HP Z640 with W7100 or K4200… or iMac?

[Aaron Star]

HP is boycotted as far as I am concerned. This after reading they cut 30,000 jobs in the US, but are ramping up H1B applicants and stating they cannot find tech skills in the US to do the jobs… Yeah right. More like they cannot find the skills at the low price they would like to pay in US.

You can build a similar Xeon System with off the shelf parts and not pay HP for their time and engineering. Use AMD for the GPU, and not the w7100 which is cheapo board gear towards people like HP building mass systems. Go with a W9100 if you really need a Pro level card, or a 390X/290x, or Fury-X for the best GFLOP performance in OpenCL. This would make a good Vegas Pro 13 machine.

The GFLOP performance on an AMD M395x Mobile/integrated chip is not the same as a 390x desktop card. The Desktop 390X is nearly 2x the GFLOP of the M395x. So the apple configuration looks great, but devil is in the marketing details. iMacs are also prone to heat issues that burn’em up faster, so that you have to buy another one that’s more updated. most people I know that have iMacs have them in the shop way more than any PC I have ever owned. Part of the design and marketing Apple has going.

Catalyst Edit Engine is different from the Vegas handles hardware, so may be not be limited to AMD for best performance. In my testing of Catalyst Edit, it seems to perform very well on the same AMD GPU hardware selected for Vegas.

Changing to FCP is a personal choice, and not a necessity as Vegas 13 is not going anywhere. Catalyst Edit appears to be slowly gaining the features that we expect from Vegas. I think another 6 months to a year and Edit will have pretty much 80% of anything we expect from Vegas.

[John Rofrano]

[Peter Ermens] “What would be your advise?”

I would suggest that you go to an Apple Store and see the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K-display for yourself. It’s a gorgeous computer and edits 4K with FCP X like butter and with the 5K display, your preview window is a full 4K! Very impressive. You really need to experience Apple’s 5K display to fully appreciate it.

I’m guessing that the price of the 12-Core HP Workstation and iMac aren’t even close with the HP costing a lot more. Since this is just for home video, the iMac seems like a better all-around value. You could also price out a new Mac Pro at the same price point as the HP. That would be a more even comparison.

It all boils down to whether you want a Mac or a PC. Since Sony Catalyst Edit runs on both it doesn’t really matter which you choose for the future. You could ways run Vegas Pro on the Mac anyway so get the computer that you really like (Mac or PC). A Mac will run Final Cut Pro X and Vegas Pro. A PC will only ever run Vegas Pro (unless you build an illegal hack-intiosh). So the Mac gives you more options.

BTW, Here is Vegas Pro running on my Mac desktop using VMware Fusion’s Unity mode: 😉

~jr

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

[Peter Ermens]

[John Rofrano] “I’m guessing that the price of the 12-Core HP Workstation and iMac aren’t even close with the HP costing a lot more”

The pices of the mentioned HP and the iMac are (at this moment) almost the same. Just under € 5000 (in the Netherlands, Europe).

And yes I love the iMac but it’s only expandable by (expensive) Apple parts.
With the HP I can use some “old” disks from my current system.

Vegas Pro 13(453); I7-950, GTX465 (1GB), Windows 10 (64), 24GB and a I7-4770, GTX660 (1,5GB), 16GB, Windows 10 (64), DS1812+ (+20TB)

[John Rofrano]

[Peter Ermens] “And yes I love the iMac but it’s only expandable by (expensive) Apple parts.”

Actually, it’s expandable by reasonably priced parts from OWC. I purchase a larger SSD drive for my son’s MacBook Air which supposedly is not “expandable” but it was quite easy to do and reasonably priced. The iMac is basically a big laptop. You can add memory and storage but not change the graphics card or display just like any laptop. That never stopped people from buying laptops.

[Peter Ermens] “With the HP I can use some “old” disks from my current system.”

So you are going to let a few € 50 hard drives influence a € 5000 buying decision? The iMac has USB 3 and Thunderbolt ports. Adding storage should not be a concern.

Hey, if you want a big case that can hold lots of exchangeable parts by all means get the HP. Like I said, it’s a personal choice that only you can make. This is why I picked up a 2010 Mac Pro instead of getting the iMac 5K. They were both the same price and I chose the Mac Pro because it was more expandable just like you are thinking so I really can’t argue about that. I did the same thing. 😉

~jr

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