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Dell vs Apple
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[Gabe Strong] “[David Mathis] “Windows belong on a house, not a computer! ;-)”
Unless you want run a machine with two CPUs as well as multiple GPUs.. 🙂
Shawn
You can do that with a 2009 Mac Pro”
What’s the latest CPU chipset supported by the 2009 Mac Pro? Also, would I be able to drop newer nVidia cards into that machine… say, like two GTX Titan Blacks?
Shawn
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I have the same 2009 Mac Pro and agonized and analyzed about doing what Marco did or getting a new Mac Pro. Because I was about to cut a RED raw feature I opted for the new Mac. While I like it and the Thunderbolt raids I have attached, it’s not everything I hoped for in the performance department. Sadly when I got back from location and tested out some of the footage on my old Mac it was fine and I realize I should have just done the upgrade.
Now with Resolve 12 on the horizon I’ve decided to sell the new Mac Pro once this show is fully wrapped and use the cash to upgrade my old Mac Pro with a GTX980, PCIe drive and more RAM AND also upgrade my PC with TitanX card and PCIe drive. And I should have some cash left for other little goodies like internal SSD’s etc.
It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
[Lance Bachelder] “Now with Resolve 12 on the horizon I’ve decided to sell the new Mac Pro once this show is fully wrapped and use the cash to upgrade my old Mac Pro with a GTX980, PCIe drive and more RAM AND also upgrade my PC with TitanX card and PCIe drive. And I should have some cash left for other little goodies like internal SSD’s etc.”
It’s worth looking at the configuration of systems used on “Gone Girl”. Last section here:
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/gone-girl/
Editorial machines were Mac towers with NVIDIA K5200 cards. SSD-based RAIDs for editing files. The PCs did the heavy lifting for AE VFX and R3D debayering. Not cheap, but a way to maximize this technology.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Lance, exactly for reasons like this I got a 2012 Mac Pro tower while they were still available. Anxious to see Resolve 12 as well. Will use the 2013 nMP for FCPX. The tower is also convenient for multiple boot drives, given Apples proclivity for changing OSX every year and orphaning or deprecating certain software I find important. I can boot everything from 10.6.8 on up including El Capitan if I see a need for it when it is released.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500, Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
[Shawn Miller] “What’s the latest CPU chipset supported by the 2009 Mac Pro? Also, would I be able to drop newer nVidia cards into that machine… say, like two GTX Titan Blacks?”
OWC’s CPU upgrade program has the 3.33GHz Quad-core Nehalem CPU as the fastest offered. If you have a 2010/2012 MP you can go up to the 3.46GHz 6-core Westmere chips.
You can drop in two Titan Blacks, but you’ll need to buy an external PSU to power them. I’m not sure how big the Titans are, but you might be down to a single PCI slot if the Titan in Slot 2 also blocks Slot 3. You’ll also have to flash the cards (or pay someone to do it if you don’t have the right gear/knowledge) if you want them to be fully functional. Non-flashed cards don’t show the Mac OS boot screen (the screen is black until the login window shows up) so if you need to do any diagnostic/trouble shooting (such as booting into Safe Mode, Recovery mode, etc.,) that happens before the OS launches you’ll need either a flashed GPU or an official made for Mac GPU.
With regards to hardware, Macs only appear to be DIY friendly because they are so DIY limited. Given the current crop of nearly factory sealed computers what can you really DIY? If you want to do some DIY stuff with a an old MP you can, but you run into many ‘gotchas’ because Apple isn’t big on supporting hardware that wasn’t originally available for the machine. Even to do something as simple as adding eSATA and/or USB 3 ports via a PCI card takes leg work because some cards work fine while others are flakey as heck. Recently the SuperDrive on my Mac Mini died and I thought, “no problem, I’ll just get the USB SuperDrive.” Nope. If the Mac shipped with a SuperDrive then it can’t use the USB SuperDrive. I’ve read you can modify a text file in OS X to disable this ‘feature’ but I really don’t think you should have to hack the OS just to use the external SuperDrive.
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[Jim Wiseman] “Lance, exactly for reasons like this I got a 2012 Mac Pro tower while they were still available. Anxious to see Resolve 12 as well.”
Here’s an idea of a real-world benchmark – rendering, not editing with RED. On one indie film project, I’m running a 2011 fast quad-core MP. Lots of RAM, a Sapphire 7950 card and a Crucial SSD for a boot drive. Media is coming from a MaxxDigital array connected via mini-SAS.
The film was shot on RED Ones, 16:9 4K. I edited in X with transcoded 1080p ProRes Proxy files (originally created in Redcine-X Pro). Towards the end, we dropped a few pick-up shots into the FCPX timeline directly from the camera raw RED 4K files. Although playback wasn’t super fluid, it was good enough in X for the purpose of a few pick-ups.
Final conform and grade was done on this same machine in Resolve 11 from the native RED files. 23.976 project rate. Rendering out a self-contained 1080p ProRes4444 master ran at about 10-12fps at full debayer quality. Not earth-shattering, but fast enough on this machine to be not much of a problem. And most of those hardware upgrades are pretty midrange and very cheap these days.
Potentially your main point of failure on an older machine will be the logic board and/or power supply.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Andrew Kimery] ” Even to do something as simple as adding eSATA and/or USB 3 ports via a PCI card takes leg work because some cards work fine while others are flakey as heck.”
I recommend this card:
https://www.caldigit.com/Fasta-6GU3pro/
I’ve put in several without issue. Simple and plug-and-play. A recent installation is running an OWC 4-drive (spinning disk) USB3.0 RAID array. It’s clocking around 250 read/write. Not blazing, but more than good enough for 1080p editing.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I recommend this card:
https://www.caldigit.com/Fasta-6GU3pro/“
That’s the one I went with and I’ve been happy with it. A friend of mine with an ’09 Mac Pro bought a 4 port USB 3 card (can’t remember which one, but brand name w/good reviews) and has had nothing but problems with it.
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[Andrew Kimery] “You can drop in two Titan Blacks, but you’ll need to buy an external PSU to power them. I’m not sure how big the Titans are, but you might be down to a single PCI slot if the Titan in Slot 2 also blocks Slot 3.”
That’s disappointing, the Titan cards take up two slots. I had been toying with the idea of purchasing a Mac Pro for my next major computer upgrade, but I never saw a hardware configuration that I liked. Now that I’m using a GPU renderer with Cinema 4D, Macs are officially out of the running, due to single CPU and limited options for multiple GPUs.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “That’s disappointing, the Titan cards take up two slots. I had been toying with the idea of purchasing a Mac Pro for my next major computer upgrade, but I never saw a hardware configuration that I liked. Now that I’m using a GPU renderer with Cinema 4D, Macs are officially out of the running, due to single CPU and limited options for multiple GPUs.”
You could do what some Resolve users do and use an external PCI box to get more slots.
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