FCS 3 and the new Mac Pro

[Chris Tompkins]

FCP will run great on all new macs. Buy the strongest, fastest one your budget allows. JMO

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta

[Walter Biscardi]

[stu aull] “My understanding is lack of mulithreading capability of the FCS makes buying a Bucket ‘O Ram and all 12 processors a bit of a waste?? (understanding that this may not be the case forever…).”

To some people they are sold on that argument. Here we can easily point to the machine that renders the fastest and has the most realtime features. That would be the one with the most / fastest processors and the most RAM. All other things being equal, the Octo 2.93 with 16GB RAM smokes all the other Mac Pros in the shop.

Bottom line, by the fastest machine you can afford. Put a minimum of 8GB RAM in there, though now it seems 16 is a good starting number.

All of the current iMacs and Mac Pros will all run FCP well.

[stu aull] “WHICH configuration of this new machine will best suite current FCS apps.”

The BEST one is always the fastest one. That hasn’t changed.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” featuring Sigourney Weaver coming soon.

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[John Fishback]

As Walter suggests, buy the beefiest machine you can. If you run 3rd party products like CS5 and certain encoding products, they will definitely take advantage of multi-threading and multiple cores. And one day, FCP will catch up.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Stu Aull]

Thanks all –
this mantra is as it always has been and I bow to your collective wisdom! Wasn’t sure if thoughts on this had changed since our G5 of…. *gasp*…. 6 yrs ago (!)

now where is my credit card….

🙂
Stu Aull
Alaska

[Erik Lindahl]

It’s hard at the moment to say which machine is the most bang for the buck but I’d imagine for a lot of task the single CPU 6-core option will be the best option. For apps that are limited to fewer cores it might very well be THE fastest option as it’s got the highest clock-speed of the lot. 

That said, it could be the dual-CPU machines win on some task due to I presume a dual-memory controller setup and thus higher memory through-put. Still, the 6-core single CPU has faster memory than the dual-CPU 4-core machine so hard to say before some tests are out. 

Aside from this I’d go for the 5870 GPU. Apps like Motion and Color SHOULD see a boost here. Future OpenCL ready apps will also notice this. General RAM-memory is not to be forgotten. I’d say a decent figure is 2GB per core in the system. 

4 core = 8-16 GB
6 core = 12-24 GB
8 core = 16-32 GB
12 core = 24-48 GB

These are just rough-takes, but an 8-core system running AfterEffects with 8GB of RAM makes RAM being a limiting factor. Depending on the given work for the machine a faster drive-solution is recommended, even if only using 2-3 internal drives raided (do keep them back-ups running :-)).