New 16 inch Macbook Pro - 5600M with 8GB of HBM2 memory?

[David McDonald]

I'm looking at getting a new MBP with pretty much max performance upgrades, but I'm not sure if this upgrade will be worth it and wondering if anyone here has some insight.

AMD Radeon Pro 5600M with 8GB of HBM2 memory

vs

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory

I do a lot of editing and After Effects work - nothing super intense but mostly dealing with 4K footage, either from Alexa, Blackmagic, and sometimes RED. I actually haven't been dealing with 8K or R3Ds as much lately, but I still want to keep that in mind because it does come around sometimes, and may more in the future. I currently have a powerful PC, but don't love working on it. I just can't get used to Windows and I still resort to working on my 2014 iMac sometimes because I am just so much quicker on it with every task, so I may sell the PC at some point. But either way, I'd like to have a powerful mobile workstation that can handle most of my projects, since my current 2015 MBP is a bit slow for After Effects and some Premiere projects.

 

[Ericsson San Pablo Chu]

I think the 5600m is worth it, but I may be bias because I returned my 5500m for it. The reasons I did so: I did a 'test edit' on a project and observed my istat computer usage. I had a 2.3 i9, 64gb ram, 5500m, 1tb ssd. What I deducted was that in almost all instances the bottleneck was my gpu, i.e. it was fairly easy to have it running at 100%. Ram never really went over 50% pressure, and gpu generally maxed out before cpu. Hard drive speed isn't a problem as I either edit off a raid 0 array or a Samsung t7. I know you can use an epgu, but 1. That eats up thunderbolt 3 bandwidth; 2. I don't trust epgu's yet, plus they're too reliant on software compatibility; 3. portability. Anyway it seems like for video work, gpu is becoming more and more important, especially on Davinci which is my editing platform of choice.

The other reason I went with the 5600m, is that the 5500m is known to draw more power/run hot when attaching a second monitor. If you search the issue on macrumors, there's a lot of people whose MacBook Pro 5500m's fan's get pretty loud just attaching a monitor to it (not doing anything else).... I think there may be some workarounds now (turboboost pro, switchres x, going clamshell mode), but I didn't want to deal with that.

So I ended up with a 2.3ghz i9, 32gb ram, 5600m, 1tb MacBook Pro 16. Fans were pretty loud the first few days (I think has something to do with Spotlight indexing), but I was editing today and I'm not sure if I just got used to it or they settled down.... they just weren't as noticeable as the first couple days. In any case, other the initial impressions with the fans being a bit noisy, I'm really happy with it (and super happy I was able to switch to the 5600m In time)

 

[Misha Engel]

Check this site https://barefeats.com/ for info on Apple stuff.