We’ve made a lot of Mac Pro videos in the
last month, and one thing that was consistent
between were comments about AMD’s new Threadripper
CPUs and how you can build a much cheaper
PC that’s also much more powerful, so we
did just that.
This right here is our $5,000 Threadripper
PC Build, and in this video, we’re going
to compare it to our $15,000 Mac Pro in everything
from features, benchmarks, thermals, fan noise,
real-world performance tests, and more!
Now as a disclaimer, I do want to mention
that this isn’t a fair comparison in many
ways, one big one being the Mac Pro uses MacOS
which is important for a lot of people, and
at this point, you can’t even Hackintosh
this Threadripper. There are also a few ways
the Mac Pro absolutely kills this PC build,
and we’ll mention all of these important
factors at the end of the video.
When choosing the parts for this Threadripper
PC build, I wanted to make sure to match as
much specs as possible which required a $850
motherboard that comes jam-packed with features.
So before we get into the performance testing,
here’s how the features of this PC compare
to the Mac Pro.
It comes with WiFi 6 built in, compared to
Apple’s WiFi 5. It comes with PCI express
4, compared to 3 on the Mac. And just like
the Mac Pro, it comes with dual 10Gbe, and
it supports ECC RAM, although we didn’t
use it for this build.
It comes with much more I/O, including 10
USB-A ports, 7 of which support Gen 2 speeds
compared to two ports on the Mac Pro that
only support Gen 1 speeds.
This PC build also has two USB-C ports and
two Thunderbolt 3 ports compared to eight
Thunderbolt 3 ports on this Mac Pro configuration,
which is a major benefit.
Along with that, the motherboard in this PC
comes with a bonus add-in storage card, which
can RAID up to 4 PCI express 4.0 M.2 SSDs
together for up to a massive 15,000 MB/s read
speed.
You can also easily add a ton of different
storage drives like hard drives, which isn’t
as easy on the Mac Pro.
And the best feature of all is that this PC
build can power Apple’s 6K Pro Display XDR
in 10bit at 6K resolution. We’ll show you
how we did that in just a minute.
Here’s a list of all of the parts we used
for this PC build compared to the parts that
are in the Mac Pro. Now if you want to know
why we chose these specific parts, we discuss
them in our step-by-step build guide that
you guys can watch after this video to learn
how you can build this PC yourself.
One of the major annoyances we ran into with
the Mac Pro is that Apple controls all of
the driver updates for the graphics cards,
forcing users to wait until they update MacOS.
But with Windows, parts manufacturers can
update their drivers on their own schedule,
so you get updates more often.
Now getting into performance, we want to point
out a massive advantage for the PC, and that’s
the ability to overclock the CPU, which you
can’t do on the Mac Pro.
This setup is capable of overclocking up to
4.25GHz, but it draws an extra 180W of power
and puts out way more heat and fan noise for
only 8% more performance, so we went back
to stock for this comparison.
So without further ado, let’s start our
performance testing with Geekbench 5’s CPU
test.
Unsurprisingly, this 32-core threadripper
CPU scored over 2x the multi-core performance
of the 12-core Mac Pro, but be sure to keep
in mind that it costs only 42% more while
getting over double the performance, which
is awesome bang for your buck!
Now we usually don’t mention single-core
performance, but it shocked us that this PC
got a higher single-core score even though
it has 20 more cores, which usually never
happens!
So ultimately, you’re not sacrificing performance
for tasks that only use one core.
The main benefit for the 12-core Xeon is that
it supports up to 768GB of RAM compared to
only 256GB on this Threadripper CPU, but to
be honest, not that many people actually need
that much RAM.
Now moving onto a more realistic benchmark,
Cinebench R20, the Threadripper performs even
better, scoring 17,254 points compared to
only 5,519 on the Mac Pro.
However, it came at the cost of fan noise,
even though this case is the Darkbase Pro
900 from Be Quiet, which is filled with sound
dampening materials and very quiet fans.
The ambient noise in the middle of our office
stays at around 37 to 38 decibels loud.
The back of the threadripper PC while idling
measured at around 46 to 47 decibels, and
while running Cinebench R20, it measured all
the way up to 55 decibels loud.
In contrast, the Mac Pro idled at around 38
decibels, which is basically completely silent,
and while running Cinebench R20, it measured
slightly higher at around 39 to 40 decibels,
much lower than the PC at idle.
And the most annoying thing about this PC
is that the fans kick up pretty loud every
time you open up a new app because of how
much wattage this CPU takes.
And even with this much performance, we noticed
that the Mac OS is still much snappier than
windows when doing basic tasks and things
like installing programs and unzipping files
which why a lot of people prefer Macs.
For example, we’ve had apps freeze multiple
times on this PC just in the time that we
were testing these systems, and absolutely
zero freezes on the Mac Pro.
In terms of the temps while running Cinebench
R20, the Mac Pro got up to 69 degrees, while
the Threadripper PC reached a high of 79 degrees,
which is still very impressive and even though
we had a massive watercooler it had to run
at full blast to do so.
Now moving onto graphics benchmarks, we tested
Geekbench 5 using Metal on the Mac Pro and
CUDA on the PC, which is the best-case scenario
for both systems.
Here, the PC scored over 50% higher than the
Mac Pro, which is impressive considering the
fact that you can get it for around $1,250
compared to paying Apple $2400 for the Vega
II upgrade.
So with that, we decided to test out video
gaming performance using the Unigine Heaven
Benchmark on the extreme preset, and the PC
got 210FPS compared to 114 on the Mac Pro.
And even with that much FPS, the 2080TI graphics
card in the PC stayed at a cool 70 degrees
thanks to its triple-slot cooler.
The Mac Pro’s Vega II GPU ran at 81 degrees,
but the difference was that it stayed completely
silent throughout the test.
In fact, even when we max out the CPU and
GPU at the same time by running Cinebench
R20 and Unigine Heaven simultaneously, it
remained basically silent, which was incredibly
impressive.
We also tested graphics rendering in the Blender
benchmark, and the Threadripper PC finished
the BMW and classroom tests in only 3 minutes
and 8 seconds, compared to 15 minutes and
54 seconds on the Mac Pro, but that was on
macOS where graphics rendering is new and
it seems to not be optimized as a weaker AMD
GPU was much faster under windows.
Since this PCs motherboard supports PCI express
4.0, we took advantage of it with a super
fast 1TB M.2 SSD, which got read speeds of
up to a massive 4,995 MB/s compared to 2,992
on the Mac Pro.
And for write speeds, the PC got 4,257 MB/s
compared to 2,948 on the Mac Pro’s 1TB ssd.
This is something you won’t be able to get
on the Mac Pro from a single storage drive
because the 2019 Mac Pro is forever limited
to PCI express 3.0 which is a bummer.
Now moving onto Photo editing in Lightroom,
the threadripper does an amazing job in terms
of editing smoothness as does the Mac, but
when exporting 500 42MP RAW images, it’s
only 42% faster than the Mac Pro, instead
of over 300% faster in Cinebench, even though
all 32 cores are being maxed out which was
quite surprising.
This shows that you so many extra cores don’t
scale in many real-world tasks.
Now before we get into video editing performance,
where we start to see a very different trend
in results, I want to reveal how we were able
to get this Threadripper PC to power Apple’s
6K Pro Display XDR.
We did it by installing a very special dual-Thunderbolt
3 port add-in card which uses two Displayport
imports from your graphics card to create
two Thunderbolt 3 ports which we used to connect
the display.
This allowed us to not only power the Pro
Display XDR, but to get it working both at
10-bit and 6K resolution, which is really
impressive seeing as it’s a custom Windows
PC.
Now finally, let’s get into Video Editing
where we’ll start with Premiere Pro because
it’s by far the most used program.
The PC does a good job putting the threadripper
and Nvidia GPU to use but so does The Mac
Pro with Metal. At times I did notice a smoothness
difference in favor of the Mac because the
PC would drop frames at times when starting
to playback or scrubbing through the timeline.
When it came time to exporting regular 4K
the Mac Pro surprisingly took the lead even
though both systems were not maxing out the
CPU or Graphics. This is where optimizations
start coming in and Apples Metal API starts
to kick in.
If you’re someone who works with HEVC footage
the Mac Pro is way better here. Scrubbing
in the timeline is much smoother, and it exports
our test project almost 3 times faster. This
is because of the Mac Pro has Apple T2 chip
which greatly speeds up encoding, and their
only computer that doesn’t have it, the
5K iMac takes the same time as threadripper.
Stabilizing is also faster with the Mac Pro
which is really weird since the PC’s single-core
speed is actually faster, so maybe its MacOS.
Now for some positives, Playing back tough
C200 footage is much smoother on the threadripper
at about 45fps compared to 24 fps on the Mac
Pro. This is because premiere isn’t optimized
and doesn’t use graphics like Final Cut
or Resolve does so the extra 20 cores come
in really handy.
Exporting this graded 5K 4K 60 project is
more than twice as fast because its all CPU
based so if you work with this footage in
Premiere you want as much cores as you can
get your hands on.
Now lets touch on Resolve which is much more
optimized in general and makes way more use
of graphics than CPU cores.
I started with the famous candle benchmark
that tests the video editing performance of
the GPU’s and suprisingly both graphics
performed exactly the same, reaching 18fps
while being maxed out.
Next we denoised 4K blackmagic raw and the
results were exactly the same, running between
22 and 24fps, showing us that even though
the 2080ti is more powerful for gaming and
other tasks, for video editing the Vega II
paired with Apples Metal really holds its
own.
Editing smoothness in Resolve is excellent
for both and exports are much faster than
Premiere, sometimes even beating final cut.
There also some advantages with Windows which
allows the graphics to encode the video and
the latest version uses Nvidia graphics to
decode RED RAW allowing for perfect full 8K
playback without needing a 28 or 32 core CPU.
Now Resolve has these same features ready
for MacOS, and the next version should enable
them as well. Our Mac also has a big advantage
you can’t get with any other computer, and
thats the afterburner card which competely
takse load of the CPU for ProRes and ProRes
raw allowing even an 8 core to playback 6
streams of 8K ProRes RAW where this beastly
32core would only handle 3 streams and a 28
core Mac Pro only 2.
There’s so much more differences in video
editing, and each system has it strong points
but to properly reveal the differences we
have to make a dedicated video, so if you
want to see if use the link in the video description.
Now while it seems like this $5,000 Threadripper
PC totally blows away our $15,000 Mac Pro,
and it definitely does in certain tasks, there
are a few things the Mac Pro has that this
PC simply can’t get, and a cool bonus feature
that the PC has.
First off, you can get up to 768GB of RAM
in the Mac Pro or 1.5TB with the higher spec
CPU’s, significantly higher than the 256GB
on this PC.
The case is also very unique, making it incredibly
easy to work on, unlike the pretty complicated
case we used on the threadripper PC.
And the Mac Pro also offers incredibly silent
workflow, where the threadripper is honestly
annoying to work even after tuning the fans
and using this case designed to lower noise.
The Mac Pro also offers 8 Thunderbolt 3 ports
with the ability to have 12, which you simply
can’t get on any PC.
And the last big difference is the workstation-grade
parts and more expensive components. Even
though we bought a really nice motherboard
Apple offers way more ports and a power supply
to handle 4 Vega II graphics cards.
Threadripper CPU’s don’t naturally compete
with Xeons, that would be AMD’s EPYC which
cost more and run slower.
On top of that, the Vega II graphic is also
workstation-grade and gets 32GB of VRAM compared
to only 11 on the 2080TI, which will help
a lot in tasks that use a ton of VRAM. To
be comparable we need at least am Quadro RTX
6000 which by itself would nearly double our
build price while still being sort 6 gigs
of memory that’s 30% slower than HBM2.
But not everyone needs those things for their
work, and in
those cases, you can get much more bang for
the buck and more upgradability with windows
threadripper pc.
Our threadripper has one other advantage,
built-in wireless charging on the top of the
case.
So there you guys have it! That was our $5,000
Threadripper PC compared to our $15,000 Mac
Pro. If you want to see a detailed video editing
comparison follow the link in the description
and you’d like to see how we built it, check
out that video right there for our step-by-step
guide, and click that circle above to subscribe
if you haven’t already. Thanks for watching,
and we’ll see you in the next one!
