2019 Mac Pro is Now Available at Apple.com

[trs96]

There's got to be a better way to directly support tonymacx86 than having to resort to these.

Yes there is, it's called the donate button. Too few people use it to keep this site operating. It takes money to "keep the lights on." Everything here is completely free of charge. The site wouldn't exist if we relied only on Paypal donations. Clicking affiliate links doesn't add a penny of cost to a product purchased at Newegg or Amazon.

Are you sure this Xeon Gold 5128 will work without problems (if at all)? Have you seen anyone do it?
I'm asking because, compared to the 16-core that Apple offers, apart from the significantly lower frequencies (would be even slower than the base 8-core, in lightly threaded workloads),

The '19 Mac Pro has a standard Intel 3647 Socket that will accept any of the Cascade Lake Xeons. In Quinn's video he points out that he replaced his iMac Pro's Xeon CPU with one that Apple doesn't offer and it's worked with no issues for two years now. If you look at all the builds on this site that use Intel CPUs that Apple hasn't used in Macs, including Xeons, I've never seen anyone report that they weren't compatible with macOS. Of course, the low end Celerons an Pentiums are never going to work without a major hacking effort. Any Core i3, i5, i7 or Xeon will work with macOS compatible graphics in the system.

As to the lower frequencies of the 5128 Xeon gold. Obviously single core performance will be lower, anyone that wants the highest single core specs will build with a 9900K or KS system. I'm offering another lower cost 16 core option for those with heavy rendering workloads that run all day long, maybe all night too. This would primarily be video editors that don't have more than ten grand to spend on their new MP workstation. They need as many cores/threads as they can get.

Blender is a perfect example. For someone working in 3D animation, cores don't really impact the performance on Blender renders directly, but it's rather the amount of threads your CPU can provide and still maintain optimal speeds that matters. Bumping up the amount of threads manually isn't going to do you any good without a good multi-core CPU like the Xeon Gold 5128 with 32 threads and turbo boost up to 3.9 GHz. It's one of the better "low cost" choices for heavy Blender use.

 

[trs96]

Although this would work, keep in mind that this creates a non optimal memory configuration (it's called near-balanced) and there will be a performance hit. Ideally you want 6/12 DIMMs of the same capacity.

Do you have any evidence of this to share ? Some real world testing that has been done ? How much of a performance hit ? In what situations would this hamper your workflow ?

It is possible to buy an 8 x 8GB kit of the Nemix DDR4 2933 server ram to populate all the slots. Amazon offers it right now. The cost is $473 as opposed to the $239 price of two 32 GB DIMMS.

For those that will be fine with a max of 96GB then that's the route they can take now. If they want to go with more ram later they'll have take it all out and buy a completely new kit.

 

[Sofronis]

It takes money to "keep the lights on." Clicking affiliate links doesn't add a penny of cost to a product purchased at Newegg or Amazon.

I understand that and it's fair and please don't take this personally, I have nothing against you or affiliate links in general.

What gets me, is that when I'm presented with a specific full URL, that purports to take me somewhere, but instead it first takes me somewhere else (an ad/marketing agency in this case), this is what I find a bit disingenuous.

The '19 Mac Pro has a standard Intel 3647 Socket that will accept any of the Cascade Lake Xeons. In Quinn's video he points out that he replaced his iMac Pro's Xeon CPU with one that Apple doesn't offer and it's worked with no issues for two years now.

I've seen that video of Quinn's, but that's not the same and it's not just the lower frequencies.

The Xeon you suggested belongs to a different class of Xeons and has 16 fewer PCI-e lanes. What if by using this Xeon (if it boots at all) you disable the bottom MPX slot?

I think it's better not to suggest different kinds of CPUs, until it's confirmed that they work without problems.

 

[trs96]

t first takes me somewhere else (an ad/marketing agency in this case), this is what I find a bit disingenuous.

This doesn't happen when I click any of those links. Please post a screen shot of what you're seeing after you do click the link.

 

[trs96]

I think it's better not to suggest different kinds of CPUs, until it's confirmed that they work without problems.

The whole point of this or any hackintosh community is to experiment with going off the straight and narrow path of doing things only the way Apple does them. It's all about research, posting the results of that research and then sharing that with the community. If no one ever tries that 16 core Xeon in a Mac Pro how will we know if it works or doesn't ? So if anyone doesn't want to take the chance that it might not work they're not obligated to. Someone probably will and then share what they find here. If they do buy the 16 core Xeon Gold from Amazon and for whatever reason they need to return it, they'll get a full refund with no questions asked. It's quite easy to return a CPU in my experience with them.

Any of the possible hardware configs for the Mac Pro I've posted are based primarily on saving as much money as possible to keep the total cost of ownership lower. I'm fully aware that there may be better choices that can be made by spending more. I'm in no way saying that the lower cost options are the only way or the best way to go. Someone with a $20,000 new Mac Pro budget is probably going to choose only what Apple offers from the factory and not make any hardware upgrades themselves.

I hope that you can understand what I'm doing here. What's the point in having a Mac Pro thread and saying "Spec it out with all the Apple factory upgrades you can afford" and leave it at that ?

No one can argue that Apple's hardware upgrade prices are up to 5x what they should be. Especially for ram, SSD storage and graphics. In my opinion even someone flush with cash should still do the upgrades themselves rather than throw more money at Apple's 230 billion dollar cash hoard.

 

[pastrychef]

The '19 Mac Pro has a standard Intel 3647 Socket that will accept any of the Cascade Lake Xeons. In Quinn's video he points out that he replaced his iMac Pro's Xeon CPU with one that Apple doesn't offer and it's worked with no issues for two years now. If you look at all the builds on this site that use Intel CPUs that Apple hasn't used in Macs, including Xeons, I've never seen anyone report that they weren't compatible with macOS. Of course, the low end Celerons an Pentiums are never going to work without a major hacking effort. Any Core i3, i5, i7 or Xeon will work with macOS compatible graphics in the system.

As to the lower frequencies of the 5128 Xeon gold. Obviously single core performance will be lower, anyone that wants the highest single core specs will build with a 9900K or KS system. I'm offering another lower cost 16 core option for those with heavy rendering workloads that run all day long, maybe all night too. This would primarily be video editors that don't have more than ten grand to spend on their new MP workstation. They need as many cores/threads as they can get.

Blender is a perfect example. For someone working in 3D animation, cores don't really impact the performance on Blender renders directly, but it's rather the amount of threads your CPU can provide and still maintain optimal speeds that matters. Bumping up the amount of threads manually isn't going to do you any good without a good multi-core CPU like the Xeon Gold 5128 with 32 threads and turbo boost up to 3.9 GHz. It's one of the better "low cost" choices for heavy Blender use.

I remember on the MacPro4,1 and MacPro5,1 there were some steppings of Xeons that didn't work.

 

[trs96]

I remember on the MacPro4,1 and MacPro5,1 there were some steppings of Xeons that didn't work.

We'll probably need to start a 2019 Mac Pro upgrades thread to have all the tested working components in one place. It's going to take some time to gather all of that info from testing on new MPs. I'm sure some sites/forums that are Mac Pro only will also be discussing this topic.

 

[trs96]

there were some steppings of Xeons that didn't work.

Do you recall how many did work that weren't installed in Mac Pros from the factory ?

 

[UtterDisbelief]

...
The fact that a laptop can often times outperform a Mac Pro with 50% more cores, goes to show that even apps that Pros use, can favor low core-count but higher frequency CPUs. Also the new Navi GPU in the MacBook Pro seems to work very well ...

This is a very salient point when considering the sheer horsepower that has been bestowed on the new Mac Pro models. It has to have the software that can take advantage of the parallel processing. Back in the dim and distant, when I was testing an i5 quad-core over my i3 dual but higher MHz clock CPU, I found the lowly i3 "felt" much better in use day-to-day. If I recall correctly the i3 was a 4.2GHz whereas the i5 3.6GHz or so. I made the choice of RPM over Torque because for most applications it was more relevant.

Anyway, interesting point but I stray off-topic. As you were ...

 

[pastrychef]

Do you recall how many did work that weren't installed in Mac Pros from the factory ?

I can't remember... I just remember they were specific steppings. I guess I just didn't think about it again after I did my upgrade...

Edit:

Mac Pro CPU Compatibility List

Bokkow and I have created a Mac Pro CPU compatibility list. The intent is to cover all relevant and compatible CPU upgrades for all Mac Pros. These are asked about over and over and over again, so I thought it would be nice to have it all in one place. Constructive criticism, corrections to...

forums.macrumors.com