelled to exhaustively research that. Why couldn't it be awesome straight out of the box?)
Yes, I would probably get "used to" Windows after a while if I absolutely had no choice but to switch over, but I think this 2019 Mac Pro will give me enough of a performance boost to justify its inflated price tag. Right now I'm leaning towards an $11K configuration with the 16-core Xeon and Vega II card. A medium-large job for me would cover that cost.
My two main laments about the new design is its lack of dual CPU sockets and lack of Nvidia support. I was hoping to get a Mac that's at least as fast as this PC, but that would probably mean a $15K system with the 24-core CPU, and I don't know that that's worth it. I'm guessing the 16-core Xeon will be more than twice as fast as my 2012 system and maybe 75% the speed of the Windows workstation. I haven't seen a Cinebench score for the 16-core system.
So that's my (long-winded) story, and I'm sticking to it.
Cheers.
Speaking for myself, and only myself, there's more to my work life than raw CPU and GPU power. All these people saying I'm a chump for using a Xeon-powered Mac Pro for 3D animation and motion graphics (a Threadripper would be one million times faster) rarely note that you can only install Threadrippers on Windows machines.
And I really dislike working in Windows. Obviously it works for tons of amateurs and professionals, but I'm willing to pay a $4-$5K Apple "tax" to stay in the ecosystem within which I'm most comfortable.
My wife and I just finished our 20th year in business running a small motion graphics and 3D animation studio here in Portland. We work out of a home office. Our first workstation was actually a Umax Mac (Power PC) clone on which we ran After Effects, Lightwave 3D, Premiere, etc. We later upgraded to the G3, several G4s, and eventually three cheese grater Mac Pros. I do pretty much all of the After Effects and Cinema 4D work, and we manage to make a comfortable living with our stable of clients. Most of our stuff is corporate work for HP, Intel, etc, with the occasional national commercial or PBS documentary series. I wouldn't call the stuff I do cutting edge.
For the past seven years I've been doing that work on a 2012 dual 6-core Xeon Mac Pro. While increased CPU speeds allow you to render preview frames faster, when it comes time to render my draft and final 3D animations I send those to Pixel Plow (as was noted earlier in this thread with Rebusfarm).
A few years ago a client sent us a dual 12-core Xeon Windows workstation in case we needed the horsepower for a complex immersive project, and we still have it. It's more than twice as fast in 3D rendering (Arnold CPU renderer) as my Mac Pro, but despite that I still use my creaky Mac Pro for 90% of my work. I'm constantly jumping between C4D and AE and PP to my email to Safari to Messages. I use Quicklook all of the time. I like a cohesive and intuitive interface. I like being able to sort EVERYTHING by date (not folders by date followed by individual files by date). I like being able to name my hard drives whatever I want, not with some letter. (It's possible some of my issues with Windows could be improved with third-party apps or whatever, but I haven't felt compelled to exhaustively research that. Why couldn't it be awesome straight out of the box?)
Yes, I would probably get "used to" Windows after a while if I absolutely had no choice but to switch over, but I think this 2019 Mac Pro will give me enough of a performance boost to justify its inflated price tag. Right now I'm leaning towards an $11K configuration with the 16-core Xeon and Vega II card. A medium-large job for me would cover that cost.
My two main laments about the new design is its lack of dual CPU sockets and lack of Nvidia support. I was hoping to get a Mac that's at least as fast as this PC, but that would probably mean a $15K system with the 24-core CPU, and I don't know that that's worth it. I'm guessing the 16-core Xeon will be more than twice as fast as my 2012 system and maybe 75% the speed of the Windows workstation. I haven't seen a Cinebench score for the 16-core system.
So that's my (long-winded) story, and I'm sticking to it.
Cheers.
I am currently speccing my Mac Pro and have a question for all the experts out there.
Other than a capacity difference is there a performance difference between RDIMM's and LRDIMM's ? I read somewhere (& can't remember where) that RDIMM's are faster. Is that the case?
AS if you don't need more than 384GB of ram then you can go with RDIMM's on the OWC Memory site.
Other than a capacity difference is there a performance difference between RDIMM's and LRDIMM's ? I read somewhere (& can't remember where) that RDIMM's are faster. Is that the case?
AS if you don't need more than 384GB of ram then you can go with RDIMM's on the OWC Memory site.
For the people crying “but threadripper is faster!!!”, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and try to consider why Apple isn’t adopting it.
Off the top of my head:
1) Final Cut Pro supports quick sync, an Intel feature. Benchmarks on paper may not totally account for the optimisation that Apple does on their software. A theoretical AMD Mac may not necessarily be (that much) faster than an intel Mac running FCP to be worth the hassle of switching.
2) is thunderbolt 3 even compatible with AMD chips?
3) macOS is likely fairly well optimised for Intel processors. That and intel processors still seem better for laptops (which make up 80% of Mac sales). I am not sure Apple wants to split their resources putting intel processors in MacBooks and AMD chips in their desktops, so it’s majority wins right now.
4) Threadripper is still fairly new. If AMD can demonstrate that they are capable of sustaining this performance lead, Apple might well switch to it in the future. However, if this is a generational thing (ie: Intel catches up next year), it may not be worth it. Just ride it out.
5) Just as Apple is more likely to drop the charging port altogether than switch to usb c, so too may they end up just switching to ARM than bother switching processor brands. We are not privy into Apple’s long term product roadmap, and there are possibly a lot of other considerations we are not seeing.
Thoughts?
Off the top of my head:
1) Final Cut Pro supports quick sync, an Intel feature. Benchmarks on paper may not totally account for the optimisation that Apple does on their software. A theoretical AMD Mac may not necessarily be (that much) faster than an intel Mac running FCP to be worth the hassle of switching.
2) is thunderbolt 3 even compatible with AMD chips?
3) macOS is likely fairly well optimised for Intel processors. That and intel processors still seem better for laptops (which make up 80% of Mac sales). I am not sure Apple wants to split their resources putting intel processors in MacBooks and AMD chips in their desktops, so it’s majority wins right now.
4) Threadripper is still fairly new. If AMD can demonstrate that they are capable of sustaining this performance lead, Apple might well switch to it in the future. However, if this is a generational thing (ie: Intel catches up next year), it may not be worth it. Just ride it out.
5) Just as Apple is more likely to drop the charging port altogether than switch to usb c, so too may they end up just switching to ARM than bother switching processor brands. We are not privy into Apple’s long term product roadmap, and there are possibly a lot of other considerations we are not seeing.
Thoughts?
I am going to play double devil's advocate when it comes to the hackintosh scene and what is possible and what is not, as of yet...and I have been part of the hackintosh community for quite some time. My current rig is a i7 4770K Quad core, with a Gigabyte MB, and Geforce 1080ti. I have been researching quite a bit and the plain fact is that no one that I have seen has made a hackintosh with the same specs/hardware of what is going into the new Mac Pro; and for obvious reasons, buying the same hardware is just as costly.
Gigabyte socket 3467 MB (C621 AORUS XTREME) which does not even have 10gb Ethernet is $2065 on newegg
Intel Xeon W 16-core (Intel® Xeon® W-3245, same one in the MacPro) has a street price of $2000 according to Tom's hardware.
So without anything else (RAM, Case, Power Supply, HD) we are around $4000. Mac Pro base, just upgrading to the 16-core brings the cost to $8000. So lets say you can get the additional components including a PCI card with 10gb Ethernet comes in around another $1000. So we are talking around a $3k difference in price for a system that will have no support and could break just by looking at it wrong (I have toasted my Hackintosh several times doing updates; but right now I am stuck at High Sierra due to no nVidia support past High Sierra).
The top tier hackintosh systems are currently running Core X series CPUs which quite frankly are no where near the overall capability as the Xeon W series. Clocks and core counts might be similar and synthetic benchmarks show equal or similar performance; but there are quite a few differences. For one the Xeon W used in the Mac Pro have 64 PCI 3.0 lanes from the CPU (yes 4.0 would be nice for storage, but that is about it for right now). Also the Xeon W can access a ton more RAM than the Core X; fairly critical for scientific simulations where lots of RAM is needed. AMD CPUs lack AVX-512 instructions, which is a bummer. I do like the current AMD CPUs.
And to further the issue, here are the things you need to deal with on a constant basis with a hackintosh system; and I know because I have one:
iMessage and Facetime, unless you have time to research and understand how Apple does motherboard serial numbers and machine naming, and you are lucking enough to have a EN0 ethernet port active out of the box, you will never get either of these to work; you CAN get it working, but it is a hassle; and you need to be extra diligent to validate said fake MB serial numbers.
Audio; always needs to be modified to work, and it is even more troublesome if you want it to work via HDMI or DP. (I solved it by just getting a pcUSB DI box from Whirlwind; but I have a audio console and audio monitors, so it works out good for me)
Thunderbolt 3; as of right now I do not know anyone who has hot swap working with their hack, not only that the method of it working is basically running the output of the GPU into either the MB or another PCI card, in other words, not really thought out system wide like the Mac Pro. And you need to boot into Windows in order to initially activate the TB3 cards on the Motherboards.
Sleep and correct power modes and power stepping for the CPU; unless you feel like learning about SSDT and DDST files you might as well give up on this working 100% correctly. My hack will not shut down properly after it has been running for a few days. Sleep almost never works on hacks; but not a big deal for me as I generally never have any of my computers actually sleep.
TRIM for SSDs; you can get it working, it is just a hassle.
Besides all of the above, the minute OS X requires the T series chip be present, the hackintosh scene just died, or if Apple moves everything to A series based chips.
Now let's delve even further into the Mac Pro and what it offers; what PC system can you buy that has TB3 so integrated into the system? Let's say you want to get the same level of compute power as the Vega II Duo (and mind you the Mac Pro can have 2 of them, for $10800, super ouch I agree); it is debatable whether the nVidia RTX Quadro cards can beat or match these because the Vega II Duo is only available on the MacPro, but AMD has something else called the Radeon Instict that you can buy for PC systems, I can't even find a price for the MI60 (which is the closest in spec to a single Vega II), but the MI25 is $2300, so let's assume the MI60 is around $5k, so 2 of them is $10k and separate cards, not on 1 card; so you will need twice as many PCI slots at 16x than the MacPro in order to match. Of course the debate will be on the PC side you could add a RTX 2080 ti ($1300, 16GB) and a V100 Tesla ($8000 for 16GB) for compute. The fully loaded VegaII Duo setup has 128GB of video memory though. A top of the line RTX Quadro card will run you around $6000 (48GB RAM, Quadro 8000). $10800 for 4 GPUs at the level of the MI60 seems like a damn bargain. (4 MI60s would be close to $20k.) Very doubtful, but if Apple and nVidia ever kiss and make up, would it not be cool to be able to add some V100s or a RTX card?
I guess my biggest take away gripe from everyone saying they can beat and match the synthetic benchmarks of the Mac Pro with cheaper hardware are not looking at the overall big picture of the system and what it can offer. I have already priced out building a hack with similar expansion capabilities, using as close to the same hardware and the numbers just do not add up; and even more so, neither does the time involved getting it to work.
My workload consists of light to medium 3D, motion graphics, video editing, typical photo stuff and typical office stuff (word, excel, etc etc.) My biggest slowdown is that I am generally dealing with massive pixel dimensions building stuff for LED walls and Blended screens for live shows.
The problem is that for my needs, I needs something that is very good at doing a bit of everything, single threaded and multi-threaded; and I prefer the MacOS eco system over Windows 10. I have Windows 10 on my hack also just for playing games. I have also compared all my software on my hack running under Windows 10 and OS X and there is no clear advantage to Windows. Even compared rendering on the OS X side using CUDA, OpenCL and Metal. CUDA was a bit faster, but it is also more mature and running on a card that is made for it, so DUH!
If all I had to do was render 3D scenes all day long, then of course I would be looking at the AMD Threadripper. Who would not be?
Comparing gaming rigs to the Mac Pro is pointless because it isn't a gaming rig. If you want to compare anything, spec out some HP Z systems -- the price will be the same if not more. If fact no computers from Apple are gaming rigs.
I will agree though that the base level 8-core Mac Pro is not a good bargain. I think Apple should make a Mac Pro Lite version that uses Core X CPUs, just do a 8 core and 10 core. Start the Mac Pro at the 16 core Xeon W, the starting price of the "Lite" could be $2500-$3000 and people would probably not complain as much. The Lite version could have only 1 MPX slot, 1 x16 and the half length x4 for the Apple IO card.
Nothing in stone yet, but there is a very good chance (90%) that I will be getting a 16-core Mac Pro, pretty much keeping it stock, except adding more storage (2TB, since all of them use 2 drives except the 256GB base), and apparently they are RAID 0. I may hold out for the WX5700X GPU option. Later on I expect I will get a Vega II Duo or whatever else is better at the time. I have been waiting a long time for a proper workstation tower from Apple. My last one was a G5, been on a hack for a long time.
Gigabyte socket 3467 MB (C621 AORUS XTREME) which does not even have 10gb Ethernet is $2065 on newegg
Intel Xeon W 16-core (Intel® Xeon® W-3245, same one in the MacPro) has a street price of $2000 according to Tom's hardware.
So without anything else (RAM, Case, Power Supply, HD) we are around $4000. Mac Pro base, just upgrading to the 16-core brings the cost to $8000. So lets say you can get the additional components including a PCI card with 10gb Ethernet comes in around another $1000. So we are talking around a $3k difference in price for a system that will have no support and could break just by looking at it wrong (I have toasted my Hackintosh several times doing updates; but right now I am stuck at High Sierra due to no nVidia support past High Sierra).
The top tier hackintosh systems are currently running Core X series CPUs which quite frankly are no where near the overall capability as the Xeon W series. Clocks and core counts might be similar and synthetic benchmarks show equal or similar performance; but there are quite a few differences. For one the Xeon W used in the Mac Pro have 64 PCI 3.0 lanes from the CPU (yes 4.0 would be nice for storage, but that is about it for right now). Also the Xeon W can access a ton more RAM than the Core X; fairly critical for scientific simulations where lots of RAM is needed. AMD CPUs lack AVX-512 instructions, which is a bummer. I do like the current AMD CPUs.
And to further the issue, here are the things you need to deal with on a constant basis with a hackintosh system; and I know because I have one:
iMessage and Facetime, unless you have time to research and understand how Apple does motherboard serial numbers and machine naming, and you are lucking enough to have a EN0 ethernet port active out of the box, you will never get either of these to work; you CAN get it working, but it is a hassle; and you need to be extra diligent to validate said fake MB serial numbers.
Audio; always needs to be modified to work, and it is even more troublesome if you want it to work via HDMI or DP. (I solved it by just getting a pcUSB DI box from Whirlwind; but I have a audio console and audio monitors, so it works out good for me)
Thunderbolt 3; as of right now I do not know anyone who has hot swap working with their hack, not only that the method of it working is basically running the output of the GPU into either the MB or another PCI card, in other words, not really thought out system wide like the Mac Pro. And you need to boot into Windows in order to initially activate the TB3 cards on the Motherboards.
Sleep and correct power modes and power stepping for the CPU; unless you feel like learning about SSDT and DDST files you might as well give up on this working 100% correctly. My hack will not shut down properly after it has been running for a few days. Sleep almost never works on hacks; but not a big deal for me as I generally never have any of my computers actually sleep.
TRIM for SSDs; you can get it working, it is just a hassle.
Besides all of the above, the minute OS X requires the T series chip be present, the hackintosh scene just died, or if Apple moves everything to A series based chips.
Now let's delve even further into the Mac Pro and what it offers; what PC system can you buy that has TB3 so integrated into the system? Let's say you want to get the same level of compute power as the Vega II Duo (and mind you the Mac Pro can have 2 of them, for $10800, super ouch I agree); it is debatable whether the nVidia RTX Quadro cards can beat or match these because the Vega II Duo is only available on the MacPro, but AMD has something else called the Radeon Instict that you can buy for PC systems, I can't even find a price for the MI60 (which is the closest in spec to a single Vega II), but the MI25 is $2300, so let's assume the MI60 is around $5k, so 2 of them is $10k and separate cards, not on 1 card; so you will need twice as many PCI slots at 16x than the MacPro in order to match. Of course the debate will be on the PC side you could add a RTX 2080 ti ($1300, 16GB) and a V100 Tesla ($8000 for 16GB) for compute. The fully loaded VegaII Duo setup has 128GB of video memory though. A top of the line RTX Quadro card will run you around $6000 (48GB RAM, Quadro 8000). $10800 for 4 GPUs at the level of the MI60 seems like a damn bargain. (4 MI60s would be close to $20k.) Very doubtful, but if Apple and nVidia ever kiss and make up, would it not be cool to be able to add some V100s or a RTX card?
I guess my biggest take away gripe from everyone saying they can beat and match the synthetic benchmarks of the Mac Pro with cheaper hardware are not looking at the overall big picture of the system and what it can offer. I have already priced out building a hack with similar expansion capabilities, using as close to the same hardware and the numbers just do not add up; and even more so, neither does the time involved getting it to work.
My workload consists of light to medium 3D, motion graphics, video editing, typical photo stuff and typical office stuff (word, excel, etc etc.) My biggest slowdown is that I am generally dealing with massive pixel dimensions building stuff for LED walls and Blended screens for live shows.
The problem is that for my needs, I needs something that is very good at doing a bit of everything, single threaded and multi-threaded; and I prefer the MacOS eco system over Windows 10. I have Windows 10 on my hack also just for playing games. I have also compared all my software on my hack running under Windows 10 and OS X and there is no clear advantage to Windows. Even compared rendering on the OS X side using CUDA, OpenCL and Metal. CUDA was a bit faster, but it is also more mature and running on a card that is made for it, so DUH!
If all I had to do was render 3D scenes all day long, then of course I would be looking at the AMD Threadripper. Who would not be?
Comparing gaming rigs to the Mac Pro is pointless because it isn't a gaming rig. If you want to compare anything, spec out some HP Z systems -- the price will be the same if not more. If fact no computers from Apple are gaming rigs.
I will agree though that the base level 8-core Mac Pro is not a good bargain. I think Apple should make a Mac Pro Lite version that uses Core X CPUs, just do a 8 core and 10 core. Start the Mac Pro at the 16 core Xeon W, the starting price of the "Lite" could be $2500-$3000 and people would probably not complain as much. The Lite version could have only 1 MPX slot, 1 x16 and the half length x4 for the Apple IO card.
Nothing in stone yet, but there is a very good chance (90%) that I will be getting a 16-core Mac Pro, pretty much keeping it stock, except adding more storage (2TB, since all of them use 2 drives except the 256GB base), and apparently they are RAID 0. I may hold out for the WX5700X GPU option. Later on I expect I will get a Vega II Duo or whatever else is better at the time. I have been waiting a long time for a proper workstation tower from Apple. My last one was a G5, been on a hack for a long time.
I'm so happy that I dont have to follow those Apple oddities anymore.
I bought myself a Threadripper 3970X System, too, with 64gb of ram, 1tb SSD, Nvidia 2080RTX 11GB for $5500.
For multicore tasks this system is almost 4 times faster than the more expensive entry level Mac Pro!
Next to that I know I can upgrade any part at any time I want/need to at way lower prices that Apple charges me. Next year the 64core Threadripper will be released and when prices have fallen a bit I can double the performance of my machine again!
The point is: The Mac Pro is really not a good machine for 3D/rendering. Price/performance is nowhere near a PC System. Yes that was always worse with Apple computers, but now the gap is just too big. I'm running a business and I'm not paying 20k if I can get the same performance for 5$.
I bought myself a Threadripper 3970X System, too, with 64gb of ram, 1tb SSD, Nvidia 2080RTX 11GB for $5500.
For multicore tasks this system is almost 4 times faster than the more expensive entry level Mac Pro!
Next to that I know I can upgrade any part at any time I want/need to at way lower prices that Apple charges me. Next year the 64core Threadripper will be released and when prices have fallen a bit I can double the performance of my machine again!
The point is: The Mac Pro is really not a good machine for 3D/rendering. Price/performance is nowhere near a PC System. Yes that was always worse with Apple computers, but now the gap is just too big. I'm running a business and I'm not paying 20k if I can get the same performance for 5$.
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