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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

Dan Graetz said:
Just got the ASUS 4K monitor (PQ321) working Jeff. After having no luck finding cables specifically rated for MST - I ordered a bunch of DP->miniDP cables in the hope one would work. In the end a cable advertising 'audio support' was the winner and I'm a proud owner of a 60hz 31.5" 4K display! Only just started using it but so far I'm finding the size of text & icons really usable and the screen real estate is just bonkers. In the attached pic that's a pixel-for-pixel 1080p video window in FCPx so you get a feel for how much space is left over. Reminded me of how it felt staring into my first 30" Cinema Display (which I foolishly dropped $6k when they were first released).
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That's cool! Which cable are you using? I have a few that are supposedly "really good" and have audio support and the Accel one seems to be the best and highest rated of those. It almost lets the 24" Dell work properly… Almost. It worked fine with the Sharp PN-K321 other than occasional "pop" or flash on the screen. But honestly I get just as many, or more, of those same sort of glitches with the Dual-link DVI to DisplayPort converters. I'm not sure which cable Apple sends out with the Sharp for connecting to the Mac Pro, but it seems that reports out there say that it doesn't always work at 60Hz MST.

I already had SwitchResX installed from past troubleshooting and in Display Prefs it shows up as a SwitchResX monitor with no refresh rate listed. Then when you enter the SwitchResX app it shows the full res and 60hz - STOKED!! Also running a secondary 27" Apple Thunderbolt display for now and it's all playing super smooth.
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Now this could have something to do with it as well. Seeing how all these monitors have no trouble working on the nMP via Windows, it's obviously an issue with OSX driver and mode support. If SwitchResX takes care of it, then it all comes down to mode support -- meaning that we could probably just manually add the modes into the display kext. Now I'm going to have to try the 24 and 32 inch Dell monitors again. See, that's what happens when I listen to other people about the lack of support -- all because I didn't have the monitors to test with for very long and didn't have the time to really hack into it myself. I was going to pick up the 24" Dell again anyway as soon as a proper coupon shows up. Decided that I want one for a different system, but I'll give it another shot on the nMP if I get one.

Patrick Grossien said:
On the $1K copy machine front - is there a huge difference with more RAM and processing power as well or is it only-mostly a matter of I/O ?
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Faster RAM, more RAM and faster CPU will help keep the system from getting bogged down as fast. But in the end, when you're just offloading and shuffling data around, it's 95% about your I/O throughput.

Quentin Brown said:
Wow, thanks for the very full reply Jeff, you are very generous with your time, thank you. And everbody else who pitched in on the subject of multiple systems.

I am thinking of a rack mac mini server running as a SAN as my data manangement system - then I'll hook up the MacPro to it to work on the footage. Any thoughts on this? Would if be too tied up running the SAN to manage offloading and checksum verification at the same time? Would it be better to simply run a powerful raid on the mac mini through a PCI card in the Sonnet rack and make it a shared volume and maybe network via Thunderbolt2 between the machines so that possibly unnecessary SAN functions don't become an overhead. The world of SAN is foreign to me and I'm not sure if it's entirely necessary for my needs or what kind of overheads it creates - though there are occasional circumstances where I work with editors or VFX teams on set and it would be nice to have the ability to share directly at good working speeds without copying to shuttle drives. Peoples thoughts and experiences on this would be much appreciated.
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The Mac Mini Server is a nice little machine. A bit dated though -- lots of speculation flying around about them updating the mini. I hope they do update soon as I could use a new mini server myself. That said, they only have one Thunderbolt port, NOT Thunderbolt 2, but it's good enough to attach a decent TB RAID and a 10G ethernet or fiber channel or whatever adapter to the same port. Then that leaves you with some USB3 ports for MAG readers and external HDDs for shuttling your files about.

Some of the new Z87 PC motherboards have Thunderbolt2 ports on them. I don't really advocate for building a Hackintosh with them -- lack of proper Z87 chipset support in OSX amongst other things really hamper performance. But nothing wrong with running Windows, either. You can build some rather compact and powerful PCs these days.
 
Since making copies is typically part of the plan anyway, I just use shuttle drives to provide media for various users. I typically move around project files/metadata/EDL/XML/ALE etc via USB drives/Dropbox/email attachments. In my world, the benefits of a SAN are too minimal to justify the management overhead. If we ever stop needing multiple redundant copies of digital media for data security, then I'll revisit...

Cheers - #19
 
Thank you again for sharing your knowledge and time, Jeff! This really means a lot to me!
 
David Coughlan said:
Jeff, there are two stackable coupons for the Dell right now that bring it to 1,085 shipped to LA (just tested it in cart, but am hesitating on pulling the trigger -- 20 day build time). Info here: http://www.extremetech.com/deals/177746-et-deals-dell-up2414q-4k-ips-monitor-for-994
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Ooooh, that's awesome. $1035 delivered to me if I do it. I'm very tempted. So I guess I'm debating as to wether I'm going to go for this or do the 29" LG TB2 4K display. The LG one doesn't come out until July, though and we don't have a price yet… Hmmm...
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
That's cool! Which cable are you using? I have a few that are supposedly "really good" and have audio support and the Accel one seems to be the best and highest rated of those. It almost lets the 24" Dell work properly… Almost. It worked fine with the Sharp PN-K321 other than occasional "pop" or flash on the screen. But honestly I get just as many, or more, of those same sort of glitches with the Dual-link DVI to DisplayPort converters. I'm not sure which cable Apple sends out with the Sharp for connecting to the Mac Pro, but it seems that reports out there say that it doesn't always work at 60Hz MST.
Click to expand...

Here's where I got the cable from (Australian site):
http://www.macfixit.com.au/high-speed-mini-displayport-to-displayport-cable-6ft.html
So far haven't seen anything glitchy or weird which is encouraging. Looks like I might need to disable the ASUS internal sleep mechanism as when OSX energy-saves the monitors it must lose EDID to the ASUS and you have to unplug-replug the monitor to get it back.
There's a ridiculously clunky menu sequence you have to go through on the ASUS to enable MST as well - out of the box it defaults to SST.

Before I got the cable and was trying to get it working I'd set up a manual display profile for the ASUS in SwitchResX at 3840x2160@60hz. So my best guess is that when I plugged the right cable in the profile was sitting there ready to go and it all worked.

Having worked for a day on it now - it's hard to see how anything smaller than 30" at 4K would be at all worthwhile as a GUI display. The readability of text and icons is right on the edge of usable. Maybe if you wanted to use a 24" just to preview UltraHD content that might be worth it?
 
Apple is asking developers to focus on A/V improvements in the latest dev build so maybe there will be an MST fix with the 10.9.3 update, which should also land around the same time as new 4K displays.
 
Agreed...two are better than one.

I'm still reserving my thoughts on TB networking though. Currently doing this with a rMBP between the trashcans. One hosts the Areca. One hosts a Promise. Sonnet chassis on each are tailored for either data I/O or transcoding/file crunching.
blogger-image-1257854729.jpg
 
Dan Graetz said:
Here's where I got the cable from (Australian site):
http://www.macfixit.com.au/high-speed-mini-displayport-to-displayport-cable-6ft.html
So far haven't seen anything glitchy or weird which is encouraging. Looks like I might need to disable the ASUS internal sleep mechanism as when OSX energy-saves the monitors it must lose EDID to the ASUS and you have to unplug-replug the monitor to get it back.
There's a ridiculously clunky menu sequence you have to go through on the ASUS to enable MST as well - out of the box it defaults to SST.

Before I got the cable and was trying to get it working I'd set up a manual display profile for the ASUS in SwitchResX at 3840x2160@60hz. So my best guess is that when I plugged the right cable in the profile was sitting there ready to go and it all worked.

Having worked for a day on it now - it's hard to see how anything smaller than 30" at 4K would be at all worthwhile as a GUI display. The readability of text and icons is right on the edge of usable. Maybe if you wanted to use a 24" just to preview UltraHD content that might be worth it?
Click to expand...

That's good to know, I'll have to give it another shot with SwitchResX and see what happens. My friend has the Asus and he's about a half hour drive from me, so maybe we can give it a shot over the next few days. I know it will work with the cables we have, as it works fine from Windows with those cables.

As for resolutions and sizing, I'm still sticking with my thoughts from more than a month back when I was testing these displays. UHD 3840x2160 is actually a very odd resolution to work with. For current display elements without using Hi-DPI retina style scaling, it makes for a rather huge desktop and we need the 32+" monitor size, but that's starting to get unwieldy and it feels a bit overbearing when we sit at normal desktop monitor viewing distances. At smaller sizes, like 24", is actually a better fit for a "retina" style display where most elements are scaled up in size and only things that benefit from 1:1 pixel representation are shown that way -- video, photos, lines in your CAD program, etc.. Razor sharp text and other benefits with this. Unfortunately, in terms of desktop workspace we're stuck back in 1080p land in terms of actual useable real-estate. I think the way to do it right is to go with larger 27~30 inch displays, but further increase the resolution so we can have all the desktop real-estate of current 27~30 inch monitors, but with all the benefits of the hi-DPI retina stuff too. …Anyway, see below.

L. Langer said:
Apple is asking developers to focus on A/V improvements in the latest dev build so maybe there will be an MST fix with the 10.9.3 update, which should also land around the same time as new 4K displays.
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Most of us were hoping that 10.9.2 would address the MST flakiness and/ or lack of mode support. Especially since Apple keeps telling developers and testers to focus on display drivers and graphics issues. And there was a new ATI driver module update, specifically for the new Mac Pro Dx00 GPUs, bundled with 10.9.2. I guess they just couldn't get to everything… I'm still thinking it's not high on their priority list until Apple has their own 4K+ monitors to ship. LG/Hitachi has both a new 22" 3840x2160 and a 29" 5120x2880 panel that they are reportedly showing to key partners. I'm betting we're going to see resolution-doubled HiDPI / "retina" desktop displays and iMacs later this year or early next year. Although, closed-door prototype presentations are nothing new. I've been privy to such things myself. I attended a Sony/Samsung deal where they showed off a 52" UHD LED panel and a 57" 4096 pixel wide panel. That was back in '09. Also the first year they showed the 55" UHD panel prototype at CES. None of those specific panels or displays ever came to light…
 
Yes I posted that thread, should have just posted it here probably. Mods feel free to merge
 
Michael Dalton said:
anyone know how long real wait times are for the New Mac Pros in Canada. Says April, but wondering how long will actually take to deliver? Finally able to take the plunge.
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Our Jan (first week) order is dropping next week according to Apple email.

They were all BTOs too.
 
FWIW, I went ahead and ordered one of the 24" Dell 4K monitors with the two coupons linked above. $1034 shipped to me and I don't know where they got their shipping estimate of early April from… The monitor shipped from Dell today!
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
FWIW, I went ahead and ordered one of the 24" Dell 4K monitors with the two coupons linked above. $1034 shipped to me and I don't know where they got their shipping estimate of early April from… The monitor shipped from Dell today!
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Great, looking forward to your tests as well. I actually ordered one for myself this afternoon -- 3:21pm EST -- but my order is showing an estimated delivery of 4/9.
 
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