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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

OK, so who is going to run the numbers and find the best price/performance upgrade?
 
sorry if its out of topic which mouse do you guys use on Macpro? i had magic mouse and gave it to a friend as a gift.Worst apple product i have ever used.My hand gets paralyse after 1 hour use.its not ergonomic at all.
 
Well, one target config that I think could be popular is the 10C, 64GB RAM, D700 setup (and in the case of the numbers I ran, with a 512GB SSD from Apple -- though it doesn't affect scaling much if you swap that for another model), I got this:

From Apple:
4C, 12GB RAM, D700 + Tax (NY) = ~$4700

Then via OWC, get your 4C rebate and swap components for the 10C + 64GB RAM for ~$3600 (again, after NY tax)

For a total of ~$8300 shipped (twice).

... or buy an 8C, 64GB RAM, D700 model (w/ 512GB SSD) direct from Apple for... ~$8300 (after NY tax).

So in that particular scenario you're trading 2 cores for a few weeks of shipping delay, some hassle, and a voided warranty. Might be good for some, not worth it for others. I'm sure there are other configs though.
 
Kemalettin Sert said:
sorry if its out of topic which mouse do you guys use on Macpro? i had magic mouse and gave it to a friend as a gift.Worst apple product i have ever used.My hand gets paralyse after 1 hour use.its not ergonomic at all.
Click to expand...

Logitech Performance MX. Though I seem to burn through a mouse every 16-18 months mainly because I travel and I'm fairly hard on my mice!

As for the OWC upgrades, cool, but I'd rather not chase slightly faster performance at that cost and loss of my warranty. Maybe in a year or two, but I'll most likely end up buying a new mac pro for my DIT cart then anyways.
 
Frank Cueto said:
OK, so who is going to run the numbers and find the best price/performance upgrade?
Click to expand...

If you want the 12c, it's still best to just buy from Apple. Otherwise, I would say the 10c is a great option and that's the CPU I'm installing on my next nMP, which should be here in the next week or so. The 3.3GHz 8c is also compelling as it will run all 8 cores 10% faster than the 3GHz 8c Apple offers. At 6 cores, it's only 2.5% faster and at 4 cores and less it's the same speed, so do factor that it. I think for me that's where it loses value -- it's only faster than the 8c chip Apple offers when we use all cores. If our software we use most often can benefit from that many cores, why not go to the 10 core chip and most likely gain a lot bigger performance jump?

OWC's pricing on this seems reasonable. We can still save $400 to $600 by doing it on our own, depending on CPU choice, but I'm loving their $199 warranty offering as an alternative to AppleCare and they will cover the system after the upgrade. Even for someone like me who doesn't mind pulling systems apart and putting them back together, just for the heck of it, that does sweeten this deal. For those who are a bit squeamish or just not comfortable doing these types of things or not that experienced, I think it's a great service offering. And I highly stress the experience factor -- if someone has never done CPU swaps or built any reasonably expensive PC, I would steer that person away from doing this themselves. One static zap from your finger tip onto a pin of the Xeon CPU could fry it. It's easy to slip and bend a pin. The new Mac Pro is a relatively simple and brilliant design, but it's not the most friendly tear-down project for the novice tinkerer. Lots of little delicate connectors and sensitive components.

For those of us doing R3D workflow stuff, I would say the 8core or 12core from Apple are good choices. Or buy the 4core and upgrade to the 10core. To me, the 10core is the sweet spot -- I have a PC with dual 10core CPUs and most apps, even Premiere and Resolve, can't fully utilize all 40 threads in that system by any means of efficiency. But it's a nicely performing system. There are times on my 8core new Mac Pro I wish I had a few more cores. I'm not so crazy about dropping below 3GHz with the 12 core option for when more than 8 cores are engaged.

I say stick with the 64GB RAM at full speed. Dropping to significantly slower speeds to go above 64GB is too much of a compromise, IMO. If you absolutely need more than 64GB, then I would suggest looking elsewhere… Like HP, DELL, Origin..

Kemalettin Sert said:
sorry if its out of topic which mouse do you guys use on Macpro? i had magic mouse and gave it to a friend as a gift.Worst apple product i have ever used.My hand gets paralyse after 1 hour use.its not ergonomic at all.
Click to expand...

I have the Logitech Anywhere MX mouse on my nMP at the moment. I'm pretty much a Logitech mouse and Wacom tablet guy. The Apple Magic Mouse is horrible. What's funny is that Logitech and Microsoft have both done their best to copy it and their products are even worse! It seems like a good idea, but the touch surface on top of the mouse is just stupid when we're always touching the thing, so it likes to scroll and do other things when we don't want it to. So to avoid that, we have to hold it funny and the Magic Mouse is an ergonomic catastrophe because of this -- not that its ergonomics are good to begin with. I still maintain that Apple has never, ever made a good mouse.
 
Jeff, the mouse from my ORIGINAL macintosh would beg to differ. I still love that thing.

I may end up trying the 10c upgrade down the line as prices decrease, but it's not an imperative thing, and again I'm not feeling like my 8c is a dog by any means. As an anecdote the power draw off my APC for my Mac Pro is about 200w/hr in it's normal idle mode, the new Resolve update that ties the CPU/GPUs together causes the Mac Pro to go all the way up to 550w/hr so quickly my APC basically starts screeching alarms and flashing warnings. It's GLORIOUSLY fast.
 
I thought you had the 12 core, Isaac? Anyway, I wouldn't pull out an 8 core to put in a 10 core. That's kinda silly and an upgrade that will never pay for itself. IMO, these are not upgrades that make sense as a future consideration more than 18 months or so down the road. They make more sense as a means to get CPU options Apple doesn't offer right now (the 3.3GHz 8 core or 3GHz 10 core). In 18 months, there will be a new Mac Pro with PCIe 4.0 and possibly Thunderbolt 3 ports, superior 4K support, HDMI 2.0, faster GPUs… At that point, it would make more sense to buy a new one than to try and upgrade one of these current ones to "better performance."

I still recommend the 6 core Mac Pro to a lot of people. I think for most users doing HD video, typical graphics and photo work, CAD, etc.. the 6 core is the best bang for the buck. It's a good bit more powerful than the iMac, where the 4-core option is not, only gaining on memory throughput and dual GPUs.

As much as I'd love to leave the big tower behind, I still wish Apple had a dual CPU option for us. I can't say I miss the expansion slots at all. It's a pain for those who *replaced* a tower and need to hook up a bunch of legacy stuff, but moving forward I think Apple is on the right track. The only square peg in a round hole type issue I have is the Rocket-X card. But I think it's going into the Z820 which is my dedicated Resolve and SpeedGrade system and then we're one and done. I don't think I'll buy more than one Rocket-X. ….Now if RED launches their larger EPIC-645 camera or something, then I probably will because that means 9~12K resolution. ;)
 
I'm also using the Logitech Performance MX mouse (with the K750 solar keyboard). So far so good although I wish Logitech made a K800 keyboard for Mac. I can't stand the Magic Mouse. Using it with programs such as Lightroom made me want to break things.

I went with the 6-core/16gb/1tb/D700 option and received mine ~2 weeks ago. Just ordered 64gb 1866 kit from OWC that hopefully will get here in time for the weekend.
 
Jeff, negative ghostrider.

I have the 8core, 512gb, D700, and 64gb RAM. The 12-core just wasn't financially viable right now especially when as you said 18 months down the line I'll probably replace this nMP with a newer Mac Pro.

I couldn't be happier with the 8c. And I'm not saying that to justify why I don't have a 12c.
 
Isaac Marchionna said:
Jeff, the mouse from my ORIGINAL macintosh would beg to differ. I still love that thing.

I may end up trying the 10c upgrade down the line as prices decrease, but it's not an imperative thing, and again I'm not feeling like my 8c is a dog by any means. As an anecdote the power draw off my APC for my Mac Pro is about 200w/hr in it's normal idle mode, the new Resolve update that ties the CPU/GPUs together causes the Mac Pro to go all the way up to 550w/hr so quickly my APC basically starts screeching alarms and flashing warnings. It's GLORIOUSLY fast.
Click to expand...

What is the actual wattage rating of the nMPro PSU. I cant find the definite spec? What is the model number of your APC? That screeching is the load exceeding the transformer normally.
 
I use the APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 1000, which is rated at 600w/hr. The issue is actually not the capacity of the draw. It's the system presenting a warning because of the sudden JUMP from 200-550w/hr so quickly. That was my question as well, and called APC and they verified that it was a safeguard and not overdrawing.

Can anyone with an APC verify how much power consumption they're seeing as well?

Consumption document: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2836
 
Isaac Marchionna said:
I use the APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 1000, which is rated at 600w/hr. The issue is actually not the capacity of the draw. It's the system presenting a warning because of the sudden JUMP from 200-550w/hr so quickly. That was my question as well, and called APC and they verified that it was a safeguard and not overdrawing.

Can anyone with an APC verify how much power consumption they're seeing as well?

Consumption document: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2836
Click to expand...

I have the APC Pro 1500 (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003Y24DEU/ref=pe_175190_21431760_M3T1_ST1_dp_1). No warnings with my setup. I'll try and check when I get back home what the consumption of my system is.
 
Isaac Marchionna said:
I use the APC Power-Saving Back-UPS Pro 1000, which is rated at 600w/hr. The issue is actually not the capacity of the draw. It's the system presenting a warning because of the sudden JUMP from 200-550w/hr so quickly. That was my question as well, and called APC and they verified that it was a safeguard and not overdrawing.

Can anyone with an APC verify how much power consumption they're seeing as well?

Consumption document: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2836
Click to expand...

That link just gives you standard operational load and not actual Load rating of the PSU, Full Initialization load, and peak load. Your current measured load is already over 450W max sustained listed under Apple's specs. The current UPS units are Line Interactive with that transformer on the main circuit which is not rated to handle a load greater than what the UPS is rated to handle. I would be careful running that Mac Pro 8 core on such a low UPS especially if the Mac Pro PSU is rated for higher than the 600W which could eventually burn that PSU out along with other components. This has become a major problem to computer owners the last few years when the UPS units switched from Standby to Line Interactive. Also keep in mind these UPS manufacturers likely wont honor the insurance if the total rated load is greater than what the load rating of the UPS is. Ask them if you are not sure.
 
Interesting. I may switch from the 1000 to 1500 next chance I get, and keep my other components like drives and screens on my other APC PRO 700s. I think the issue is that the draw goes up so quickly and it's close to the threshold of the APC's limit that the warning goes on (hitting the mute button causes it to not alarm). But I'm NOT exceeding the APC's draw capacity.

It's amazing how the only app that causes that is Resolve.

Eric, would you feel that the 1500 would be a safe margin of capacity to upgrade to?
 
If it's 860W or greater 1500VA then likely you will be as long as you don't connect other devices beyond a monitor or 2. Without Apple actually releasing their PSU rating spec I cant say 100%. However the poster above is currently using a 1500VA which is likely 850W or higher and is not getting any warning at all. That tells me his current transformer is able to handle the current initialization load which is the highest load rating ie PSU watt rating. The other variable to this is the efficiency of the PSU and UPS drop over time. You don't want a UPS exactly the same as your load req incase that efficiency drops quicker than your PSU.
 
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