In this video, Neil Parfitt who is a composer, music editor, synth sound designer based in Toronto has set up his new rack mount Mac Pro 7,1 computer to show some real-world tests both about the fan noise and how well it handles a very large Pro Tools project and turns up some surprises during his tests.

This is a great real-world test to help answer how loud the fans are and this is all with the computer running a very large Pro Tools session pushing the CPU usage up to 80% so this is a proper test of what Mac Pro 7,1 would sound like handling a major Pro Tools project.

He has found that once the 2019 Mac Pro is running you can take off the lid and the computer continues to run. However, what does happen is the fan speed ramps up until you close the lid, at which point the fans drop back to a whisper.

If you take the lid off whilst the computer is off then the Mac Pro 2019 will not boot up.

In the second part of the video, Neil shows the session in action with the System Usage meter open on the mother of all Pro Tools Power Test sessions, with hundreds of audio tracks full of audio files all running continuously with EQ, dynamics and reverb plugins on every track. In our recent article Pro Tools System Usage Meter - How Much Attention Should Be Paid To It? Michael Carnes pointed out that the Pro Tools System Usage meters don’t tell the whole story.

Neil has also produced a longer unboxing and observations video too…

Neil describes this video as “a candid unscripted Apple Mac Pro Rack unboxing and personal opinions/observations quickly cobbled together from my phone!!“

• 0:00 - Intro

• 1:17 - Box!

• 2:07 - Other Peripherals

• 4:25 - The Rack Rails

• 6:01 - The Mac Pro Unboxing

• 10:05 - Getting Inside

• 12:51 - The internal Guts

• 16:40 - Rack rails and integration issues

• 17:57 - Getting at the RAM

• 21:11 - OH YEAH!!!