Just the other week, I upgraded the stock Radeon Pro W5500X to an W6800X and explained the rationale behind that decision. I also mentioned that I had contemplated about the W6800X Duo but “slapped myself” because even years later, a Duo would still cost around the same price as a brand new RTX 5090 (which would be for my PC); that 5090 would run rings around this Duo for the ML based AND encoding/transcoding workflows (primarily video and image processing).
Just as how you can “never say never” (because things can always change), I found a good deal for a Duo (plus insanity did take over when I also got a deal on a new Xeon W-3245). This graphics card is exactly that; it’s an MPX module that has two W6800X GPU’s linked together with an internal Infinity Fabric Link. The Mac Pro form factor is ideal for throwing “brute force” pieces of tech like this into its box. And just with the base W5500X and Xeon W-3223 (8-core processor), it was still faster for H.264 encoding (even if by a small bit than my M4 Pro which I know for other single and multithreaded tasks, will be way faster). But I want to use this mainly for re-encoding those ML processed videos (that I’m performing on my PC since its “not even high end” RTX 4070Ti Super is double the frame rate speed of the Apple Silicon M4 Pro).
This does kind of put into context how much I would need to spend on an Apple Silicon based Mac; basically an Ultra chip with 60+ GPU cores and a higher core count for the Neural Engine. Looking at the Mac Studio, that is going to be something like the $5,499+tax M3 Ultra with 80-core GPU and 32-core Neural Engine (and even then, I doubt this would come close to an RTX 5090). Again, I don’t care about performance per watt efficiency. The M4 does not (yet) come in an Ultra variant and likely won’t. The current Apple Silicon Mac Pro hasn’t been updated since 2023 (it’s still an M2 Ultra with the base 64GB of RAM configuration starting at $6,999; you basically need to spend $1000 more to upgrade to the 24-core M2 Ultra for the 76-core GPU, and at this point, adding memory is going to just skyrocket this close to $9K).
For my less demanding video editing workflows, this is still an improvement over the base W5500X (I didn’t really do much of that with the W6800X though to get a better idea of how that compared to this Duo). Nonetheless, I’m keeping the W6800X as a spare (since MPX modules that are in excellent condition will just become more difficult to find in the future).
I haven’t yet performed the “brain transplant” with the Xeon processor (waiting for the long torx driver set to come in since the T-15 I currently have is just a tad bit short; this is to unscrew the heatsink from the logic board).
But yes, these are “latent” upgrades that I had previously never expected to do with this machine. Rather than looking at all of this as complete insanity, I am glad I am doing it (I think the processor upgrade will also give a lot more bang for the buck for what I’m doing). Additionally, on top of the gaming virtual machines I currently have running on my PC (VMWare Workstation Pro), I also have the virtual machines for older versions of macOS that I have running on VMWare Fusion on this Mac (some of them are for running older programs). My eventual plan is to move those VMWare Workstation Pro VM’s into Fusion (but this is well down the road).
