Mac Pro

[Si.]

I'm looking to replace my ageing 2011 MacBook Pro, however I'm struggling to find anything out there at the moment that can replace it. My current MacBook has been upgraded over time and is still quite good however it's how starting to lack grunt for some of the things I want to do with it and I really need quad or more cores.

I don't want another Laptop, I'd prefer a desktop. The current mac Mini is just lacking in horsepower, I have a Thunderbolt display already so don't want an iMac, and the current mac Pro is way too expensive.

What are peoples thoughts on the previous generation of Mac Pro towers? Are they still worth buying 2nd hard? Do they have thunderbolt ports so i can use my screen.

At the moment I'm thinking I'll have to leave apple after 15 years due to lack of options (I really want them to upgrade the Mac Mini but that's not going to happen anytime soon).

 

[bloodiedathame]

We still use the cMP (classic Mac Pro) at work. We've got about 20 machines varying from 2008 models to 2012 models. Most of them are set up as a render farm. They're a bit archaic now, OSX doesn't feel very smooth despite SSD's, we're having problems with firewire drives and crashes using Adobe applications. You can add USB3 cards to them, upgrade the graphics cards and even put in some quick Xeons, but they'll never do thunderbolt. www.create.pro will give you an idea of what they can do.

When we replace our day-to-day machines, we're going down the PC route. 6900k @ 4.2, 64GB, dual 1080s will outshine anything in the Apple range for what we do (video/animation/3D) and for less money. I'm moving everything at home from Apple to Windows too.

 

[Si.]

Maybe it's time to move on...

.. Now to research what's out there in PC land..

 

[Irish_Tom]

Personally, I'd get a top-spec 27" iMac and use the thunderbolt display as a second monitor.

 

[Si.]

Personally, I'd get a top-spec 27" iMac and use the thunderbolt display as a second monitor.

the problem with that is the difference irresolution between the 2 screens.. would make having dual screen awkward.

 

[Irish_Tom]

the problem with that is the difference irresolution between the 2 screens.. would make having dual screen awkward.

I've got a rMBP and a 27" Dell P2715Q 4k - different resolution and screen size but it's still handy having the extra screen estate.

 

[bloodiedathame]

I think the top spec iMac is probably the best product that Apple make, we considered getting them, but we need performance that only PCs can provide.

 

[Combat squirrel]

As all said, the old mac pro's are ancient now. Creative pro's only have one real option now - Windows.

 

[v0n]

Old Mac Pro's 2010-2012 are still perfectly usable - you can buy dual 2.26 for about £600, chuck in two six core xeons for less than £250, add Addonics Quad bootable PCIe card with 4 x mSATA raided as primary drive, populate remaining 4 SATA bays (plus two in optical drive bay) with HDDs, add one of the modern MacVidCards flashed Nvidia for display - less than £1200 you'll have a machine that knocks £15k Mac Pro out of the water and beats any PC i7 setup for the same money.

There is nothing in Thunderbolt world that older classic Mac Pro couldn't do much cheaper and for the foreseeable future bus speeds are not the bottleneck. The only threat to cMP is Apple artificially dropping OS support within the next three releases, but even then, as with Sierra and MP 3.1 - you can be sure community will mod the installations to run on older hardware because those machines are simply too good to dispose of.

 

[FreeStream]

I had a 4,1 Mac Pro (2.66Ghz) upgraded to a W3680 (3.33Ghz 6 core), 7950, 16GB, SSD, the works.

I sold it and bought a top-spec Late 2013 MacBook Pro 15", 2.6Ghz, 750M

Much faster in all but multi-threaded operations, and even then it is only 10% slower.

Old Mac Pro is just... too old now sadly.

My list would be:

1. Top End 15" MBP from last Gen. (2.8? CPU)
2. 27" iMac
3. Used nMP and upgrade the CPU in it.

 

[v0n]

I had a 4,1 Mac Pro (2.66Ghz) upgraded to a W3680 (3.33Ghz 6 core), 7950, 16GB, SSD, the works.

I sold it and bought a top-spec Late 2013 MacBook Pro 15", 2.6Ghz, 750M

Much faster in all but multi-threaded operations, and even then it is only 10% slower.

Old Mac Pro is just... too old now sadly.

Something was wrong with your box. There is simply no benchmark on earth that would show 12 core, 24 thread dual physical Westmere Xeon based MacPro with 5.1 EFI as slower than a 2.6 quad core Crystalwell based 2013 MacBook Pro. I'm sorry, but even on basic logics that's "creative".

 

[Combat squirrel]

Something was wrong with your box. There is simply no benchmark on earth that would show 12 core, 24 thread dual physical Westmere Xeon based MacPro with 5.1 EFI as slower than a 2.6 quad core Crystalwell based 2013 MacBook Pro. I'm sorry, but even on basic logics that's "creative".

He's saying the laptop is faster? Which it will be, the IPC on the newer haswells is going to destroy a 'core 2' based architecture - this was from an era when there was a big jump in IPC from 775 based stuff to sandy/haswell etc, its only since sandy bridge has everything slowed down.

 

[FreeStream]

Something was wrong with your box. There is simply no benchmark on earth that would show 12 core, 24 thread dual physical Westmere Xeon based MacPro with 5.1 EFI as slower than a 2.6 quad core Crystalwell based 2013 MacBook Pro. I'm sorry, but even on basic logics that's "creative".

6-core, not 12.

Secondly a 3.6GHz haswell will beat a 3.33ghz westmere.

Go look at the benchmarks yourself.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1368?vs=142

Similar 4570S, only wins in heavy multithreading, so yes my MBP is 95% of the time, faster than my old Mac Pro.

 

[v0n]

6-core, not 12.

cMP is dual CPU, therefore operates with 12 cores and 24 threads.

Secondly a 3.6GHz haswell will beat a 3.33ghz westmere.

2013 Macbook Pro never had a "3.6Ghz Haswell" (whatever that may be).

Go look at the benchmarks yourself.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1368?vs=142

You are making a bit of a mess out of this red herring. Linking to a random windows benchmark between i7 980 and i7 4570S, rather than W3680 (or X5690 as one would normally upgrade 4.1 or 5.1 cMP to) Xeon vs mobile 4960HQ doesn't help much either.

Look, with all due respect, there is no plausible way on earth for a quad core laptop to compete with dual CPU, 12 core Mac Pro, regardless of generation gap.

Let's get down to earth for a second - maybe there is a reason why video editors and encoders aren't working on Macbooks, right?

 

[FreeStream]

No offence but I had both machines side by side and did multiple benchmarks including lightroom, handbrake, linpack, etc. The MBP in lightly threaded apps is faster.

Mine was a single socket 4-core 4,1 2.66GHz, upgraded to a W3680 with the 5,1 firmware.
http://www.everymac.com/systems/app...-quad-core-2.66-early-2009-nehalem-specs.html

My MBP, 95% of the time, sits at its multi-core boost clock of 3.6GHz.

You are more than welcome to suggest a single and multithread benchmark which I can run to prove it.

I don't doubt for a second that a >=6-core 3.XX cMP would beat a laptop in heavy multitasking, but the OP didn't mention heavy multitasking. I sometimes miss having the pure grunt.

But it's immaterial if the OP wants to use his TB display over TB (does the TB display work on a mDP connection?) otherwise you'll also struggle to make it work on the PC side too.

 

[bloodiedathame]

Whilst the cMP is great for multithreaded grunt, with day to day stuff it's beginning to struggle. The low clock speeds (certainly of the 2.4Ghz 2012 machines I use), are a problem, coupled with older architecture and that OSX will be being written so that it is optimised for newer hardware, all means that the machine really does drag. Maybe the X5690 upgrade helps a bit but when you're looking at spending over £1k on 2011 CPU's, you've got to ask yourself 'is it worth it?'.

 

[v0n]

Maybe the X5690 upgrade helps a bit but when you're looking at spending over £1k on 2011 CPU's, you've got to ask yourself 'is it worth it?'.

Lovely cluster. You're looking at about £330 for a pair of X5690's, on a good day you can find them in tens for £130 each. Is it really worth it - at that price - it totally is.

I am baffled how many of you use "multithreaded" as if it were something odd and unusual. Look at your Activity Monitor, there is barely any single thread process in MacOS anymore. Bash, cron, few odd processes and even if you were running something super odd - regardless of synthetic bench - your kernel still have 24 slots to assign those single core processes simultaneously to on cMP, instead of 8. No process runs specifically on one and the same core anymore on any modern machine?

You are more than welcome to suggest a single and multithread benchmark which I can run to prove it

We don't have to - those benchmarks are available for long time now -

Now take benches of cMPs with modded CPUs and you get the picture.

But it's immaterial if the OP wants to use his TB display over TB (does the TB display work on a mDP connection?) otherwise you'll also struggle to make it work on the PC side too.

From what I remember Apple Thunderbolt Display doesn't have any external controls, so even if he found PC that somehow works with it (it's not Display Port backwards compatible), it would have to offer specific driver control for the ATD display - brightness, hue, alignment etc. For a new "oozb-see" 2016 Macbook Pro (but not Macbook) initial incompatibility is apparently solved by a £30 quid TB3->TB2 dongle.

 

[FreeStream]

We don't have to - those benchmarks are available for long time now -

Now take benches of cMPs with modded CPUs and you get the picture.

Machine - Single - Multi
Late 2013 2.6GHz MBP - 4134 - 13431
cMP 3.33Ghz 6-core - 2954 - 12227
cMP 3.1Ghz 12-core - 2659 - 17352
cMP 3.46Ghz 12-core - 2890 - 21322

<6 Threads = MacBook Pro
>6 Threads = Mac Pro.

http://browser.primatelabs.com/v4/cpu/compare/1338166?baseline=760295

Unless I'm missing something here?

 

[bloodiedathame]

We use After Effects a lot, Adobe have taken away the multiprocessing (render multiple frames simultaneously) ability, which means our Xeons aren't great for After Effects anymore. After Effects far prefers high clock speed CPUs, I have a gently overclocked 4.0Ghz 5820k at home and it's immeasurably faster in application and at rendering than my 12core Xeon at work.

Some applications just work better with higher clock speeds, others with more threads. It's a total trade off. I wouldn't dream of a render farm of 5820k's for C4D.

 

[Adrianr]

We still use the cMP (classic Mac Pro) at work. We've got about 20 machines varying from 2008 models to 2012 models. Most of them are set up as a render farm. They're a bit archaic now, OSX doesn't feel very smooth despite SSD's, we're having problems with firewire drives and crashes using Adobe applications. You can add USB3 cards to them, upgrade the graphics cards and even put in some quick Xeons, but they'll never do thunderbolt. www.create.pro will give you an idea of what they can do.

When we replace our day-to-day machines, we're going down the PC route. 6900k @ 4.2, 64GB, dual 1080s will outshine anything in the Apple range for what we do (video/animation/3D) and for less money. I'm moving everything at home from Apple to Windows too.

We had to start the process about a year or so ago. We have the odd one clinging on for dear life but 95% of the department is now Z640s/Z840s. We still had to buy some of the trashcans for retouching but frankly we just couldn't stake the future of the business on Apples patchy commitment to the professional market. These workstations are absurdly quick, can get loads of cores, we can put crazy amounts of ram in them, use the newest fastest GPUs, multiple internal drive raid arrays, it's daft to even draw a comparison because frankly there isn't any.