Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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

Isaac - I use the 1500 model you linked to and have had good success. One of my older 5,1 Towers blew out the PSU on a lesser UPS last month when the battery kicked over, so I don't touch anything less than 1500 now regardless of the config. That tower has been to hell and back anyway though, so I'm not surprised. I like the TrippLite ones too since they rack mount (SmartLCD I think is the model).

Jeff - that's exactly why the 2690 is a nice alternative. Haven't seen anyone put it in such easy to read details than your post earlier. Had a friend liken the Xeons to cars - the 8 Core is a Nissan GTR with its higher spooling turbo and daily drivability. The 10C is a Corvette - fast but balanced. Good for little added speed with some finessing. The 12C is a Viper. Flat out fast but sloppy in the corners. Really only lives on the track.
 
That APC unit should do it I think. Although, you could still over-draw with a monitor connected or the system under heavy load. The D700 GPUs are each rated at max 290W, the CPU socket is rated to hold up to the full 150W TDP E5 series Xeon -- your 8-core is rated at 130W. So you're at 710W just for the two GPUs and CPU at peak load, plus the cooling and system/ chipset overhead, TB and USB port output. I don't recall, but the PSU in the nMP is either rated to 775W or 825W. And these are output load numbers. Circuit draw can be 5 to 20 % higher, depending on the efficiency of the PSU. The new Mac Pro PSU is super-efficient, all solid-state, low thermal. I'd be surprised if it's less than 94% efficient while in nominal operating range. Anyway, I guess the load monitor on the thing should tell you if you're good or not. Just keep in mind that if you're pushing near capacity on the UPS, you're going to burn up the battery system and possibly cause short-falls on the output that could damage your system far worse than not plugging it into anything.

Personally, I almost never use a UPS on workstation systems, they're just not worth the hassle. A good line conditioner is highly recommended, preferably one for your entire home/ office or at least localized to specific equipment. Typically, I only use UPS's on servers or critical systems and I'll go for the larger rack-mount units that can more than handle the load. This APC unit you're looking at is targeted at home PC's and AV equipment. It would be perfect for an iMac w/ printer and second screen or an HDTV w/ set-top box and blu-ray. Maybe I'd change my tune if I had a lot of power outages, but we only suffer a couple each year, usually weather related. Worst-case scenario is the power goes out while I'm saving or something and everything I've done for the last 10 to 30 minutes is toast. That's maybe happened once in my entire life <knock wood>. I've lost far more data just to a system locking up or other issues not specifically power related.
 
Jeff's point about not requiring UPS units for edit systems is also my normal recommendation. Power Modulators such as Monster or Furman are better for protecting your sensitive equipment unless you get the Online UPS units which are very expensive. These units normally have a flat load limit of 1200W or 1800W which is more than enough for most.
 
Eric Bowen said:
Most likely your PSU in the nMPro is undamaged but you never know.
Click to expand...

Dick move, Eric, dick move...you just installed doubt 2.0. I'm guessing it's fine. And the computer has been fine in the past few weeks since that happened.

I'm mostly doing long (read: longer than 12-16 hour) renders, and in my apartment building the power is pretty good. But every now and then we've had an outage, which has killed a render. Frankly the way I have it is monitors are on one APC, RAID is on another, and the Mac Pro would be purely the 1500VA.
 
Another Dev Build is seeding today. No information about it except whatever the release notes say and it's another A/V focused build request from Apple.
 
I'm probably going to install the new build this weekend, but other than the persistent OSX 10.9 PDF printing issues, the last dev seed is working great. Better than 10.9.2. Even got the sleep issue with the Pegasus2 managed. Not sure what's up and Promise didn't have an answer either -- I'm not the first to report. I forced a factory reset on the unit and all seems well, didn't have to rebuild the RAID volume or anything. Hmmm..



DJ Meyer said:
Does yours pull more than 450w?

Anand, Apple, iFixit all saying 450. My D700 8core won't pull more than 454 no matter how hard I push it.
Click to expand...


I have not measured it's power draw. I'm just going off numbers. The D700 GPUs are performance clamped R9 280X cards w/ 6GB each. In PC land, the stock 280X 3GB cards are rated for max 290W and it seems they operate at load in most games or intense graphics apps at around 200~230W. So if there are two of them in this system…? Looking at the GPU data and power connections, there are enough power leads to pipe that much wattage to them. Running Windows on the system, I can't seem to get power consumption data back from the GPUs. Although that seems to be normal with R9 2xx cards anyway, everyone is having to do calculate based on external measured system draw. The D700's are reported as 280X cards with 6GB and perform accordingly, or within about 10% of what the stock cards are getting in similar benchmarks and games.

So if the system is only drawing 450W, I'm perplexed as to how it's supporting a 130W CPU and two of the most powerful GPUs out there -- even if they're crippled by about 10%. Most gaming rigs that are running X79 motherboards, quad-core i7 @ 95W, 16GB RAM and a single reference R9 280X 3GB card plus dual SSDs and a blu-ray drive are still pulling over 400W under load.

What were you running when you were pulling 450W? I'll try and measure mine, but I'm trying to devise a test that that will actually drive the system hard at load. Probably trying to push it in Resolve is the best bet for now. I can peg the CPU cores with rendering, or the GPUs with gaming tasks. Not a truly good way at the moment to hit both and sustain it.

I've been told by a couple sources that the PSU is larger [than 450]. I'll also know when my next nMP gets here and I pull it apart for the CPU upgrade. Or at least I can see what's stamped on it.
 
It's certainly possible to run the NMP off of a 450-500 watt psu. Passive cooling for components, a single fan, and driver tweaks for optimizing performance along with the under-clocking of the non-reference design GPUs could pull it off. My older Core 2 Quad desktop has several HDDs, 16GB of DDR2, an SSD, and an over-clocked GTS 450 and it rarely goes above 250 watts.
 
Hi guys

We're almost ready to place an order for a new Mac Pro. The D700's are a no brainer and we're adding our own memory from Crucial BUT I'm still undecided on whether to go with the 6 or 8 core CPU.

Here in the UK the 8 core is £1200 more than the 8 - are we going to see a significant performance jump if we go for the 8 core?

We'll be running FCP X, Motion, Resolve and Adobe CC on this system.

Best wishes

Scott
 
Scott Brown said:
We're almost ready to place an order for a new Mac Pro. The D700's are a no brainer and we're adding our own memory from Crucial BUT I'm still undecided on whether to go with the 6 or 8 core CPU. Here in the UK the 8 core is £1200 more than the 8 - are we going to see a significant performance jump if we go for the 8 core?
Click to expand...
Significant is the keyword. The performance benchmarks that Jason Myres posted on the LiftGammaGain forum indicate to me that the differences are minor, at least for what I need from Resolve, Avid, and FCP. I think there were bigger gains involved with the D700 vs. D500 GPU, plus more RAM and faster drives.

I opted for a 6-core myself and have been impressed with it in the last few days. I haven't slammed it with anything really trying, like realtime full-res 4K, but for modest HD projects I think it's fine.
 
I opted for the 6 core as well after the advices from this thread. Still waiting on it....
I'm still hoping that I won't have to buy a new machine in the next 18 months, or that in due time, a new processor upgrade will help me keep it alive. As for the one man show that I am, and the budget I have at the time, I'm nowhere near spending thousands on new equipment each year...

As soon as I have it and find something to share about the performance with the material, I'll post feedback here.
 
Mark/Patrick

Thanks for your reply's; I'm thinking the 6 core will be our best best and the £1200 saved will go towards storage, mostly likely the Pegasus R2 24TB unit.

Have a great weekend.

Best wishes

Scott
 
Patrick Grossien said:
I opted for the 6 core as well after the advices from this thread. Still waiting on it....
I'm still hoping that I won't have to buy a new machine in the next 18 months, or that in due time, a new processor upgrade will help me keep it alive. As for the one man show that I am, and the budget I have at the time, I'm nowhere near spending thousands on new equipment each year...
Click to expand...
We're all in the same boat!

The MacSales videos on upgrading the nMP look very interesting. I'm hoping to do a RAM upgrade in the next few weeks, then I'll jump on the SSD as soon as they have those available. But in truth, I just got mine up and running, installed 25 pieces of software on it, and I've only filled up 50GB, leaving 200 free.

BTW, the main demo machine at Blackmagic's NAB booth demoing Resolve 11 was the identical machine: 6-core nMP with dual D700s. Performed like a champ with Red footage.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top