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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

New Mac Pro

Dave_S said:
Thanks and appreciate it highly :-)
Click to expand...

Sorry, my receipt was just mailed.

3.0Ghz 8-Core Machine, Stock 16gb Ram (going to 64gb after the fact), 512gb PCIe HDD, D700 GPUs. Total was 6399.00. No sales tax for an Oregon purchase. ETA is January.

Now where to order my RAM from?
 
So the $600 upgrade to D700's was right! Amazing. As far as my limited knowledge goes, this looks like a smart play to push most purchasers to go for the D700's, allowing them to lock in great volume-purchase rates while simultaneously providing a massive (relatively) pool of Mac Pro users with very powerful OpenCL cards, promoting more and more parties to prioritise OpenCL support and performance. Sound plausible?
 
Any idea which configuration would be great for editing natively in 5K or 4K and Davinci color grading with more than 2 nodes? My MacBook Pro Retina isn't powerful enough and I would like to improve this for 2014. Is there so much difference between the 6core, 8core, 12core? Thanks in advance guys!
Sebastian
 
Wow, basic 12 core, with D700, comes in at £6437. Need to think about this, i mainly film, grade in Davinci and composite in Nuke....
 
Ordereded... ;)

3.0GHz 8-core, 64GB, 1TB, D700's

Couldn't get myself to go for the 12-core for another $1500, when most apps will benefit more from the faster cores vs. more cores. I'm going to be into this for around $9K after tax, even with biz discount and still have to factor in $3K for TB2 RAID. I wrestled with this for some time. Even switched back and forth in the shopping cart. Ultimately, I think my target budget of $12K for everything but monitor(s) (system plus RAID) won out.

For those of you looking at this, if your budget allows and you spend better than half your system time in Resolve or rendering in the likes of a 3D app or Nuke or AE, you may want to consider that 12-core. If budget is tight, the first cut I would make is dropping to the 8-core. Just sayin'

I opted to buy Apple's RAM. Their pricing on it isn't bad, better than I expected. Should be within $100 by my calculations after my biz pricing of buying through OWC or Crucial, then it just arrives with the system.

Anyway new shiny trashcan Mac is about half the price of a new Z820 rig. It's half the computer too, and 1/5th the size with better external connectivity. So we'll see how this goes. Like everyone else's, it just ships in "January".
 
Ok still no info yet if the CPU will be upgradeable?

I'm wondering - all GPU aside - how much more power we get from a 6-core (or even 4-core) compared to an i7 or i5 iMac ?
I'm thinking this will be a totally different beast already, but is it really?

It would be great to be able to purchase a lesser CPU now and upgrade when needed - and hold onto the $1.500-$2.000 for a 4k display for now :)

Any insight on that?
 
Won't know until someone opens the hood and takes a look at the CPU. NDA comes off today I think. If the CPU is replaceable, I may cancel and re-order a quad-core with D700s just for reasons... Like 10 cores at 3GHz reasons.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Won't know until someone opens the hood and takes a look at the CPU. NDA comes off today I think. If the CPU is replaceable, I may cancel and re-order a quad-core with D700s just for reasons... Like 10 cores at 3GHz reasons.
Click to expand...

Thank you, Jeff! And aside the upgradeability (awesome word) any speculation for the power of a Quad and a 6-core?
 
Thanks Jeff and Isaac for sharing your system with us.
 
Elliott Balsley said:
How do you get that Apple business discount online? I thought you had to do phone orders for that.
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I just know what my discount should be, I have to give my order # and info to my sales rep so he can make the adjustment.
 
Just ordered.

3.0GHz 8-core
64GB
1TB
2xD700

Lists for $8099.00, got a pretty fair discount via my employer. Math worked out similarly for me as for Jeff: with my discount, pricing on RAM was essentially a wash, so I changed my plan at the last second and went with Apple for the full 64GB. Was also going to go with 512GB boot drive, but again, with my discount the upgrade was reasonable so went with the full 1TB.

Think this is nearly identical to Jeff's rig, so not sure I'll have anything to add in terms of benchmarking beyond what Jeff is likely to do, but totally willing to run any benchmarks and tests people want to see when this things arrives in Jan.
 
My understanding in regards to After Effects is that the only times multiple cores are helpful are when:

1. You're using Render Multiple Frames simultaneously or the BG_Render script during rendering.

2. Some effects are multithreaded - I don't know which... and this would be a big help to know.

But if you're not using any plug ins, then you're not utilizing anything but the single processor. In which case even 8 is overkill.

Do I have this right?

Are there any charts about how much FCPX will be utilizing the multithreading?

My third app is blender which currently on mac only does multi in beta build and I've not ever tested it. Blender Cycles would love CUDA... so that's a bummer.
 
We just pulled the trigger on an 8-core and a 12-core. We'll hopefully have side-by-side render comparisons shortly after they arrive. Besides the processor, all other specs are identical. 64GB RAM, 1TB flash, dual D700's.

We're migrating our JMR 16x PCIe cards to 8x single channel PCIe cards to translate Silverstor 18-drive RAIDs from SAS to Thunderbolt connections. (Downgrade.)

Currently no real solution for RED Rocket-X. Lots of stuff pending in the pipeline, but at the moment the new Mac Pro will not support RR-X's and that's a seriously shitty thing.
 
On the store configurator page, Apple seems to confirm that both GPUs get x16 PCIe lanes:
Mac Pro comes standard with two workstation-class AMD FirePro graphics cards with up to 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each, enabling powerful GPU-based visualization and compute capabilities in every system. Both GPUs are connected internally via x16 PCI Express gen 3 lanes for massive bandwidth.
Click to expand...
This is great news, since the GPUs then will have enough bandwidth to be serious computation devices, but on the other hand... this means that all the Thunderbolt ports get (at best) to share the remaining 8 PCIe lanes. That's some serious bandwidth throttle.
 
Jack Stenner said:
Via education store:

2.7 GHz 12-core
64 GB RAM
1 TB Flash
Dual D700s
AppleCare (required by employer)
--------------
$8739.00

I was expecting and had put aside $10K for this, so I'm happy :party:
Click to expand...


My Educational is more?

2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache
64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
1TB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
Apple care
________
$8,938.00
 
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