FCPX on 5K iMac

[Jeremy Garchow]

[John Rofrano] “Do you know what GPU the older Mac Pro’s are using?”

I had to replace them over the years, so I can’t remember off the top of my head. They were nothing extraneous, just stock or stock-ish.

Rather than spend any more money on them, we just retooled to new hardware. It has been worth it.

I think you cannprobably extend the life of an old MacPro, but with fcpx, I think it takes advantage of newer technologies. I’m not an expert in the technologies, I just know it is a much better experience to edit on newer hardware with X, from a practical, day to day, standpoint. The tubes are also much easier to travel with and allow a much more powerful on set experince than a laptop.

Now outside of fcpx, perhaps this isn’t true, and a GPU and SSD upgrade might be worth it.

[Steve Connor]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Now outside of fcpx, perhaps this isn’t true, and a GPU and SSD upgrade might be worth it.
“

Although FCP X can be a little “creaky” on my upgraded 2008 MP, Premiere Pro CC absolutely flies!

[John Rofrano]

[Ryan Holmes] “I agree with Jeremy here for sure. It’s only $600 more for the D700’s over the stock D500’s, so get the D700’s! That will be well worth the extra money, if you go that route.”

OK, so now I have to share with you some of my “perspective”. 😉 lol

I purchased my current 2008 Mac Pro 2.8Ghz 8-Core with 16GB Memory, Radeon HD 5870, 256GB SSD, 2TB RAID 0 for $740 on eBay!!! At the time, my NVIDIA Quadro 4000 in my PC Workstation had died and I was contemplating spending (wasting) $800 on another Q4000 when I realize that I could get an entire Mac Pro with an HD 5870 that was just as powerful as the Q4000 for less money than the Q4000 alone! That’s when I started thinking about the price advantage of buying the last generation’s top-of-the-line and I started thinking about getting the a 12-core 2010 Mac Pro as my next Mac.

Reality struck when I got my MacBook Pro Mid-2012 and it’s geekbench score is the same as my 8-core 2008 Mac Pro and in FCP X I can render almost as fast so a 2012 4-core is now as fast as a 2008 8-core. This is why I’m interested in this thread. The question is: can the latest 4-cores compete with the older 12-cores? and how do GPU’s change the game? That’s what makes it impossible to compare (the CPU/GPU factor). I know the 12-cores will win with highly paralleled tasks like rendering but as I said, I’m really concerned about smooth editing while using GPU accelerated plugging like Boris Continuum Complete which leads me to believe that a sufficiently powerful GPU on a 2010 Mac Pro might fit both needs.

When I came across this thread, it started me thinking about whether it is better to spend $2500 on a 12-Core 2010 Mac Pro or $2500 on an iMac 5K and I’m realizing from this thread that the base iMac 5K with it’s Core i5 isn’t going to cut it so we’re now talking $3200 for an iMac 5K (with Core i7, 16GB memory, Radeon R9 M295X upgrades) which is the same price as a 2013 Mac Pro 4-core 16GB, w/D300’s but if you look at the geekbench scores, the 4-core iMac is faster than the 4-core Mac Pro. But geekbench scores don’t take GPU performance into account. (I also realize that I’m not counting the fact that the iMac has a stunning 5K display that would cost $2400 all by itself but I’m not working with 4K so it’s not something I need at the moment).

So I agree with you and Jeremy that if I “go that route”, a 6-core 2013 Mac Pro with D700’s is $4600 and I appreciate the fact for $600 more than $4000 it’s worthwhile to get the better GPU’s but I’m not ready to drop $4600 (twice what I’m planning to spend) on a new Mac Pro unless it’s going to give me twice the performance of a 12-Core 2010 Mac Pro. Even if it did, I don’t have the $4K to spend anyways. 🙁

I’m not sure I’m any closer to making a decision other than indecision but this has been a good discussion.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Mitch Ives]

Edit on a loaded MacPro and you may change your mind…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[John Rofrano]

[Mitch Ives] “Edit on a loaded MacPro and you may change your mind…”

…would you care to elaborate? 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Oliver Peters]

Here’s a good score page. This is for CPU ratings, so GPU performance isn’t factored in. Notice the single and multicore 64-bit tests.

https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[John Rofrano]

Yea, those are the geekbench scores I was talking about. I use them all the time to determine the relative performance of the Mac’s I’m looking at on eBay. This is one thing I use to tell a fake. If someone says they have a 3.06Ghz Mac Pro that gets 24000 on geekbench I know it’s a 2009 because the 2012’s get 27000+. Sure enough when I ask they admit it’s a 2009 that’s had it’s firmware flashed and CPU upgraded. For some reason, just making the specs the same doesn’t make the computer as fast so other architectural differences between the 2009 and 2010/2012 are at play here (probably front side bus speed and memory speed).

What got me interested in the 2010 12-core is that the 2.93Ghz is third on the 64-bit Multi-Core list below the 2013 2.7Ghz 12-core and the 2012 3.06Ghz 12-core but it’s ABOVE all the other 2013 Mac Pro’s! So my thinking is I can get a 2010 12-core for $2400 that is still faster than the 2013 8-core which is $6000 almost 2.5x the price!

I realize that CPU power isn’t the only thing and the dual GPU’s in the 2013’s will help the real-time editing performance I’m looking for, but my 2008 Mac Pro already had an SSD drive and the upgraded HD 5870 GPU so I was really impressed with the performance I for got a $740 investment to begin with. I can still add a faster SSD and more powerful GPU but the 2008 doesn’t have hyperthreading so it’s 8 cores and 8 threads with slower 800Mz memory. The new quad-cores are 4 core and 8 threads with 1600Mz memory which is why they give similar performance. I though having 12 cores and 24 threads with 1333Mz memory would definitely put me over the top for rendering tasks and the 2.93Ghz would help with real-time along with a powerful GPU.

What’s also interesting to note is the power of the D-Series GPU’s in the new Mac Pros. My Radeon HD 5870 still has more stream processors and compute power than the D500. I understand that the Mac Pro has two D500’s and the D700’s are even better but it’s interesting to note that the D-Series, like all other “professional cards”, are weaker than their consumer counterparts. here are the comparative specs:

My Radeon HD 5870 has:
1600 stream processors
153.6GB/s memory bandwidth
2.27 teraflops performance

The D500 has:
1526 stream processors
240GB/s memory bandwidth
2.2 teraflops performance

Getting back to the topic of this thread, it would be interesting to see how the AMD Radeon R9 M295X in the iMac 5K stacks up against these GPUs.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Steve Connor]

[John Rofrano] “Getting back to the topic of this thread, it would be interesting to see how the AMD Radeon R9 M295X in the iMac 5K stacks up against these GPUs.
“

I’m hoping to get a second look at the retina IMac on Friday, I’ll take some 4K material with me to see how that goes.

[Jeremy Garchow]

The thing about geekbench scores is, how does that translate to editing in fcpx?

I know, “the numbers don’t lie” but sometimes, they don’t tell the entire truth.

I like looking a barefeats.com for different tests as a lot of them are related directly to professional video applications including FCPX.

https://www.barefeats.com

https://www.barefeats.com/imac5k4.html

https://www.barefeats.com/tube05.html

[Mitch Ives]

The 5K iMac will no doubt be a desirable thing, but we shouldn’t confuse it with a Mac Pro. I’ve worked with it at Apple… I like it, but it’s not like my “loaded 8” new MacPro.

Why… there are a lot of differences. The nMP has dual GPU’s and the D700’s are very quick. The iMac doesn’t have that. Bus speeds on the front side, etc. have differences. The nMP has three separate TB controllers, so I can keep the disk array on a separate one, other drives on one, other things on the third. Makes a big difference. These are just a few.

To make the new iMac really useful, you’ll need to max it out… at which point it isn’t cheap. The difference in price pretty much disappears, other than the fact that you save the cost of the monitor.

Should people always choose a nMP over the iMac. Of course not. But let’s recognize the differences.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill