Premiere Pro Editors – What road do we take? Buying a new Mac (Vader helmet) or a 2011-2013 MacPro?

[Tom Laughlin]

Sorry about that, I meant to post this link:

https://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=218&ad=34593129&cat=&lpid=&search=&ad_cid=1

He has other stuff for sale, and is constantly starting new Mac builds, and selling builds, so that previous link was a listing for another mac he had, sorry, this was the link I was referring to:

https://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=218&ad=34593129&cat=&lpid=&search=&ad_cid=1

Tom Laughlin
Producer/Editor
Digital Chop House
Salt Lake City, Utah
http://www.digitalchophouse.com

[Spencer Sy]

Like Greg’s advise, I would go for the classic Mac Pro tower for a lower cost and will still be good for the next 3+ years. I’ve had some experiences in using both the classic Mac Pro and the new Dark Vader black Mac Pro. There is not much speed difference with both machines in terms of heavy graphic design and After Effects editing. I don’t use Premiere Pro so I could not comment on that area.

Another consideration is some New cylinder Mac Pro users are having problems with rendering using Premiere Pro https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1422947?start=0&tstart=0 and some are having GPU crashes or freezes that they had to take the computer to Apple to replace the GPUs https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-pro-late-2013-gpu-driver-issues.1860297/

I upgraded my 2010 5,1 Mac Pro’s CPUs from 8 cores 2.4ghz to 2.93Ghz 12 cores. The prices of the Westmere Xeons making the upgrades cheaper. have gone down And added a blade PCIe Samsung SSD XP941. There is a newer Samsung SM951, this blade is similar to the one being used on the new Dark Vader Mac Pro and MacBook Pros. Here is a lab test of the Samsung SSD blade on the classic Mac pro https://barefeats.com/hard200.html I also added a USB 3.0 card and upgraded the Video Card to a flashed Nvidia 770GTX 4G vram.

When buying a used classic Mac Pro, make sure to verify with the seller if the cMac Pro is a 4,1 2009 model with the firmware upgraded to a 5,1 or a Genuine 5,1 cMac Pro from 2010 to 2012. The price of an upgraded 2009 should be cheaper. The link you gave on a sale ad at KSL.com is actually a 2009 4,1 Mac Pro with an upgraded firmware. You can tell by looking at photo no. 4 showing a screenshot of the hardware overview, the SMC version is 1.39f5. A genuine 5,1 2010-2012 cMac Pro will have a SMC version of 1.39f11. I am not saying don’t buy a 2009 upgraded cMac Pro. It’s best the seller discloses about the model in the sale ad. Note that 2009 cMac Pros uses Delidded CPUs without the heat spreader. The 5,1 2010-2012 Mac Pros uses lidded CPUs.

Here are some eBay ads offering for sale with CPUs upgraded cMac Pros. The first link discloses the machine to be a 2009 cMac Pro.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mac-Pro-5-1-8-Core-3-46-GHz-32GB-1333-Ram-250GB-SSD-4Port-USB3-Yosemite-150916-/271993101835?hash=item3f540d5e0b:g:uiUAAOSwFnFWAGbg
https://www.ebay.com/itm/APPLE-MAC-PRO-MID-2010-MINT-12-CORE-3-33Ghz-64GB-480GB-OWC-PCIe-HD5770-/151877946042?hash=item235ca18aba:g:s-sAAOSw9r1WEBuk

Some sellers may offer a 30 day warranty. Another way to find out is if the seller provides the serial number, you can check the model and year here https://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.php Hope you get to your upgrade path.

Graphic Designer Illustrator
https://www.spencersy.com/

[Chris Borjis]

[Tom Laughlin] “GRAPHICS CARDS: He also talked to me about the graphics card situation, and has bench-tested card after card, OS vs OS, and so many combinations of OS, cards, and Premiere Pro versions, that he knows it down to a science, and has used and tested the “ATI 4870″ against the ATI 5870, ATI 5770, Nvidia 8800GT and an Nvidia GTX285. The ATI 4870 has outperformed all of these other video cards in benchmark testing in a Mac Pro. Out of all the Higher End Video Cards he has used in a Mac Pro over the years the ATI 4870 seems to be optimized better and the performance he has seen shows it.”

All of those cards are quite old and will under perform compared to the newer gpus out there.

I would get the Nvidia GTX 680 one of the above posters mentioned earlier, I have one
of those as well as Quadro 4000 cards in two other machines…the GTX is faster
and the 4GB one in particular works better than them all at 4k editing resolutions.