Order iMac Pro for testing purposes.

[JulianBoolean]

@dannys1

Wow. Big thanks for your time.

1. Perhaps I missed it somewhere, but I'm wondering which version you are testing, ie number of cores and clock speed?

2. My render application (Octane) needs a video card with CUDA support. Can you plug an eGPU into this and run Nvidia cards? Probably doesn't make economic sense at all, but can't help wondering.

 

[dannys1]

@dannys1

Wow. Big thanks for your time.

1. Perhaps I missed it somewhere, but I'm wondering which version you are testing, ie number of cores and clock speed?

2. My render application (Octane) needs a video card with CUDA support. Can you plug an eGPU into this and run Nvidia cards? Probably doesn't make economic sense at all, but can't help wondering.

This is just the base model for now, wanted to get it in ASAP - will probably get higher specs in over the next few months.
I believe you can use Nvidia eGPU's yes. Infact when I was Googling the unique High Sierra version number for this the results pulled up mostly that Nvidia had released drivers compatible with it.

 

[Brookzy]

Wow so the iMac Pro literally doesn't support non-APFS boot drives, so if you use an external hard drive as a boot disk for occasional test purposes (like me), that isn't possible because APFS doesn't support spinning disks yet? Ouch.

And great observations on the boot security. What a silly design. Touch Bar MacBooks were a pain for admins due to the T1 and Apple hasn't learned their lesson for T2.

 

[dannys1]

Back with some testing.

As it's 8 core there are 16 virtual cores, so needed to run 16 terminal "yes" processes to max it out, I went for 17 just to ensure...

I used Intel's own Power Gadget for monitoring, here it is after about 5 minutes or so showing 100% utilisation and the heat up to 90 degrees

After 15 minutes it's a steady 93 degrees, the fans are SILENT, literally nothing.

After about 15-20 minutes some very minor throttling of the turbo boost happened, but it was for literally a split second, it would just drop from 3.90 to 3.67 you can see these tiny dips in the graph below. I doubt this would make any difference at all to a rendering project.

Finally I killed the processes and it returned to very quickly to a much lower temperature.

Over all i'd say I was really impressed but then this is only the 8 core machine so you'd expect there to be lots of thermal room to cater for the 18 core machine - I can't imagine you'd ever hear the fans doing anything with the 8 core machine unless the video card kicks out much more heat (which it may do, i'll test this tomorrow)

 

[FredT2]

Thanks! I'm glad to see you back. Your initial tests look great. Please don't forget Handbrake!

 

[anticipate]

- I just took delivery of the 8 core base unit too. Much thanks for the initial testing. Here are some of my very very initial thoughts / brain dump from having it for a few hours:

- It looks like a very dark grey iMac 5K. That's fine, but I wish they had made some tweaks in design given the internal are completely and utterly new. It feels rushed.

- I have owned I think every mac released since Tiger, and this one is the quietest (save myMac Mini), even more so than the trashcan MP. I guess the fans are designed for up to 18 cores, and as such barely seem engaged. Throttling seems minimal to non-existent. You have to max out the CPU, GPU, and RAM to 100% to even hear the fan... and that's super rare.

- Thanks for noticing the differences on the boot sequence. I tried to run recovery a few times due to a botched migration (my fault) and couldn't get it to even turn on. The secret, was to hold the Command-R AFTER the apple logo appears.

- I did manage to successfully restore the T2 chip using a MacBook, but that doesn't do anything to the actual SSD drive. You still need recovery mode for that. Not having netboot sucks ... However if you do have another Mac you can install from scratch that way with configurator. Recovery mode/partition of course also works well.

- The T2 is interesting. It is doing all kinds of new stuff with security etc. I noticed it seems to not only include hardware encryption with the secure enclave, but also is a very good ISP for the camera, which is vastly better looking than any in-built camera I have seen on the mac before. That surprised me. // The T2 also handles a lot of other things like being the SSD controller. Apple has combined many support functions and chips onto one.

- The screen is identical in quality to the latest 5K iMacs, and also looked similar to my Dell 5K display. Which is to say - very nice, with no issues.

- The speakers seem much better than any imac I have used, with tight bass.

- There are 4 wifi antennas on the unit. Though I am connected via a Gigabit Ethernet connection, it's nice to see 4x4 MIMO on this unit.

- The Vega "Pro" 56 is slightly downclocked vs the desktop card I tried. However the performance of it is within 5-10% of the eGPU'ed desktop card from what I have seen/read in benchmarks. They're basically equal.

IN practice however I think the internal Vega 56 will be faster (even downclocked) than the eGPU Vega 56 due to the thunderbolt 4 bandwidth limitations in some edge cases.

The Vega 64 is faster of course, but only about 5-10%. So unless one needs 16GB of VRAM (That's a lot!)... the 56 is still a very very fast chip and equal to an Nvidia 1070 ti. It's a VERY fast chip, but it's also nice to see Apple (eventually) supporting eGPUs, because...

- It is really nice to have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports along with the 4 USB 3.1 ports. This gives a lot of future expandability for faster/additional eGPUs down the line when they get even faster in a few years (or one needs CUDA), among other things.

- I am really happy they sped up the SD Card reader. Lots of pro cameras still use these cards.

That's all I have had time to mess with so far. Over the week I will test more, including FCPX editing and comparing it against using a 15" 2016 MBP with an eGPU.