New Mac Pro line anytime soon?

[Stephen Townsend]

If you live in a world of gigantic optimism you could tell yourself that the potential new release of the MacPro line is Apple's best kept secret to date and is going to be beyond what any of us have imagined so it's going to wipe the floor so badly with any current PC that the huge market of non-creatives and non-style-hunters are going to move over to them... You never know! If not I can see a lot of people leaving Mac in a similar fashion to how people have left Final Cut but their appeal to the 'trendy-public' will keep plenty of cash rolling for them not to care I imagine.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

If you only do video... but if you do VFX and unbiased rendering, a computer can never be powerful enough...

Yet another argument against a Mac Pro tower... As great as dual-Xeon systems are and the Mac Pro is a solid workstation amongst mid-range Xeon offerings, if all you care about is raw power, you would be looking at 4-way and 8-way systems and other options like multiple low-cost render nodes in a simple farm or perhaps in a cluster. If Apple wants to be taken seriously in the VFX / CGI world moving forward they need to either come up with some seriously bigger and more scalable offerings. Or they need to streamline the current Mac Pro into something more reasonable. The current design is a decade old and inefficient. Just got a HP Z820 yesterday and it's more compact than the Mac Pro with a lot more room inside, even after the ability to install an optical drive and 7 3.5" HDDs internally, 16 DIMMs, dual liquid-cooled CPUs and 7 expansion slots.

For serious VFX / 3D / animation work, the Mac Pro (and similar PC workstations) are somewhat of a mismatch these days unless you're a one-man-band trying to do everything on one box. I think we'll see another Mac Pro, but it's going to be sleeker, more compact, probably more modular to fit both the low to mid range workstation needs as well as fill that gaping hole that currently exists between the iMac and Mac Pro as we know it.

I think it will happen and I think it will be a great product. But it's not where people are going to look if they want the most CPU horsepower.

[Jeffrey T. Morgan]

Obviously, like everyone, I just wish Apple would announce there plans, even if they don't know them A simple "we are working on it" or "Nothing new ever again".

Adobe specifically is really doing some interesting moves with cost, features and speed. They really seem to be listening to what we say as well as thinking of new things on their own. With adobe being platform agnostic...

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Jeff, I mostly agree. But every time the MacPro has been updated, it's been a very good choice as a VFX/3D-workstation, even for Windows users... Lets see what Apple brings us next...

I agree that cluster would be ideal, but I just bought myself a second hand Mac Pro 8 core, added 64 GB ram and a nVidia GTX 580 card for a total below 3500 USD. Not the worst investment, as an interim workstation.

But I plan to add up to 5 render nodes in a cluster, for cheap. They will mostly be used for Maxwell Rendering. Could you give me a suggestion on a cost effective alternative? Rack-mounting is a plus.

Best regards,
Jon M. Puntervold

[Andrew clemson]

I think, unfortunately the higher end user is fast becoming an even smaller share of the overall market than it currently is. This means, as stated before that Apple is more than likely to focus on low to mid-range machines.

In terms of thunderbolt, its enabling me to backup and playback in a much more streamlined kit than I could before, and size and power draw are a big deal for me when Im quite often working out of the back of a 4X4. Id say its super useful, especially in situations like Mark suggested above, which is similar to what I'm doing, although with the AJA ioXT substituted for the BMD box. (has the throughput option) and the T-tap is even smaller!

If the Rocket housings from magma, sonnet or m-link don't work well enough for the occasions when I need transcodes ASAP, then Ill head back to a tower but my MBP setup is suiting 90% of my jobs, and I'm kind of hoping that at worst I will get away with 2 X MBPs..... (would love if somehow I could share a R4 or R6 between two MBPs)

Im definitely not as smart as most of you guys when it comes to this stuff, but in my work scenarios the form factor, power consumption and unified cabling trumps horsepower....

peace.

[Ben McCarthy]

Jeff, I mostly agree. But every time the MacPro has been updated, it's been a very good choice as a VFX/3D-workstation, even for Windows users... Lets see what Apple brings us next...

I agree that cluster would be ideal, but I just bought myself a second hand Mac Pro 8 core, added 64 GB ram and a nVidia GTX 580 card for a total below 3500 USD. Not the worst investment, as an interim workstation.

But I plan to add up to 5 render nodes in a cluster, for cheap. They will mostly be used for Maxwell Rendering. Could you give me a suggestion on a cost effective alternative? Rack-mounting is a plus.

Best regards,
Jon M. Puntervold

Youll need as seperate power supply for the gtx 580 to run It in a macpro

570 is probably the better option

[Jeffrey T. Morgan]

Yeah, VFX / 3D workstations are a different beast. I think that is something people (not you, you differentiated) sometimes confuse. I think that there are a few tiers to consider when buying a computer:

The level where you have to convert everything to a different codec to render

The level where R3D's just work in real time without compromise, often with basic effects / color correction but final exports and renders take time ( though faster than it used to be if you line up MPE and Nvidia cards )

The level where you get real time-ish renders / playback even with heavy effects, and just overall faster renders

The prices being sub $1000, sub $2000, and over $4000 respectively. (those numbers are just ballparks, they are for DIY computer builders so someone buying a prebuilt system will pay a lot more, and the numbers don't include software)

For me, I am an editor and color corrector, and my $2000 does everything someone like me needs. I hope Apple is going to step up and offer something exciting, but it really was a one-two KO with the massive dissapointment of FCPX and the huge delays and lack of flexibility with MacPros. ...

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Youll need as seperate power supply for the gtx 580 to run It in a macpro

570 is probably the better option

Damn. I already bought the gtx 580. What kind of power supply is needed?

[Ben McCarthy]

You can install one of these inside the DVD sled

http://www.fspgroupusa.com/boosterx-5/p/417.html

The other problem in the Macpro drops the nvidia cards down to PCIe 1.1 spec rather than 2.0 because of lack of EFI, there's ways of desoldering the bios chip and adding an EFI instead thus turning it into a "mac card" cable of running at full spec.

OSX 10.7.4 breaks support for these cards and you'll have to modify some key texts for them to work properly.

Theres a guy on eBay called MacVideoCards, who's on the Macrumours forums, he's the only one that I've seen offering the EFI solution, you can send in your card and have it modified for under $200.

My plan is to wait for the new Macpro, hopefully there an option for the GTX670 in there and buy the Mac version.

But the MacVideoCards solution seems to be the most effective unless you've got the time and know how to desoldering everything yourself.

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

The GTX 580 should work without an extra power supply, and with OSX 10.7.3 it works without any workarounds or hacks. nVidia will probably come with 10.7.4 drivers for the GTX 5xx..