2013 Franken Mac Pro Tube – FCPX editor upgrades 2013 Mac Pro

[Joe Marler]

[Dominic Deacon] “It honestly takes about half an hour to an hour to put a pc together. …What’s unproven though? The cpu will come from Intel….The GPU will come from nVidia…These are all battle tested parts….If any part of my pc fails it’s under warranty….I built my most recent pc 18 months ago. Over that period it hasn’t crashed once- and it’s massively overclocked- let alone any hardware issues. No reason for there to be either. They are all quality parts….”

In a previous job I built hundreds of custom PCs for corporate use. On an *individual* basis a certain configuration might seem to work. But stress testing dozens of them under wide conditions would often reveal intermittent systems integration issues involving firmware, software, FGPA/ASIC versions, etc. This in turn required engineering-level interaction with the suppliers.

Companies like Lenovo or Dell are not just slapping together parts. The so-called “standardization” of modern PC components does not magically avoid all integration problems. There are engineers at those companies using expensive test instruments like this logic analyzer to debug those: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-52kXRLG/0/X3/i-52kXRLG-X3.jpg

A single individual building his own PC does not have access to those resources. Yet standardization is good enough that you can often get away with building a PC and it usually works pretty well. I am typing this on a PC I built myself. However you can also get involved in bewildering, time-consuming debugging situations where the problem cause is unclear, esp. for intermittent and infrequent issues.

Re why doesn’t Apple just build an ATX-form machine, one reason is they are looking to the future. ATX is an old paradigm rooted in the 1990s, and if modern designers were approaching the task today without that historical baggage, they’d do something different. You can see some discussion of this by industry professionals on RealWorldTech.com: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=163257&curpostid=164090

Each Thunderbolt 3 bus supports bi-directional transfers at 40 gigabits/sec (80 gigbits/sec total), which is faster than 4-lane PCIe 3.0, and real-world tests have shown that transfer rates above that haven’t yielded much practical benefit (for GPUs): https://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-express-and-thunderbolt/ That said the PCIe interface (as opposed to a row of PCIe card slots) is definitely useful for high-speed SSD.

So while ATX and a row of PCIe card slots are comfortable and familiar, they are rooted in the past and if designers could start afresh today they would use different technologies. That is what Apple’s doing.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Joe Marler] “Re why doesn’t Apple just build an ATX-form machine,”

I think his point was about using standardized and interchangeable parts so that Apple users could have more options at competitive prices. Even if engineers started with a clean slate today it would still behoove them to create agreed upon standards otherwise the cost of computers would skyrocket. Imagine if literally every computer line made (from Dell to HP to Acer to Boxx) was a custom form factor with a custom motherboard, custom GPUs, custom PSU, etc., and these parts weren’t interchangeable across computer lines from the same company (let alone interchangeable across brands). It would be a nightmare.

Getting back to Apple for a second, the long of the short of it is that Jobs never wanted end users to have control. Woz is the one that wanted to keep Apple ‘open’ so people could mod/customize/tinker if they wanted too. The iPad and the iPhone (totally sealed, computing ‘appliances’) is always what Jobs ultimately dreamed of. The realities of the computing world kept Apple from reaching that goal up until basically a few years when Apple started soldering on components like RAM and ditched their last computer that had anything close to an open design (the old MP).

[Shawn Miller]

[Eric Santiago] “Sorry to hijack this thread, since we have a few seasoned DIY PC builders here, what’s your opinion on these Nvidia cards?

I am looking at an HP Z840 and they are offering these:

NVIDIA® Quadro® K4200 (4 GB)
NVIDIA® Quadro® K5200 (8 GB)
NVIDIA® Quadro® M4000 (8 GB)
NVIDIA® Quadro® M5000 (8 GB)
NVIDIA® Quadro® K6000 (12 GB)

I dont have an idea on pricing and I am sure the K6000 is above my price range.

Its mostly for Maya and Renderman.

Ive posted similiar questions on Max/Maya and no reply.

Thanks in advance :)”

You probably won’t see much of a difference in performance from the K5200 to the K6000… unless I’ve missed something and Renderman now supports GPU preview or rendering. Otherwise, the CUDA core count, amount of VRAM over 4GB, bus speed etc. won’t really matter that much.

Shawn

[Andy Patterson]

[Joe Marler] “Re why doesn’t Apple just build an ATX-form machine, one reason is they are looking to the future. ATX is an old paradigm rooted in the 1990s, and if modern designers were approaching the task today without that historical baggage, they’d do something different. You can see some discussion of this by industry professionals on RealWorldTech.com: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=163257&curpostid=164090“

ATX maybe old but it still works well. Keep in mind we went form ISA to PCI to AGP to PCIE. The ATX form factor did not change but the technology of computers has. I think it is possible that in the year 2025 the ATX computer may be a thing of the past.

[Joe Marler] “Each Thunderbolt 3 bus supports bi-directional transfers at 40 gigabits/sec (80 gigbits/sec total), which is faster than 4-lane PCIe 3.0, and real-world tests have shown that transfer rates above that haven’t yielded much practical benefit (for GPUs): https://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-expre... That said the PCIe interface (as opposed to a row of PCIe card slots) is definitely useful for high-speed SSD.”

I tend to agree. Thunderbolt will get even better. In another 2-3 years SSD will replace the mechanical HD. Things will change but the 2013 Mac Pro was not idea for a workstation at the time it was released. I am not saying it does not work but there should have been an option to get dual 8 core CPUs and one D-700 graphics card. PCIE slots and a few expansion bays would have been nice in 2013. In the year 2025 that may not be the case.