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New MacPro
OK, I've decided to update my aging MacPro to the new model in December. For you tech-savvy folks I have a question.
Take a look at the tech specs below. Do you think the higher end model is worth the additional $1000? How about some of the configurable options: 8-core? 12-core? Dual 6GB video cards? 32GB or 64GB RAM? I'm trying to get the best deal without going over $6000. Which do you think are the most important options to focus on?
It will be primarily used for video and audio editing, with some gaming.
Comments
I don't know what you need for video or audio editing. I would, however, very strongly advise that you not spend much on upgrades for gaming purposes. A small fraction of your budget would be enough to build a very nice gaming machine as a separate rig.
Also, it's not at all clear how good that system would be as a gaming rig. FirePro is for AMD's professional graphics cards, but AMD hasn't released any FirePro D series cards yet. If you buy a Mac Pro and try to install Windows for gaming, there may or may not be any Windows drivers for it at all. Even if there are, FirePro cards aren't optimized for gaming. Apple writes their own video drivers, so they aren't affected by AMD's distinction of separate drivers for Radeon and FirePro branded cards on WIndows and Linux.
From the specs, it looks like a FirePro D300 is basically a Radeon HD 7870/Radeon R9 270X ($200), while a FirePro D500 is basically a Radeon HD 7970/Radeon R9 280X ($300). I'm guessing that AMD may have offered Apple FirePro versions of those cards for about the same price as the Radeon-branded equivalent, but made special cards for Apple in particular, so that people won't be able to get FirePro cards for Windows on the cheap.
For comparison, look what a FirePro W9000 (current generation FirePro equivalent to a Radeon HD 7970/Radeon R9 280X) costs:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195116
There's no way that Apple is paying AMD anywhere near that.
Thanks for the info. I'm not worried about Windows since I don't even own a copy. Any gaming I do will be with native Mac clients (D3,WoW, LoL) and Steam for Mac (Borderlands 2, Killing Floor, Left4Dead 2, DOTA 2). I have three Cinema Display monitors connected to my machine right now (nothing like playing a game at 2560x1440), but I plan on upgrading to at least 2 4K displays sometime next year. My understanding is this new MacPro can run 4 of them simultaneously.
The machine is mostly for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro X.
Again, thanks for your input.
The added price is meant for professionals - and maybe with Final Cut and some other heavy duty software you are part of the intended audience. If 6 cores saves you 30-60 minutes a day, or if having more GPU power saves you 30-60 minutes a day, the extra cost can easily pay for itself (depending on how much you value your time).
For gaming, even the base model is a horrible buy - while it will perform fine, the price is just way out of line with the performance, and none of the options will appreciably make the gaming performance any better than the baseline model. These are built to do rendering and large file manipulation and other heavy duty workloads - and your going to pay a premium to do that well. Gaming fits in there, but only loosely.
Actually, after looking at Apple's web page, the FirePro D500 is almost certainly a Tahiti chip, but cut down further than a Radeon HD 7950. So it's somewhere between a Radeon HD 7870 XT and a Radeon HD 7950, with basically shaders and TMUs equivalent to the former but memory and ROPs equivalent to the latter. It will be a capable card, to be sure, but hardly high end--and not even fast enough that two of them in CrossFire makes much sense with Hawaii just around the corner.
Recent AMD GPU chips outside of the low end have the capability to run six monitors at a time. But 4K monitors take a ton of bandwidth, so Apple is "only" claiming that it can do three 4K monitors at a time.
With both video memory and system memory, it's a case of, you need however much you need, and if you add a lot more than you need, it doesn't really benefit you at all. For video memory, unless you're doing pretty intense GPU compute, more video memory really just lets you use higher resolution textures, and doesn't really get you anything else. Even with three 4K monitors, the video memory usage of the depth buffer and frame buffers is basically a rounding error as compared to 2 GB or 3 GB of video memory in total, at slightly under 100 MB per buffer.
Personally, I feel you may be downgrading if you get one of the new MacPro's. Its like they threw everything out the window for productivity in the name of sticking it in a little round case. A couple years ago you could get a dual CPU macPro which would probably be better for your purposes. In Video Editing the most important things are CPU and Memory. With the dual CPU you could load it with more memory, and get a lot more cores at faster speeds. The default memory setup is also bad on the first one just because they loaded 3 dims on what is probably quad channel memory.
The top end D700 is about equivalent to the FirePro W8000 since its teraflops that is important. In the D500 offered on these models its more around a W7000. They are also probably mobile chips considering how small the case is. Don't let the 384-bit bus with 6GB of memory fool you, they are not getting any bandwidth with that for some reason.
These things are just too awful to reasonably recommend getting either for anything you want to do on it. If you asked two years ago I might have been able to get over my prejudice for Macs and recommended on. These new models are going to far. They are not useful and you will be wasting a lot of money for nothing.
On top of this anything gaming related will be gimped on the Mac since they take eons to approve any OpenGL standard to be used on their devices.
My advice is going to be that unless you specifically need OS X for something then to not bother with it at all. There's no configurable model I would say is a decent deal at all.
You're paying through the nose well over and above what you need to be, getting yourself hardware locked (Hope you don't need more than 4 USB ports and love Thunderbolt btw) in the process.
The hardware is very nice, no doubt, but it lacks some basics when it comes to 'workstation' class systems. I would be considering some form of RAID for example if I was dropping that amount of money on a machine and the new Mac Pro is relegated to a 256GB PCIe Flash Drie and 1TB HDD at most so unless you already have a thunderbolt enabled external RAID that's worth consideration also. (keep in mind you'll still be missing out on having your actual computer protected with the RAID setup, no casually swapping out dying drives when it decides to go on you randomly)
Graphics wise it's some of the highest offerings Apple have ever had in their systems yet it is what it is, workstation graphics. Yeah it might support 4K monitors but have fun trying to actually play games at 4K with those cards. If you do intend on getting multiple monitors you've also just passed on the chance to be able to play games across all monitors at once with Eyefinity. (Unless of course you want to boot into Windows for your games)
It truly is an excellent example of good hardware design with zero thought for flexibility, pretty much true to Apple's style. Everything from the 4 USB ports, lack of PICe Slots, Optical Drive and the complete lack of any expandability at all really. You lose all that but what you do get ends being an extremely well designed box. One that you can't do anything with if you find a year or two down the line you want to change something. It's the gaming console of the workstation world. (Minus the good entry price)
If you honestly do need OS X and gaming isn't an issue then go for it. As for which deal is best? With the kind of money you're talking here I would just get whatever you can afford, there's not really any bargain to be had with one configuration over another. The only thing you need to figure out is if you favour CPU performance over GPU or not.