Purchasing a mac pro

[jake blackstone]

Also are the Broadwell Chips shipping anytime soon? I would like to build a PC with them if ASUS releases a new Mini-ATX board with better ports in 2011-3 Socket.

I just got a SuperMicro with X10DRG-Q mother board with dual E5_2650 V4. First of all original BIOS V1 didn't work with V4. So, to update BIOS to V2, that supports V4 CPUs, you need V3 CPUs. SO, I paid someone to do it. Then I installed CentOS 6.6 for Linux Resolve and CentOS complained about non supported CPUs. Lo and behold, current Linux RedHat kernel is not fully there yet with the support for V4. So, luckily, I was able to swap my E5_2650 V4 for E5_2690 V3. But if you're on Windows (I'm on 8.1), it's all good with V4 support.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Tubular sells

Tubular sells

I also love the form factor of the trash can. It's my favorite workstation for certain tasks (snip) Apple needs to rethink the design though. It's time to step up with real GPU options and future upgrade paths if they want to be relevant in the VR future. And they can't reserve that thinking only for their top tier workstation either. They need to find a way to be competitive in this segment or bow out entirely. I'd like to see a larger cylinder or cube form factor that can accept full size PCIe GPUs. And I would like to see them open up to use off the shelf GPU hardware. (snip)

What I picture in my mind is a larger tube that still leverages the central cooling chimney design. I'd go from the internal triangle that supports 3 "boards" (currently 2x GPU and one for MoBo & everything else) to a pentagon or hexagon - and yes - this will increase circumference. I'd make it tall enough to host full sized PCIe cards, which should only add 4" or so. I'd up the PSU to 750W and leverage the larger diameter of the top to utilize a even bigger fan in hopes of keeping the RPM slow like the current model.

Going back to boxy towers and their ventilation challenges is not attractive. Creating a physical standard for add in cards that nobody else supports is BS. Thanks to the clever design of the tubes, a taller version should make it pretty simple to slip off the casing to install standard PCIe cards.

I have no idea what the folks in Cupertino have planned, but a taller and wider tube that supports industry standard boards while retaining the advantages of the nMP form factor just might be the perfect synthesis of "Think Different" and support for professional use cases based on PCIe architecture.

Cheers - #19

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The add-in GPUs didn't work out well for Apple on this one. And no one else supporting them was also not supposed to happen. Intel, AMD, Apple, HP and Lenovo, as well as some others, all had their hands in that spec. This was supposed to be the new compact GPU / expansion form factor for compact desktops, all-in-ones and performance notebooks. I would say that initiative failed. To add insult to injury here, Apple even went with two separately designed GPU units in the 2013 Mac Pro. One of which had the cut-outs for the mounting of the PCIe / M.2 SSD. Should have kept the GPU design the same for both PCBs and ditched one of these Thudnerbolt 2 headers in favor of a second M.2 interface so we could double our internal storage. As cool as a lot of the trash can Macs design features are, there are a lot of decisions which seem to be poorly thought out or implemented via committee. If not for Johnny Ive's elegant design notes and overly ambitious condensing of PCB components, it feels more like something Microsoft would design.

The Chimney design is elegant and was Jobs' doing -- and done before with the Mac Cube. I agree -- a larger cylinder that can accommodate a couple real PCIe cards, larger power supply, more CPU options and more data storage would make this system a winner.

 

[Nicholas Croft]

WWDC :

+) New MBP announcement seems very likely (rumors around that APPL is into heavy testing of revised chips)

+) 2016 nMP : Scratching my head on this. OSX has a 12 Core limit. To make use of a 18 or 22 core Xeon ... I Guess that Apple will announce first, give companies 3 months to test with a development version of the OS - and that the Golden Master will make its way out in October 2016.

AJ

They removed the core limit in 10.11.3

http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/t...the-machine-apple-never-gave-us.155542/page-4

http://www.rampagedev.com/?p=2036

 

[Cicero A]

So, I went ahead an purchased the maxed out 5k 27" iMac. I have been using it a little over a week. Everything is maxed with the exception of the ram which I have not purchased the sticks for yet. Now, one of the main reasons that I wanted a new system, was to use Davinci Resolve for coloring 4-6k raw footage. I've downloaded a few r3d samples and at 1/4 res, it seems that my playback is really jumpy with only minor color corrections. Would the ram upgrade fix this issue? I love the machine, but if anyone knows of any replacements coming soon, please let me know. I would hate to have spent +3k on this machine and then a month or so later they release an upgrade that performs better with resolve for the money spent.

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Resolve relies heavily on your GPU. The GPUs in the current iMacs are pretty limiting. I think a maxed out iMac could be well suited for editing, but for resolve you really want something better.

 

[Wynn Padula]

For computers it is always best to wait until you absolutely need it - since they change so fast.

That said, I have a 4GHZ iMac 27" with SSD intel and an SSD RAID external and it smokes.