**The Unexpected Deal: How I Scored a $5,500 iMac Pro**

There are going to be comments that say "dude, that's a terrible deal" and that computers worth like $57. "I could build a PC for 169th the price and get like 420 times the performance." But let's address that head-on. $5,500 is expensive, no doubt, this is by far the most amount of money I've ever spent on a computer. So, let's evaluate if this makes any sense.

First off, yes, obviously you can build a PC for less. But it's not as huge a gap as you'd think. People sometimes send me parts lists that prove they can save money with a PC but they use cheap parts often don't include a high quality monitor stock coolers and it's just not a good comparison if you put together a comparable Rison based Macintosh Apple system on PC part picker and add in an LG ultra fine display, you're looking at a touch over $4,000. But let's be real, convenience has value, and the iMac Pro is possibly the most convenient workstation you can imagine. It's a plug-and-play 18 core machine and that counts for something especially if you move around.

**Is this better than a Mac Pro?**

Obviously, for me, the answer is yes. Spectra spec dollar-for-dollar, this iMac was $500 less than the base Mac Pro comes with 10 more cores, four times the RAM, eight times the storage, and has much better graphics, and comes with the 5k display thrown in as an overall package, it's hard to beat this iMac Pro because you're not just paying for the specs here, you're paying for the package. And as a package, this is one of the only high-end workstations that looks like this and has this level of functionality. There really isn't a ton of competition for a high-end configuration of the iMac Pro, which is why it's kind of an interesting product.

**The iMac Pro vs the Mac Pro: Coexisting or Mutually Exclusive?**

I think the key point for me is that the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro can coexist side-by-side and each have their benefits depending on what your needs are. I think honestly, for most people that are looking at the base level Mac Pro, an iMac Pro in the here-and-now makes more sense, but if you're buying a machine that you're planning on upgrading and keeping over a very long period of time, the Mac Pro is a great option.

**How did I get this deal?**

Well, as I've said a number of times before, there is an element of luck here but it's not completely random. Whenever I want to buy the cheapest of some Apple products, I start by browsing active and sold listings to get a sense of the going price for that particular product then I try to undercut that number or find the cheapest one that's available. Start by setting up search parameters to filter for the specs configuration and year that you want then sort by time newly listed and save the search so you can get updates and stay current whenever new listings are added.

This particular iMac Pro showed up as an auction with a starting bid $5,500 it was listed by a relatively inexperienced seller and they use stock photos and had very little information in the description. These things tend to scare most people off especially with an expensive machine such as this but the account was several years old had positive feedback in the past, and eBay has very good buyer protection so I knew if I didn't get exactly what was advertised, I would be able to get a refund.

**The Aftermath**

Because of those factors, no one bid on this iMac. I won with the starting bid of $5,500, which is unbelievable. I've never experienced this kind of power or this many cores and this is going to be my editing machine, you're gonna see it in the background of all my videos for the foreseeable future.

I might eventually if there's a new iMac Pro that comes out with a 6k display please do that I might end up buying one of those. The nice thing about something like this is I probably won't lose any money once I sell this machine even in like a year, say what you want about Apple but they hold their value and if you get a good deal it can be cheap or free to own one of these things which is insane.

**Conclusion**

So that's it for this video as usual don't forget to Like comment and subscribe. Don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke neon II, and please consider checking out my subreddit which you'll find linked in the description below. And with that I'll see you all in the next video

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe 2019 Mac Pro has been out for over a month at this point and it's quite a confounding situation for content creators such as myself I've been looking to the eye Mac Pro is a possible solution to this conundrum and by golly I think I've cracked it if you look at the base configurations for the iMac pro and the Mac Pro I certainly wouldn't blame you for being a little confused the iMac Pro has the same eight cores and 32 gigs of ram but comes with much better graphics and four times as much storage and a 5k display and costs $1000 less and that's just buying new see the iMac Pro came out two years ago and there are plenty of used options but the past several months I've been keeping my eye on iMac Pro pricing with the intention of buying the least expensive one and reviewing it to see if it's any good however I did not buy the least expensive iMac Pro not by a longshot this as far as I'm aware is the cheapest eighteen core iMac pro that has ever been sold on eBay and it's amazing my iMac pro is equipped with the top-of-the-line 18 cores e&w 2191 processor 128 gigabytes of 2666 ddr4 ECC Ram the upgraded Vegas 64 graphics with 16 gigabytes of vram and a 2 terabyte internal SSD and the price for all of this high-end Space Gray goodness $5,500 just $500 more than the base model if you price out this exact same configuration on Apple's website you will get a price tag of a staggering ten thousand three hundred and forty nine dollars before tax and that's also not including the Apple care that my iMac pro has until October 2021 now I've been using this iMac pro for over a month now in fact you may even have spotted it in the background of some of my recent videos but chances are you didn't because it's pretty much identical to the standard iMac in terms of designed despite that this thing looks absolutely stealthy and cool Space Gray looks fantastic on the iMac though I really hope we get a new iMac design with thinner bezels soon because it really dates the design so right off the bat let's start assessing the performance with the thermals a lot of you are probably rightly wondering if this chassis is able to cool an 18 core Xeon processor and I'm happy to report that it can when under load the Xeon runs at 2.7 to 2.8 gigahertz that's an impressive 4 to 500 megahertz sustained boost above base clock as far as thermals go running Cinebench back-to-back-to-back takes three full runs before the fans are audible and even then they're not very loud at all after a few runs temperatures peak at 93 C and the machine will not thermal throttle or drop below 2.7 gigahertz it's also important to note that the fans at that point are not running at their full potential so I decided to try an experiment using Mac's fan control I manually cranked all the fans up to max rpm and ran Cinebench back to back again this time we see stable two point eight five two two point nine gigahertz clock speeds on all cores and we see the temperatures dropped by ten degrees or more we also see scores improved by about five percent over three runs apples fan curve is definitely quiet but it's not extracting every last percent of performance from the iMac Pro so is the trade-off of fan noise versus performance worth it I'm really not sure I like a quiet machine but I would also like to get as much performance as possible let me know your take in the comments below so now that we've addressed thermals let's benchmark the thing in Cinebench are twenty the iMac Pro demolishes everything I've ever tested scoring six thousand seven hundred and forty five CB that's twenty seven hundred points faster than my I nine iMac Geekbench for shows similarly on inspiring numbers scoring fifty five thousand eight hundred and sixty three and the multi-core test that's more than twenty thousand points better than the eye nine ninety nine hundred K which by the way is also very close to the base model iMac Pro and the eight core Mac Pro in Unigine heaven the Vegas 64 scores two thousand eight which is a noticeable improvement over the Vega forty eight and in Unigine Valley it similarly beats out lesser cards scoring 24:41 very impressive numbers here the iMac pro is also really solid for gaming surprisingly games like Battlefield five Rainbow six siege GTA 5 Far Cry five and many other recent triple-a titles will run on high and ultra settings in 1440p at 60 frames easily and it's not just that they get good frames they get consistent frames no lag spikes no frame drops and the fans are a lot quieter under sustained gaming loads than the allowed single fan design in these standard IMAX and obviously to be clear you're not buying an 18 core iMac pro 2 game on it but if you are buying an 18 my Mac Pro you can game on it there's a difference so what about real-world performance as I've said I've been using this for all of my videos for the past month and this thing is astounding the iMac Pro is stupendously quiet when running Final Cut you simply do not hear the fans it refuses to show strain no matter how many streams of 4k color-grading text effects and transitions you throw at it compared to my core I nine iMac which is already no slouch the iMac Pro simply embarrasses it in every way I dropped in the same 20 minute 4k 60 clip with color grading and let both machines render the clip out the iMac completed the task in 18 minutes and 16 seconds where the iMac Pro accomplished the same task in 13 minutes and 17 seconds a full 5 minutes faster next I exported that very same clip and the iMac took 3 minutes and 31 seconds where the iMac Pro took 2 minutes flat now as with any of my videos on Apple products there are going to be comments that say dude that's a terrible deal that computers worth like $57 dude I could build a PC for 169th the price and get like 420 times the performance dude so let's address that head-on $5,500 is expensive no doubt this is by far the most amount of money I've ever spent on a computer so let's evaluate if this makes any sense first off yes obviously you can build a PC for less but it's not as huge a gap as you'd think people sometimes send me parts lists that prove they can save money with a PC but they use cheap parts often don't include a high quality monitor stock coolers and it's just not a good comparison if you put together a comparable Rison based Macintosh Apple system on PC part picker and add in an LG ultra fine display you're looking at a touch over $4,000 but let's be real convenience has value and the iMac Pro is possibly the most convenient workstation you can imagine it's a plug-and-play 18 core machine and that counts for something especially if you move around okay Mac proton is this better than a Mac Pro it's a complicated question obviously for me the answer is yes spectra spec dollar-for-dollar this iMac was 500 bucks less than the base Mac Pro comes with 10 more cores four times the RAM eight times the storage and has much better graphics and comes with the 5k display thrown it as an overall package it's hard to beat this iMac Pro because you're not just paying for the specs here you're paying for the package and as a package this is one of the only high-end workstations that looks like this and has this level of functionality there's really not a ton of competition for a high-end configuration of the iMac Pro which is why it's kind of an interesting product I think the key point for me is that the iMac pro and the Mac Pro and packing Tosh's and pre-built systems and all sorts of other things for that matter are not mutually exclusive I think the iMac Pro the Mac Pro can coexist side-by-side and each have their benefits depending on what your needs are I think honestly for most people that are looking at the base level Mac Pro an iMac Pro in the here-and-now makes more sense but if you're buying a machine that you're planning on upgrading and keeping over a very long period of time the Mac Pro is a great option let me know what you think of this debacle down in the comments section below I'm definitely curious to hear what you think so how in the world did I get this deal how can you find stuff like this on eBay well as I've said a number of times before there is an element of luck here but it's not completely random whenever I want to buy the cheapest of some Apple products I start by browsing active and sold listings to get a sense of the going price for that particular product then I try to undercut that number or find the cheapest one that's available start by setting up search parameters to filter for the specs configuration and year that you want then sort by time newly listed and save the search so you can get updates and stay current whenever new listings are added this particular iMac Pro showed up as an auction with a starting bid $5,500 it was listed by a relatively inexperienced seller and they use stock photos and had very little information in the description these things tend to scare most people off especially with an expensive machine such as this but the account was several years old had positive feedback in the past and eBay has very good buyer protection so I knew if I didn't get exactly what was advertised I would be able to get a refund however because of those factors no one bid on this iMac I won with the starting bid of $5,500 so the cheapest 18 core iMac pro as far as I'm aware it is unbelievable I've never experienced this kind of power or this many course and this is going to be my editing machine you're gonna see it in the background of all my videos for the foreseeable future I might eventually if there's a new iMac Pro that comes out with a 6k display please do that I might end up buying one of those and the nice thing about something like this is I probably won't lose any money once I sell this machine even in like a year say what you want about Apple but they hold their value and if you get a good deal it can be cheap or free to own one of these things which is insane so that'll do it for this video as usual don't forget to Like comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke neon II and please consider checking out my subreddit which you'll find linked in the description below and with that I'll see you all in the next videothe 2019 Mac Pro has been out for over a month at this point and it's quite a confounding situation for content creators such as myself I've been looking to the eye Mac Pro is a possible solution to this conundrum and by golly I think I've cracked it if you look at the base configurations for the iMac pro and the Mac Pro I certainly wouldn't blame you for being a little confused the iMac Pro has the same eight cores and 32 gigs of ram but comes with much better graphics and four times as much storage and a 5k display and costs $1000 less and that's just buying new see the iMac Pro came out two years ago and there are plenty of used options but the past several months I've been keeping my eye on iMac Pro pricing with the intention of buying the least expensive one and reviewing it to see if it's any good however I did not buy the least expensive iMac Pro not by a longshot this as far as I'm aware is the cheapest eighteen core iMac pro that has ever been sold on eBay and it's amazing my iMac pro is equipped with the top-of-the-line 18 cores e&w 2191 processor 128 gigabytes of 2666 ddr4 ECC Ram the upgraded Vegas 64 graphics with 16 gigabytes of vram and a 2 terabyte internal SSD and the price for all of this high-end Space Gray goodness $5,500 just $500 more than the base model if you price out this exact same configuration on Apple's website you will get a price tag of a staggering ten thousand three hundred and forty nine dollars before tax and that's also not including the Apple care that my iMac pro has until October 2021 now I've been using this iMac pro for over a month now in fact you may even have spotted it in the background of some of my recent videos but chances are you didn't because it's pretty much identical to the standard iMac in terms of designed despite that this thing looks absolutely stealthy and cool Space Gray looks fantastic on the iMac though I really hope we get a new iMac design with thinner bezels soon because it really dates the design so right off the bat let's start assessing the performance with the thermals a lot of you are probably rightly wondering if this chassis is able to cool an 18 core Xeon processor and I'm happy to report that it can when under load the Xeon runs at 2.7 to 2.8 gigahertz that's an impressive 4 to 500 megahertz sustained boost above base clock as far as thermals go running Cinebench back-to-back-to-back takes three full runs before the fans are audible and even then they're not very loud at all after a few runs temperatures peak at 93 C and the machine will not thermal throttle or drop below 2.7 gigahertz it's also important to note that the fans at that point are not running at their full potential so I decided to try an experiment using Mac's fan control I manually cranked all the fans up to max rpm and ran Cinebench back to back again this time we see stable two point eight five two two point nine gigahertz clock speeds on all cores and we see the temperatures dropped by ten degrees or more we also see scores improved by about five percent over three runs apples fan curve is definitely quiet but it's not extracting every last percent of performance from the iMac Pro so is the trade-off of fan noise versus performance worth it I'm really not sure I like a quiet machine but I would also like to get as much performance as possible let me know your take in the comments below so now that we've addressed thermals let's benchmark the thing in Cinebench are twenty the iMac Pro demolishes everything I've ever tested scoring six thousand seven hundred and forty five CB that's twenty seven hundred points faster than my I nine iMac Geekbench for shows similarly on inspiring numbers scoring fifty five thousand eight hundred and sixty three and the multi-core test that's more than twenty thousand points better than the eye nine ninety nine hundred K which by the way is also very close to the base model iMac Pro and the eight core Mac Pro in Unigine heaven the Vegas 64 scores two thousand eight which is a noticeable improvement over the Vega forty eight and in Unigine Valley it similarly beats out lesser cards scoring 24:41 very impressive numbers here the iMac pro is also really solid for gaming surprisingly games like Battlefield five Rainbow six siege GTA 5 Far Cry five and many other recent triple-a titles will run on high and ultra settings in 1440p at 60 frames easily and it's not just that they get good frames they get consistent frames no lag spikes no frame drops and the fans are a lot quieter under sustained gaming loads than the allowed single fan design in these standard IMAX and obviously to be clear you're not buying an 18 core iMac pro 2 game on it but if you are buying an 18 my Mac Pro you can game on it there's a difference so what about real-world performance as I've said I've been using this for all of my videos for the past month and this thing is astounding the iMac Pro is stupendously quiet when running Final Cut you simply do not hear the fans it refuses to show strain no matter how many streams of 4k color-grading text effects and transitions you throw at it compared to my core I nine iMac which is already no slouch the iMac Pro simply embarrasses it in every way I dropped in the same 20 minute 4k 60 clip with color grading and let both machines render the clip out the iMac completed the task in 18 minutes and 16 seconds where the iMac Pro accomplished the same task in 13 minutes and 17 seconds a full 5 minutes faster next I exported that very same clip and the iMac took 3 minutes and 31 seconds where the iMac Pro took 2 minutes flat now as with any of my videos on Apple products there are going to be comments that say dude that's a terrible deal that computers worth like $57 dude I could build a PC for 169th the price and get like 420 times the performance dude so let's address that head-on $5,500 is expensive no doubt this is by far the most amount of money I've ever spent on a computer so let's evaluate if this makes any sense first off yes obviously you can build a PC for less but it's not as huge a gap as you'd think people sometimes send me parts lists that prove they can save money with a PC but they use cheap parts often don't include a high quality monitor stock coolers and it's just not a good comparison if you put together a comparable Rison based Macintosh Apple system on PC part picker and add in an LG ultra fine display you're looking at a touch over $4,000 but let's be real convenience has value and the iMac Pro is possibly the most convenient workstation you can imagine it's a plug-and-play 18 core machine and that counts for something especially if you move around okay Mac proton is this better than a Mac Pro it's a complicated question obviously for me the answer is yes spectra spec dollar-for-dollar this iMac was 500 bucks less than the base Mac Pro comes with 10 more cores four times the RAM eight times the storage and has much better graphics and comes with the 5k display thrown it as an overall package it's hard to beat this iMac Pro because you're not just paying for the specs here you're paying for the package and as a package this is one of the only high-end workstations that looks like this and has this level of functionality there's really not a ton of competition for a high-end configuration of the iMac Pro which is why it's kind of an interesting product I think the key point for me is that the iMac pro and the Mac Pro and packing Tosh's and pre-built systems and all sorts of other things for that matter are not mutually exclusive I think the iMac Pro the Mac Pro can coexist side-by-side and each have their benefits depending on what your needs are I think honestly for most people that are looking at the base level Mac Pro an iMac Pro in the here-and-now makes more sense but if you're buying a machine that you're planning on upgrading and keeping over a very long period of time the Mac Pro is a great option let me know what you think of this debacle down in the comments section below I'm definitely curious to hear what you think so how in the world did I get this deal how can you find stuff like this on eBay well as I've said a number of times before there is an element of luck here but it's not completely random whenever I want to buy the cheapest of some Apple products I start by browsing active and sold listings to get a sense of the going price for that particular product then I try to undercut that number or find the cheapest one that's available start by setting up search parameters to filter for the specs configuration and year that you want then sort by time newly listed and save the search so you can get updates and stay current whenever new listings are added this particular iMac Pro showed up as an auction with a starting bid $5,500 it was listed by a relatively inexperienced seller and they use stock photos and had very little information in the description these things tend to scare most people off especially with an expensive machine such as this but the account was several years old had positive feedback in the past and eBay has very good buyer protection so I knew if I didn't get exactly what was advertised I would be able to get a refund however because of those factors no one bid on this iMac I won with the starting bid of $5,500 so the cheapest 18 core iMac pro as far as I'm aware it is unbelievable I've never experienced this kind of power or this many course and this is going to be my editing machine you're gonna see it in the background of all my videos for the foreseeable future I might eventually if there's a new iMac Pro that comes out with a 6k display please do that I might end up buying one of those and the nice thing about something like this is I probably won't lose any money once I sell this machine even in like a year say what you want about Apple but they hold their value and if you get a good deal it can be cheap or free to own one of these things which is insane so that'll do it for this video as usual don't forget to Like comment and subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Luke neon II and please consider checking out my subreddit which you'll find linked in the description below and with that I'll see you all in the next video\n"