Mac Pro

Si.

Si.

Soldato
OP
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Melbourne, Aus
I've been reading up on the Z840, very impressive, and after speaking to the sales manager I can buy one with the company discount..

Do you know if it will work with my existing Thunderbolt Display? It has a Thunderbolt port so I have my fingers crossed.
 
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Just to weigh in I've bought pretty much every generation of Apple's Mac Pro machines.

In 2015 I picked up a maxed out 15-inch Macbook Pro and since I benchmark every machine I get I was able to determine exactly what I gained/lost with a Mac Pro vs a Macbook Pro.

Normalizing my tests to the Macbook Pro as a base line of 1.

The Mac Pro 2013 (6 core, D700, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD) in single threaded tests was 0.87 times the speed of a 2015 Macbook Pro. In multi-threaded performance it was 1.18.

I had a 12 core briefly and that was 0.77 times the speed of a MBP in single threaded tests. It was however 1.66 faster in multithreaded speeds.

In gaming those dual D700 graphics chips allowed the Mac Pro to surpass the Macbook Pro by nearly 5 fold. That was when using BOTH graphics processors in Crossfire mode in Windows. In OS X only one GPU is used for 3D apps which means you get a x2.5 fold improvement over a 2015 Macbook Pro.

Where the Mac Pro shines is in having a lot of Thunderbolt ports, in remaining very, very quiet under long periods of load and finally in looking drop, dead gorgeous...

It is also superlative in redistributing wonga from your coffers to Apple's...

Can't recommend it today, it's a very, very poor investment.

I briefly tested a maxed out 27 inch 5k iMac and to be honest that isn't too far off a Mac Pro. It's about 10% faster than a maxed out MBP in single and multi threaded apps and about 1.72 times as fast in gaming.

TLDR; If you need OS X the Macbook Pro or iMac are a far better value purchase than a Mac Pro and surpass it in every performance metric except gaming and very multi threaded applications.
 

Si.

Si.

Soldato
OP
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Melbourne, Aus
I ended up getting my first PC in over 10 years as there just isn't a Mac machine to suit my needs. Apple really have missed the mark not updating the Mac mini.
 
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Welcome to the other side. My main work machine at home is a PC now, and I've ditched my old iPhone 5 for an Android Huawei as of a few weeks ago. Apple are going to have to wake up and smell the coffee really soon, they've let a lot of people down, and with so many premium pieces of hardware in the market, at 25% of the price of Apple's, they can't last.
 
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I picked up a 2009 4,1 Mac Pro last year to replace my 3770k desktop, I haven't regretted the purchase at all. I put in a pair of x5670s (£130 for both) and a gtx970. I run Windows 10 for games and the cpu usage is usually below half at all time. In multithreaded benchmarks it's roughly twice as powerful as a stock 3770k. Mac OS feels really smooth, my only issue I've had is with apples security updates breaking the nvidia web drivers.
 
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Update* I upgraded one of our 2009 Mac Pros with the new CPUs. It was already flashed to 5,1 and there wasn't any reason I could see as to not do that one. It made the most sense to upgrade the worst machine. I hoped that the CPUs I took out might be worth something but they're only worth about a tenner! Put in the HDDs and 1333 RAM from my usual workstation and I was up and running within an hour.

I left the lids on the CPUs, so it was a little tetchy tightening up the coolers. In fact the first time I put it together, the fan for CPU-A wasn't running which meant all the fans were running at 100%. I ended up just tightening it up a bit more and it must have seated the fan headers correctly as a result, all booted up and running fine. Cinebench ran at about 1600.
 
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