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00:00Hey, how's it going? Dave2D here. So this is a video on the new iMac Pro, and this is
00:09going to be like a two-part video. I'm going to do a comparative performance review between
00:13the iMac Pro and three other powerful desktops that I've been using over the past little
00:17bit, and then for the second part of this video, I'm going to talk about the idea of
00:21this product as a whole. So for the comparison, we have four desktops. So first is this iMac
00:27Pro. It's the 10-core model, 64 gigs of RAM with the Vega 64 GPU, and then we have a Threadripper
00:33Alienware Area-51. So this thing has 16 cores, 64 gigs of RAM, and a pair of GTX 1080Ti's
00:40in SLI, and then we have a Ryzen 1700X build. This is an 8-core CPU, 64 gigs of RAM, single
00:47GTX 1080, and then lastly, we have the 10-core Trashcan Mac Pro. Now, this thing is a little
00:52bit dated. It's four years old at this point, but before the iMac Pro came out recently,
00:56this thing was literally the most powerful Apple computer that you could get for multi-core
01:00applications. Performance on the 10-core iMac Pro is very good. Like, if you ignore the
01:05price of this thing, and you only look at the performance benchmarks, you can see that
01:09it's better than the 8-core Ryzen by quite a bit, and it's a noticeable step up from
01:13the 2013 Mac Pro, but as expected, it's not as good as the 16-core Threadripper. So these
01:18benchmarks obviously don't show us everything because this thing's running a Xeon processor
01:22with ECC memory, but it does give you a general idea of how they perform relative to each
01:26other. Now, I'm an Adobe user, particularly Adobe Premiere, so I'm going to focus my performance
01:31review of these devices for Premiere. So these are the render times for my workflow, which
01:35is 5K footage from a Scarlett W camera, and we're seeing the same kind of trend here.
01:40Performance on the 10-core iMac Pro is very good. Not as fast as the Alienware Threadripper
01:45system, but it's still pretty impressive. The thermal performance is also really good,
01:49because cooling a 10-core CPU in a form factor like this is not easy, and then doing it
01:53quietly is even more difficult, and we're looking at very comfortable temperatures on
01:57idle or load. Fan noise is also surprisingly quiet. It doesn't come on very often, but
02:02when it does, it's very tolerable. So yeah, there's a lot of good things about the iMac
02:06Pro. I mean, it looks really good, the space gray is awesome, the space gray keyboard is
02:09really cool, and the black lightning cable, which for some people is really important.
02:14The 5K screen looks amazing with an improved webcam, and the I.O. is pretty good as well.
02:18We're getting way more ports than the average Apple computer, and as you saw earlier, the
02:21thermal management is quite good, but the thing that makes this computer special to
02:25me is the form factor. They're able to stick so much great hardware into a relatively small
02:30all-in-one package, and it's a very nice-looking package in my opinion. But the reason why
02:34I made this video, and the thing that kind of bugs me with this product, is the price
02:39tag. So this is an Apple product. Apple products tend to be a little bit more expensive, and
02:43it's a professional Apple product, so you're going to pay a little bit more of a premium
02:46than normal, but you often see this argument being thrown around about how this thing is
02:51not overpriced, because if you tried to build this thing from scratch, like through your
02:56own parts, the price tag would be not too different from what Apple charges. But I don't
03:00entirely agree with that, because I think most people that are building systems with
03:04Xeon processors and ECC memory wouldn't be pairing it up with a 5K screen. So Xeon processors
03:10are used for applications where it's just constant, heavy use of the CPU. So if you're
03:14a stock trader, or just doing any kind of application where you're doing complex calculations
03:19all day, every day, you're running scenarios or something like that, Xeon makes sense.
03:23If your renders take like 18 hours to run, then yeah, Xeon makes sense. And same with
03:28the RAM. If your applications require huge amounts of data to be transferred around in
03:31memory, and you just cannot have any room for error, then sure, ECC RAM is great for
03:36you. But for most people, for most professionals, they don't want this stuff. They want really
03:42powerful computers. And in 2018, we have the ability to buy really powerful computers
03:47that are not Xeon processors and do not require ECC memory. And it bugs me that Apple is putting
03:53this type of equipment as the only option for those professionals. So most people, most
03:59professionals, they want high core count. They want like 8, 10, maybe 12 cores. And
04:04for Windows users, there's plenty of inexpensive options right now. We can get like Ryzen CPUs,
04:09i7, i9, even Threadripper is cheaper than this stuff. With Xeon, you're paying a huge
04:14premium for the processor, for the architecture, and you're forced to buy just expensive components
04:19across the board to make that stuff work. And with Apple, you're locked into that ecosystem
04:25just to be able to get high core count. So for certain content creators that work with
04:29Apple applications, this kind of makes sense because it's really your only option. But
04:34for people that work with applications that have multi-platform abilities, like you can
04:38do it in Windows or you can do it on Apple, like the Adobe application, this product is
04:43just, it feels so overpriced. I really enjoy the OSX or Mac OS they call it now. I enjoy
04:48Mac OS, but this product just feels way too expensive to justify its purchase, at least
04:53for someone like me, like a kind of mid-tier content creator. So that's what we have. A
04:58very overpriced, I'm going to use that term, overpriced product from Apple this year that
05:04fits the needs for a very few number of people, but I think for most people, it should be
05:08a pass. Okay. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. Thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved
05:12it. See you guys next time.