The Art of Repurposing: Using an Old 5K iMac as a 5K USB-C Display

When it comes to repurposing old technology, some people might think outside the box, while others might get creative with what's already available. One such example is using an old 5K iMac as a 5K USB-C display. This can be done by linking up some nice displays or going all out and turning the 5K iMac into a 5K USB-C display itself. However, for those who want something larger with OLED and high refresh rates, but are looking for a more affordable option, using a TV might just be the way to go.

In this article, we'll explore the possibilities of repurposing an old 5K iMac into a 5K USB-C display, as well as the benefits of using a TV instead. We'll also take a look at some options available in the market and how they can be used to create a versatile computer setup.

Using a TV as a Monitor: The LG C1 55-Inch 4K OLED TV

One such option is the LG C1 55-inch 4K OLED TV, which can be used as a monitor. This TV offers a high refresh rate of 120Hz, making it perfect for those who want smooth and responsive performance. With its 55-inch display, it's larger than most computer monitors on the market, offering a bigger screen real estate for content creators.

The LG C1 55-inch 4K OLED TV can be picked up for $1,200 or even better, the 48-inch version which has a higher pixel density. The 48-inch version offers a whopping 69 inches of display space, making it perfect for those who want to multitask or have multiple screens open at the same time.

While using a TV as a monitor might not be ideal in every situation, with the right setup and viewing angles, it can offer an amazing experience. The biggest takeaway from this article is that even though the Mac Studio doesn't have a lot of internal expansion, it can still be a very versatile tool.

The Author's Setup: Editing Bay and Content Creation

As for how I set up my Mac Studio, I'm happy to share my experience with you. My editing bay is where all the magic happens, and it's equipped with my trusty M1 Ultra 64-core Mac Studio as the hub of activity. The studio display is connected primarily to the Mac Studio, but I'm also a dual-monitor type of guy, so I have another DIY studio display set up.

My DIY studio display was created back in April, and it's been a reliable workhorse ever since. It's connected to my Mac Studio via Thunderbolt, providing a high-speed connection for all my storage needs. With the Synology drive plugged into the same port, I can access 69 terabytes of external storage, which is perfect for storing large files or backing up my library.

The Storage Configuration: A Mix of SSD and Hard Drive

When it comes to storage, I've got a mix of both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs). My internal drive on the Mac Studio is a standard 1TB SSD, which provides fast performance for most tasks. However, when it comes to storing large files or my entire library, I rely on my 48Terabyte RAID Drive, which is connected via Thunderbolt.

I also have a separate 20TB hard drive storage set up, which can be accessed via the same Thunderbolt port. This provides me with a total of 69 terabytes of external storage, making it perfect for storing and editing large files. With this configuration, I can work on multiple projects simultaneously without worrying about running out of space.

The Audio and Video Equipment: Elgato Key Light and GH5

As a YouTuber, I need high-quality audio and video equipment to record my content. My Elgato Key Light is connected to the Mac Studio via USB, providing natural lighting for my face and background. The camera itself is an XLR mount on top of the GH5, which connects to the Mac Studio via a USB port.

The GH5 provides 4K video recording capabilities, making it perfect for recording high-quality videos. However, I've found that using this setup can result in lower quality audio compared to some other options. Nevertheless, it's convenient and gets the job done.

Conclusion: Do You Actually Need a Mac Pro?

Finally, I want to talk about whether or not you need a Mac Pro to run your entire YouTube channel. The M1 Ultra 64-core Mac Studio may not offer as much storage or unified memory as some other options, but it's still an incredibly powerful machine that can handle most tasks with ease.

While I've been excited for the release of the new Mac Pro, having this Mac Studio has made me wonder if I really need more than what I have. With its 69 terabytes of external storage and 64-core processor, it's perfect for storing and editing large files.

In conclusion, repurposing old technology can be a great way to get creative and find solutions to common problems. Whether you're using an old 5K iMac as a 5K USB-C display or setting up a TV as a monitor, there are plenty of options available in the market that can help you achieve your goals.

By repurposing technology and experimenting with different configurations, we can create versatile computer setups that meet our needs. Whether you're a content creator, developer, or just someone who loves to tinker with tech, I hope this article has inspired you to think outside the box and explore new possibilities.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwith rumors abounding about the potentially imminent release date for the new apple silicon mac pro i can't be the only one who's wondering does anybody actually need that so today i don't want to focus on performance i want to focus on how the mac studio can be the centerpiece of a professional workstation because of how versatile it can be as a hub for all the other stuff that makes a professional workstation actually possible and along the way we're gonna solve one of the biggest problems that i have with the mac studio so get subscribed leave a like down below and let's get started so the mac pro a lot of us have been really excited to see what an apple silicon mac pro will look like just because we're curious to see what apple can do when the sky is the limit but down here in the real world i have to wonder if a mac pro is actually necessary for the overwhelming majority of people i mean i am what i would consider to be a creative professional i make a living with this mac studio right here and honestly it's a little bit hard to imagine what more i would be able to accomplish with like 40 more cpu performance or 60 more gpu performance like those numbers they don't mean that much in my day-to-day and paying for all of that extra hardware doesn't necessarily get you anywhere i for example did not really find any difference in terms of final cut pro rendering or exporting with my workflow between the 48 and 64 core m1 ultra mac studios so then the big thing holding the mac studio back is the package it doesn't have internal expansion no pci lanes no modular graphics cards no upgradable storage but does that mean the mac studio can't be as useful as a hypothetical mac pro well today i'm going to show you how i've been able to use the mac studio to its best to do what i need it to do and this video is made possible by today's sponsor synology specifically the new ds-1522 plus nas which you'll hear more about shortly but real quick before we dive into everything that i have used to turn my mac studio into the ultimate workstation i do want to mention that everything i'm talking about today will be linked in the description below and those are affiliate links so if you do use those to buy stuff it will help support the channel so i very much appreciate that so the biggest gripe that i have with the mac studio is the way that it handles storage apple decided to manufacture these things with removable storage modules but they won't actually let you or i upgrade the storage in our machines and that is really frustrating so the first thing that you have to do with a mac studio is find a workaround but that doesn't mean that it has to be complicated i mean i rely very heavily on my samsung t7 i mean these things are just the best they are small portable not that expensive i've got one and two terabyte versions linked down below you can even get these things with fingerprint recognition for added security so definitely pick up one of these but this on its own is not gonna cut it my youtube channel generates about two terabytes per month of final cut libraries and that's a lot so even if i were to pay the examinate price and fully load out a mac studio with 8 terabytes i'm gonna need something else until recently that came in the form of this my 48 terabyte raid array this thing is pretty simple it's an owc thunder bay which i'll have linked down below of course and inside of it we've got four 12 terabyte hard drives just set up in raid 0 so it's just pure storage so because it's raid 0 and it's over thunderbolt we can get about a thousand megabytes per second sequential read write speeds so that's pretty good but this i've had some issues with it's not the most responsive system to use it takes a bit of time to get it all booted up and i've been looking for something a little bit better for my day-to-day video editing and that's when synology reached out to me oh we got a big old box of treats today let's see what we're working with here three 12 terabyte seagate iron wolf hard drives these are some absolute beefy boys oh and then we got the ds-1522 plus itself a network upgrade module two 480 gigabyte sata ssds and here is the actual box itself look at that there's even access ports on the bottom for nvme ssds so you could upgrade this thing with even faster drives so let's go ahead and start the assembly process it should be pretty simple here this 10 gigabit ethernet upgrade module now this one actually is pretty cool very easy to install there's a little hatch around the side here with two screws and with those out you just pop off this little cover and slide in the 10 gigabit module oh that is beautifully simple okay so then we just flip around here and we've got our five bays and we can populate those with our many many drives all right so let's install now we'll do ssds first tada now it's time to go set it up setting up the ds-1522 plus was pretty easy it connects to its own local host and it actually has its own operating system the ds1522 plus has a ryzen processor and eight gigabytes of ram which allows you to get this graphical interface so that you can manage plug-in installation through the package center managing your volumes and drives and configuring backup settings you can choose from a bunch of different raid types including shr which has the ability of withstanding a drive loss without losing any of your data for my storage pool with the 12 terabyte hard drives i decided to go for an shr partition which gave me drive redundancy and 20 terabytes of storage whereas with the ssds i decided to go for raid 0 so i could maximize my storage space at about 900 gigabytes so if we look at these guys side by side it looks very similar they're both black boxes full of hard drives but there are some key differences the big advantage that we get using network attached storage is that it's attached to the network so rather than access all of the files locally over a thunderbolt connection you can connect to this thing from anywhere now i have it set up to run directly over a 10 gigabit connection because the mac studio's got 10 gigabit we upgraded this thing with 10 gigabit just straight up plug an ethernet cord in and you're done you've got about a thousand megabytes per second read write on both the ssds and the hard drives that's pretty great but beyond that i can even access my final cut libraries over wi-fi on a laptop so one of the biggest problems that the nas is solving for me is essentially the issue of idle disks with my thunderbolt raid array when you stop actively reading and writing to those drives they will go to sleep and that can be really annoying when i'm working on a video project because sometimes i'm not you know over in the final cut pro window sometimes i'm on my other monitor doing research finding b-roll finding articles and then i go back to final cut pro and it takes a while for the timeline to wake up again so we're on the desktop here final cut pro has been open in the background for a couple of minutes if i go over here and hit the space bar when i tested it that was a pretty big delay and it gets worse there are some times where it will fully freeze and crash final cut pro so that's definitely not ideal but now with the nas set up i've had it idling in the background for several minutes i go over here i hit the play button and that's pretty much immediate single port on this thing not a lot of lag there so that is a major improvement and this is also off the hard drives so this system is just way more responsive than over thunderbolt so when you combine all three of these magical boxes we get about 70 terabytes of storage we get 64 gpu cores and 20 apple silicon cpu cores so this is quite the combination this is basically the foundation of what makes this channel run that's all well and good but we need something to look at the contents of all of these boxes on so let's talk monitors so what apple wants you to use and what i frankly use every day is the studio display it matches the look and feel of the mac studio for sure and its built-in speakers microphone and webcam mean it's a nice one cable solution but let's be honest if you're doing video production sound design pretty much anything where you have to listen to or record video or audio you're probably not gonna use those i for one connect a pair of speakers a camera and a dedicated microphone to my mac studio so given that at that point you're not really tethered too many of the extra features for the studio display i'm basically paying 1 600 bucks for the panel if you don't need 5k for example you can take your pick from any of a thousand excellent 4k monitors i linked some nice ones down below or you can be a weirdo like me and repurpose an old 5k imac into a 5k usbc display but what if all of those options bore you you want something that's larger that's got oled that's got high refresh rate and it's cheaper well why not use a tv this is the lg c1 55 inch 4k oled tv and it honestly makes a really good computer monitor you can pick these things up for 1200 bucks or perhaps even better you could get the 48 inch version which has a higher pixel density for literally like 900 bucks for a 48 inch 4k oled screen with a 120 hertz refresh rate that's freaking what maybe more people should be using tvs as monitors i mean if you get your viewing angles right that's a pretty awesome experience so the biggest takeaway that i want to impart upon you guys watching this video is that the mac studio even though it doesn't have a lot of internal expansion can still be a very versatile tool so to give you an idea of what that all looks like i've showed you a lot of things a lot of options and different tools but to finish this video up i want to talk about how i have it set up so this is it this is my editing bay this is where i edit every single video this is where i do my podcast dark mode every sunday at 9 00 pm this is where it all happens and this is how i have it set up so first up you can probably see it peeking through there we have the m1 ultra 64 core mac studio that is our hub of activity now connected to that primarily i have the studio display but i'm definitely a dual monitor type of guy so over here we have my diy studio display which i made back in april so those are my two 5k displays but there's a lot more plugged into this thing i mean a lot of this video has been about storage so how do i have that set up well my internal drive on the mac studio is just the normal one terabyte i didn't want to give them any of my money because i have a 48 terabyte raid drive which is plugged in over thunderbolt down below the desk now with the synology drive which is plugged in over there where my router is i've got that hardwired over a 10 gig connection so what i'm doing now is copying my library over to it so that i can edit off of it and i have that configured with a one terabyte solid state drive and 20 terabytes of hard drive storage so if we put all of that together i've got 69 terabytes of external storage nice so that does it for the computer for the monitors and for the storage configuration but because i'm a youtuber there's a lot of video stuff that goes on here i film entire videos i film ads and i shoot my podcast here so so i've got my elgato key light over there and then next to it is my gh5 which is connected via a cameling 4k to a usb port on the mac studio and then on top of the camera you might not even be able to see it is an xlr mount and a preamp for the shure sm7b which i use for audio so audio and video all go over the cam like it's not the best quality but it's convenient and then that all connects to my dual monitors and my 69 terabytes and wow when i say it out loud this setup sounds like a bit of a mess but it honestly works really really well and i didn't even mention that i have my logitech speakers plugged in here because the studio display speakers they're just not gonna cut it so yeah that is my full build out with my mac studio it's a lot yeah i use pretty much every single port on this thing and honestly i'm really happy with the way it works do you actually need a mac pro i mean i've been grappling with that myself i've obviously been very excited for one to come out but having this mac studio not even top of the line i didn't get the extra insane amount of unified memory or storage so it really does make me wonder do i need more than this five thousand dollar mac studio to run my entire 400 000 subscriber youtube channel i honestly don't know so thank you guys so much for watching this video i really hope you enjoyed it and if you did i would very much appreciate if you leave a like on this video and get subscribed and turn on notifications there's going to be a lot more coming over the rest of this year and i look forward to seeing you guys there so with that thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next youwith rumors abounding about the potentially imminent release date for the new apple silicon mac pro i can't be the only one who's wondering does anybody actually need that so today i don't want to focus on performance i want to focus on how the mac studio can be the centerpiece of a professional workstation because of how versatile it can be as a hub for all the other stuff that makes a professional workstation actually possible and along the way we're gonna solve one of the biggest problems that i have with the mac studio so get subscribed leave a like down below and let's get started so the mac pro a lot of us have been really excited to see what an apple silicon mac pro will look like just because we're curious to see what apple can do when the sky is the limit but down here in the real world i have to wonder if a mac pro is actually necessary for the overwhelming majority of people i mean i am what i would consider to be a creative professional i make a living with this mac studio right here and honestly it's a little bit hard to imagine what more i would be able to accomplish with like 40 more cpu performance or 60 more gpu performance like those numbers they don't mean that much in my day-to-day and paying for all of that extra hardware doesn't necessarily get you anywhere i for example did not really find any difference in terms of final cut pro rendering or exporting with my workflow between the 48 and 64 core m1 ultra mac studios so then the big thing holding the mac studio back is the package it doesn't have internal expansion no pci lanes no modular graphics cards no upgradable storage but does that mean the mac studio can't be as useful as a hypothetical mac pro well today i'm going to show you how i've been able to use the mac studio to its best to do what i need it to do and this video is made possible by today's sponsor synology specifically the new ds-1522 plus nas which you'll hear more about shortly but real quick before we dive into everything that i have used to turn my mac studio into the ultimate workstation i do want to mention that everything i'm talking about today will be linked in the description below and those are affiliate links so if you do use those to buy stuff it will help support the channel so i very much appreciate that so the biggest gripe that i have with the mac studio is the way that it handles storage apple decided to manufacture these things with removable storage modules but they won't actually let you or i upgrade the storage in our machines and that is really frustrating so the first thing that you have to do with a mac studio is find a workaround but that doesn't mean that it has to be complicated i mean i rely very heavily on my samsung t7 i mean these things are just the best they are small portable not that expensive i've got one and two terabyte versions linked down below you can even get these things with fingerprint recognition for added security so definitely pick up one of these but this on its own is not gonna cut it my youtube channel generates about two terabytes per month of final cut libraries and that's a lot so even if i were to pay the examinate price and fully load out a mac studio with 8 terabytes i'm gonna need something else until recently that came in the form of this my 48 terabyte raid array this thing is pretty simple it's an owc thunder bay which i'll have linked down below of course and inside of it we've got four 12 terabyte hard drives just set up in raid 0 so it's just pure storage so because it's raid 0 and it's over thunderbolt we can get about a thousand megabytes per second sequential read write speeds so that's pretty good but this i've had some issues with it's not the most responsive system to use it takes a bit of time to get it all booted up and i've been looking for something a little bit better for my day-to-day video editing and that's when synology reached out to me oh we got a big old box of treats today let's see what we're working with here three 12 terabyte seagate iron wolf hard drives these are some absolute beefy boys oh and then we got the ds-1522 plus itself a network upgrade module two 480 gigabyte sata ssds and here is the actual box itself look at that there's even access ports on the bottom for nvme ssds so you could upgrade this thing with even faster drives so let's go ahead and start the assembly process it should be pretty simple here this 10 gigabit ethernet upgrade module now this one actually is pretty cool very easy to install there's a little hatch around the side here with two screws and with those out you just pop off this little cover and slide in the 10 gigabit module oh that is beautifully simple okay so then we just flip around here and we've got our five bays and we can populate those with our many many drives all right so let's install now we'll do ssds first tada now it's time to go set it up setting up the ds-1522 plus was pretty easy it connects to its own local host and it actually has its own operating system the ds1522 plus has a ryzen processor and eight gigabytes of ram which allows you to get this graphical interface so that you can manage plug-in installation through the package center managing your volumes and drives and configuring backup settings you can choose from a bunch of different raid types including shr which has the ability of withstanding a drive loss without losing any of your data for my storage pool with the 12 terabyte hard drives i decided to go for an shr partition which gave me drive redundancy and 20 terabytes of storage whereas with the ssds i decided to go for raid 0 so i could maximize my storage space at about 900 gigabytes so if we look at these guys side by side it looks very similar they're both black boxes full of hard drives but there are some key differences the big advantage that we get using network attached storage is that it's attached to the network so rather than access all of the files locally over a thunderbolt connection you can connect to this thing from anywhere now i have it set up to run directly over a 10 gigabit connection because the mac studio's got 10 gigabit we upgraded this thing with 10 gigabit just straight up plug an ethernet cord in and you're done you've got about a thousand megabytes per second read write on both the ssds and the hard drives that's pretty great but beyond that i can even access my final cut libraries over wi-fi on a laptop so one of the biggest problems that the nas is solving for me is essentially the issue of idle disks with my thunderbolt raid array when you stop actively reading and writing to those drives they will go to sleep and that can be really annoying when i'm working on a video project because sometimes i'm not you know over in the final cut pro window sometimes i'm on my other monitor doing research finding b-roll finding articles and then i go back to final cut pro and it takes a while for the timeline to wake up again so we're on the desktop here final cut pro has been open in the background for a couple of minutes if i go over here and hit the space bar when i tested it that was a pretty big delay and it gets worse there are some times where it will fully freeze and crash final cut pro so that's definitely not ideal but now with the nas set up i've had it idling in the background for several minutes i go over here i hit the play button and that's pretty much immediate single port on this thing not a lot of lag there so that is a major improvement and this is also off the hard drives so this system is just way more responsive than over thunderbolt so when you combine all three of these magical boxes we get about 70 terabytes of storage we get 64 gpu cores and 20 apple silicon cpu cores so this is quite the combination this is basically the foundation of what makes this channel run that's all well and good but we need something to look at the contents of all of these boxes on so let's talk monitors so what apple wants you to use and what i frankly use every day is the studio display it matches the look and feel of the mac studio for sure and its built-in speakers microphone and webcam mean it's a nice one cable solution but let's be honest if you're doing video production sound design pretty much anything where you have to listen to or record video or audio you're probably not gonna use those i for one connect a pair of speakers a camera and a dedicated microphone to my mac studio so given that at that point you're not really tethered too many of the extra features for the studio display i'm basically paying 1 600 bucks for the panel if you don't need 5k for example you can take your pick from any of a thousand excellent 4k monitors i linked some nice ones down below or you can be a weirdo like me and repurpose an old 5k imac into a 5k usbc display but what if all of those options bore you you want something that's larger that's got oled that's got high refresh rate and it's cheaper well why not use a tv this is the lg c1 55 inch 4k oled tv and it honestly makes a really good computer monitor you can pick these things up for 1200 bucks or perhaps even better you could get the 48 inch version which has a higher pixel density for literally like 900 bucks for a 48 inch 4k oled screen with a 120 hertz refresh rate that's freaking what maybe more people should be using tvs as monitors i mean if you get your viewing angles right that's a pretty awesome experience so the biggest takeaway that i want to impart upon you guys watching this video is that the mac studio even though it doesn't have a lot of internal expansion can still be a very versatile tool so to give you an idea of what that all looks like i've showed you a lot of things a lot of options and different tools but to finish this video up i want to talk about how i have it set up so this is it this is my editing bay this is where i edit every single video this is where i do my podcast dark mode every sunday at 9 00 pm this is where it all happens and this is how i have it set up so first up you can probably see it peeking through there we have the m1 ultra 64 core mac studio that is our hub of activity now connected to that primarily i have the studio display but i'm definitely a dual monitor type of guy so over here we have my diy studio display which i made back in april so those are my two 5k displays but there's a lot more plugged into this thing i mean a lot of this video has been about storage so how do i have that set up well my internal drive on the mac studio is just the normal one terabyte i didn't want to give them any of my money because i have a 48 terabyte raid drive which is plugged in over thunderbolt down below the desk now with the synology drive which is plugged in over there where my router is i've got that hardwired over a 10 gig connection so what i'm doing now is copying my library over to it so that i can edit off of it and i have that configured with a one terabyte solid state drive and 20 terabytes of hard drive storage so if we put all of that together i've got 69 terabytes of external storage nice so that does it for the computer for the monitors and for the storage configuration but because i'm a youtuber there's a lot of video stuff that goes on here i film entire videos i film ads and i shoot my podcast here so so i've got my elgato key light over there and then next to it is my gh5 which is connected via a cameling 4k to a usb port on the mac studio and then on top of the camera you might not even be able to see it is an xlr mount and a preamp for the shure sm7b which i use for audio so audio and video all go over the cam like it's not the best quality but it's convenient and then that all connects to my dual monitors and my 69 terabytes and wow when i say it out loud this setup sounds like a bit of a mess but it honestly works really really well and i didn't even mention that i have my logitech speakers plugged in here because the studio display speakers they're just not gonna cut it so yeah that is my full build out with my mac studio it's a lot yeah i use pretty much every single port on this thing and honestly i'm really happy with the way it works do you actually need a mac pro i mean i've been grappling with that myself i've obviously been very excited for one to come out but having this mac studio not even top of the line i didn't get the extra insane amount of unified memory or storage so it really does make me wonder do i need more than this five thousand dollar mac studio to run my entire 400 000 subscriber youtube channel i honestly don't know so thank you guys so much for watching this video i really hope you enjoyed it and if you did i would very much appreciate if you leave a like on this video and get subscribed and turn on notifications there's going to be a lot more coming over the rest of this year and i look forward to seeing you guys there so with that thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next you\n"