WHAT WORKAROUNDS FOR THE 4 SLOT MPro LIMIT?

[Anson Fogel]

What workarounds has anyone devised for the 4 slot limit on Mac Pros? Generally, we're talking about a machine with a Rocket, GPU, SAS/ESATA card and an Accelerator/SDI out card.

Specifically, I've gotten busier and busier with post work, and need LTO and other things, but no slots. I have a late 08 MP with Rocket, GPU, CalDigit ESATA card and a Decklink HDExtreme. I need LTO and more non Ethernet stuff. I see the options as:

1. Replace CalDigit with generic SAS or ESATA card, new main online array, and cascade LTO and/or more arrays off that. Downside: Expensive and time consuming, not clear it solves much long term.

2. Mobile-ize the rocket, get generic ESATA card, see 1 above, frees up slot. Downside, spendy, and slower transcodes and lower res preview. Upside, have mobile rocket for the occasional client who will pay for it (not often)

3. 2 Machines - Get a newer MPro, use one machine for R3d preview and transcoding and long renders in other apps, other for editing, mastering, grading, etc - big downside to me aside form cost? Noise, and above all, the need to access a fast RAID at the same time from both machines. Gig e not fast enough. Unless there is a way....but its also spendy and takes up space, makes noise, etc. But one machine could become the mobile....anyway.

4. Use Firewire or GigE for LTO archiving. Not clear how this happens either, but long overnight tape writes are ok.

And so forth. I am sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of camera and DP work, but also a lot of our own post production for some clients. We don't get paid well to do post all the time, nor do we only work as shooters and just deal with transcodes, dailies and one lights. Discuss....

 

[Curran Giddens]

5. PCIe expansion chassis.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

If a PCIe expansion chassis is too spendy for you, I think running your LTO via GigE is the quick fix.

As an alternative you could blackmail Steve Jobs into giving us 6 slots on a Mac tower... :cornut:

Cheers - #19

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

Clearly, Steve Jobs is more interested in Iphones, Ipads and Iwhatever than the professional use of the Mac Pros.

 

[Anson Fogel]

Ah yes.

Ah yes.

#6, blackmail jobs, rapidly and well.
#5, PCI Expansion chassis - who has had good luck with what specific model?

 

[Loren White]

The Magma ones are pretty popular.

http://www.magma.com/expressbox1.asp

 

[Chris Kenny]

Clearly, Steve Jobs is more interested in Iphones, Ipads and Iwhatever than the professional use of the Mac Pros.

Just to reiterate:

1) The Mac Pro's four slots are already using all 40 lanes provided by Intel's chipsets. They could spread those lanes out across more slots, but not doing so is a fairly reasonable design decision and not really an indication of apathy.

2) The relative lack of Mac Pro updates lately has mostly been a consequence of Moore's law having stalled out somewhat with respect to CPUs in the last few years. It's not like Intel has released a couple of generations of processors that Apple has ignored or something.

In general, a lot of people seem to be acting as if Apple has somehow decided recently that internal expansion isn't important -- but today's Mac Pro is the most expandable tower Apple has had on the market since the PowerMac 9600 was discontinued over 12 years ago.

 

[Kaku Ito]

My 2slot Magma works great at x8 lane.

 

[Bruce Allen]

Just to reiterate:

1) The Mac Pro's four slots are already using all 40 lanes provided by Intel's chipsets. They could spread those lanes out across more slots, but not doing so is a fairly reasonable design decision and not really an indication of apathy.

That's the thing: Apple is too lazy to use anything other than the stock Intel solution.

For example SuperMicro's workstation has 2x PCI-E 2.0 x16, 4x PCI-E 2.0 x8 (1 in x16 slot), and 1x PCI-E x4
http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/Superworkstation.cfm

Or HP Z800:
2 PCIe Gen2 x16
2 PCIe Gen2 x16 mechanical (x8 electrical)
1 PCIe Gen2 x8 mechanical (x4 electrical)
1 PCIe Gen1 x8 mechanical (x4 electrical)
1 PCI
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-12454-296719-307907-4050865-3718645.html

2) The relative lack of Mac Pro updates lately has mostly been a consequence of Moore's law having stalled out somewhat with respect to CPUs in the last few years. It's not like Intel has released a couple of generations of processors that Apple has ignored or something.

They released the 6-core update several months after PCs.

HP for example announced 12-core Z800 workstations back in March. I think it took a month for reviews to pop up but still... it's late August and Apple is only shipping their stuff now.

My 2slot Magma works great at x8 lane.

Awesome! How much? I am comparing that to Cubix GPU-x (8x version)...

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Chris Kenny]

That's the thing: Apple is too lazy to use anything other than the stock Intel solution.

Using Intel's stock chipsets is just not an unreasonable decision. I certainly wouldn't call it evidence of laziness. And again, these are the most expandable Macs Apple has made in over 12 years. It's fine to say a Mac with more slots would be useful to you; it would be useful to me as well. But the lack of one is simply not evidence that Apple has stopped caring about the pro market because the iPhone is distracting them or something. Apple's level of interest in the pro market does not appear to have changed significantly in many, many years.

And there is hope on the horizon for the slot problem, in the form of Light Peak and USB 3, which provide sufficient bandwidth for tasks like video I/O and RAID storage without needing to use up slots.

They released the 6-core update several months after PCs.

HP for example announced 12-core Z800 workstations back in March. I think it took a month for reviews to pop up but still... it's late August and Apple is only shipping their stuff now.

You have to be very careful with this. Intel will announce processors months before they're actually shipping in sufficient quantity for OEMs to base a product around. Some OEMs will then race to announce products based on those processors, knowing they they won't be able to ship units at more than a trickle for quite some time. (And of course some of those first machines will go to review sites, creating the impression they're generally available before they are.)

 

[Chris Ratledge]

more and more the solution that appeals to me is a Hacintosh, even though most here seem to be against the idea

 

[Bruce Allen]

Using Intel's stock chipsets is just not an unreasonable decision. I certainly wouldn't call it evidence of laziness.

OK, but we can agree that they are at least *less energetic* than HP and Supermicro, who don't limit themselves to the stock chipsets, right?

and Dell, and Boxx, who also don't use the stock chipset...

Hang on, they ARE the laziest large workstation manufacturer.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Er... I'm not sure what some of you guys are smoking. Right now, for dual Xeons, there's Intel's chipsets. That's it. There's no "stock chipset" or modified chipsets, etc.. That SuperMicro board that Bruce linked to uses the exact same i5520 "Tylsersburg" that is being used in the Mac Pro. This is it, this is the best there is right now...

There are some motherboards, like the SuperMicro one linked by Bruce, which utilize dual chipsets and have a dual south-bridge design to increase their PCIe expandability. The i5520 chipset allows linking two of them in a tandem/cascade mode, which is what SuperMicro has done here. Intel has a couple motherboards of their own that do the same thing and so do other makers -- Tyan, for example.

In cascade mode, the two chipsets sacrifice 8 PCIe lanes from the primary chipset and 4 lanes from the downstream chipset to form the link and to balance the load. Or at least that's a simplistic way to explain it. On this SuperMicro board, the primary chipset hosts two PCIe X16 slots, the second hosts four PCIe X8 slots and one X4 slot.

Apple could have easily done this and given us more slots and lanes, but there's a problem... And I think the real problem here is that Apple likes to create their outward designs first and then make the hardware fit. They don't like to change a design, even if it sucks, once established. The MacBook, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro tower all perfect examples of this. The Mac tower has had the same outward design since the days of the first aluminum PowerPC G4 towers. This design sucks a hairy cucumber like nothing else, but Apple sure seems to love it. You can't rack mount it without sawing the handles off the top and bottom or mount it vertically. For the time, having four PCIe slots in the PowerMac G5 as well as the 2006 model Mac Pro was just fine. Sure some people wanted another slot in there, but realistically there weren't any more lanes to really go around with those generations of the system. However, with the 2008 Mac Pro to some extent, and for sure with the 2009-2010 Mac Pro, the four slots is simply inadequate.

Apple isn't really lazy from a hardware design perspective. In fact, they're quite aggressive. Simply studying the logic board of the current '09/10 model Mac Pro and comparing to most any motherboard in PC land will confirm this. Where the real problem lies is that they're just too damn lazy or perhaps even too in-love with their current design, to alter the form factor of their beloved Mac Tower so that we can actually have enough room in there to get more slots and a reasonable amount of space for internal storage!

Anyway, since the latest update is not really an update, just that they're now selling the latest 6-core CPUs along with the same logic board they have been selling for the past 17 months... I'm really hoping we get a major update, including a refresh of this terribly crappy, sucky, and just downright ridiculous tower design, when the next round of CPUs and chipsets hit the channel. Which should be by the end of the year or early next year. It's starting to look like it will be early 2011 for the new chipsets, so I keep my hopes up. If Apple goes another round with new chipsets that will give us 72 PCIe lanes without cascade and they keep stuffing us with 4 slots, I may just be inspired to sell all my Mac Pro systems and try again someday when they decide to actually make a Pro system. I guess I'll keep an iMac around for iOS development...

To keep this thread somewhat on-topic, most of the realistic options have been covered here. It's hard to know what to do though and each person's situation will differ. I personally tried a PCIe expander and felt it wasn't worth the money. I sent it back and for not much more, I found me a good deal on a 2008 8-Core Mac Pro and built it out and now it sits next to my '09 Mac Pro. I'm thinking of putting one large RAID on the '08 tower and replacing the RAID controller in the '09 with a 10Gbps ethernet card. Then I can also put another card in the '08 tower and link them and both can utilize the same RAID. Because right now, I have to share files between the two over gig-e and that can really suck for huge file transfers.

 

[Erich Ocean]

I guess I'll keep an iMac around for iOS development...

I didn't know you wrote code! Any open source projects you contribute to?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yep, I'm a coder. Was a game developer, mostly back-end hardware code for console systems for several years. Then I got out of it for a while, I've been doing quite a bit of iPhone/iPad stuff this year and some Android now. No open source projects I contribute to currently. I did have an open source 2D game/sprite engine that I built along with a friend of mine around 1992, which pre-dated DirectDraw/DirectX and actually still used the old VESA VGA extension modes and other standard and some non-standard VGA/MCGA modes. Ah, the old-school game programming days were a blast. I think that's what attracted me to the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms recently. It's a new gold rush of sorts again where one person can realistically produce an app or game that people are willing to purchase. Although I have an iPhone app that's in limbo, I can't seem to get it approved for the store and Apple can't seem to give me a reason why they won't approve it. Then I've spent most of this year developing and supporting an iPad app for a medical company that they're distributing in-house. Just finished building printer support into that one -- since Apple doesn't seem to think printing from the iPad is a desired feature. Had to write my own own system to control HP PCL printers over TCP/IP... It's working.. Yay! I'm thinking I'm going to polish up that code and flesh out full support for PCL 5 & 6 as well as add PostScript 3 and bundle it as a library I can license/sell. And as soon as I do that, Apple will release iPad iOS 4 and it will probably have printing support built in. Hehe

 

[Erich Ocean]

And as soon as I do that, Apple will release iPad iOS 4 and it will probably have printing support built in.

No kidding. After I ported Google v8 (the JavaScript engine in Google Chrome) to Solaris, I started turning it into a native ARM compiler so that I could compile JavaScript code and run it on the iPhone outside of a WebView. Needless to say, Apple's War on Adobe Flash ended that project. *grrrrrrr*

 

[Dustin Cross]

more and more the solution that appeals to me is a Hacintosh, even though most here seem to be against the idea

I am planning my primary system to be a Mac Pro with a Cyclone PCIe expander and my back-up systems to be a Hackintosh. The Mac Pro will take up 9u to do the same thing I can do with a Hackintosh in 3u. My Mac Pro will stay my primary system though.



Dusty

 

[Andrew T Foster]

Heya,

I'm liking the EVGA SR-2 board, Jeff. Now with support from Apple for the 5520 chipset, it shouldn't be too difficult to put something together.

http://www.evga.com/products/moreIn...d Family&series=Intel 5520 Series Family&sw=5

I put a Hackintosh together this weekend to work as a LTO-4 backup station in the studio. Working great so far! Ran out of slots in the Mac Pro and didn't want to keep swapping cards or spend another $4k+ on a Mac Pro.

Best,

ATF

 

[Mr_Anderson]

Work around this? LOL

Work around this? LOL

What workarounds has anyone devised for the 4 slot limit on Mac Pros? Generally, we're talking about a machine with a Rocket, GPU, SAS/ESATA card and an Accelerator/SDI out card.

Specifically, I've gotten busier and busier with post work, and need LTO and other things, but no slots. I have a late 08 MP with Rocket, GPU, CalDigit ESATA card and a Decklink HDExtreme. I need LTO and more non Ethernet stuff. I see the options as:

1. Replace CalDigit with generic SAS or ESATA card, new main online array, and cascade LTO and/or more arrays off that. Downside: Expensive and time consuming, not clear it solves much long term.

2. Mobile-ize the rocket, get generic ESATA card, see 1 above, frees up slot. Downside, spendy, and slower transcodes and lower res preview. Upside, have mobile rocket for the occasional client who will pay for it (not often)

3. 2 Machines - Get a newer MPro, use one machine for R3d preview and transcoding and long renders in other apps, other for editing, mastering, grading, etc - big downside to me aside form cost? Noise, and above all, the need to access a fast RAID at the same time from both machines. Gig e not fast enough. Unless there is a way....but its also spendy and takes up space, makes noise, etc. But one machine could become the mobile....anyway.

4. Use Firewire or GigE for LTO archiving. Not clear how this happens either, but long overnight tape writes are ok.

And so forth. I am sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of camera and DP work, but also a lot of our own post production for some clients. We don't get paid well to do post all the time, nor do we only work as shooters and just deal with transcodes, dailies and one lights. Discuss....

It only has Dual Westmere 12 Core Xeons @ 3.6 GHz, 32 TB of on-board disk storage, 96 GB of RAM capacity in 12 slots, 7 full length PCIe 16x slots, GTX 470 + GT 240 video cards... and a fan speed controller for each fan? :bath:

​

 

[Vance Colvig]

Are you using an EVGA SR-2 board?? What memory sticks are you using? How is the stability?? Inquiring minds want to know. Thanks in advance.