Mac Pro 2010 Advice

[Tony Augustinack]

Hi there just looking for some hardware advice,

I am in need of a new Mac Pro and trying to decide what is the most economical, and if the extra cores are really necessary for the work I do. I mainly work in the Adobe Suite, along with the FCP suite, and occasionally working with a bit of Maya. I have been reading benchmark scores and reading up other forums, but just wanted to see if anybody had any real world insight before I pull the trigger on one.

There is quite a few different options, but I have narrowed it down to these two,

One 3.33GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (6 cores) w/32gb of third party RAM. ATI 5870 (appox. $4860)

Two 2.66GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (12 cores) w/32gb of third party RAM. ATI 5870 (appox. $6000)

Also am planning on using two G-tech es Pros in a raid 5. Along with a rocket in the future.

http://g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es-pro.cfm

Any personal experience or advice would be awesome. Thanks!

Also since I will be using an external raid, what do people do with the internal HDD bays? Archiving/Storage or nothing?

[shashbugu]

Are you working predominately with Red footage and the occasional DSLR?

[Tony Augustinack]

As of now actually I am working with DSLR footage, but will be working with RED footage once Scarlet is released.

[Alexander Ibrahim]

First off I have a dual G5, and the fastest machine I use is an old 8 core... my information is from research, not experience.

Unless you are planning on a lot of multitasking I'd probably get the six core.

Its within 1% of the speed of the 12 core using current application benchmarks- the important exception being 3D rendering applications, where the 12 core is nearly twice as fast.

So, if Final Cut, Premiere, AE, Motion, Color, Red applications or Resolve are your applications then get the six core.

If Modo, Maya, Lightwave, or Cinema 4D are key applications, get the twelve core.

Compressor should be faster on 12 cores- but I haven't seen any tests that indicate it is for most work. Maybe Redusers can help.

I'd get less RAM and invest in a Quadro 4000 card- especially if Resolve is in your future.

[Bing Bailey]

Tony , I went through the same process, I definitely recommend the 6core at 3.33ghz with 24gb ram to take advantage of triple memory , I would also recommend getting an ssd to replace the boot drive , owc has an excellent 256gb mercury pro drive. it makes a huge difference to the speed of apps launching.

most apps aren't written for and can't take advantage of 12 cores. you'll get a lot more mileage out of the higher speed 6core. I bought 4 x 2terabyte caviar black drives with 64mb cache creating one raid 0 drive , $600 total and I"m getting between 500 to 600MB a sec

[Tony Augustinack]

Thanks guys! I appreciate the advice. I am leaning towards the 6 core.

Bing, Are you using a internal raid and if so which raid card?

[Bing Bailey]

Thanks guys! I appreciate the advice. I am leaning towards the 6 core.

Bing, Are you using a internal raid and if so which raid card?

using software raid built into mac os x , getting very good and consistent results

[shashbugu]

Dont buy The Six Core, buy the 12 core, and 24gb Ram, 2GB/core. If you predominately currently work with DSLR footage, which is not very demanding but work with Maya 64 bit why would you buy the slower machine.
Obviously your workflow is more with Adobe than with FCP. Get the 12 core, set up two internal Raids, one for the system and one for editing. Try that out for few months, then upgrade to a Redrocket card, another 8GB ram and an Nvidia Cuda Card. You will have a machine you can continuously scale for at least 4 yrs. In a desktop Adobe post environment you will surely be multitasking. These products will be continually updated and they will demand more system resource. Make a future proof investment.
my 2 cents

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Don't buy the 6-core. Re-sale value is already terrible on them and you are effectively cutting your RAM capacity and bandwidth in half! The memory controllers are incorporated into the CPUs and so by not installing the second CPU, you eliminate the secondary memory host and memory banks. Not only that, but if you ever decide to add another CPU, the extra CPU cooler and memory board are super-expensive from Apple Parts and there's no guaranty that they'll even be able to supply them.

If you want to save money, step down to the 8-core or buy an overstock 2009 Nehalem model.

[Torrey Loomis]

If you want to save money, step down to the 8-core or buy an overstock 2009 Nehalem model.

Agreed--these are really cheap right now:

http://bit.ly/2009_8-Core

Torrey
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Torrey Loomis
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