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Upgrade to 08 Mac Pro 3.1 for FCP X
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Mac Pro 2008-2012 still has a lot of uses in 2015. It serves as a great distribute rendering farm with Compressor 4.2, RAID drive array and still can do some decent editing in FCP 10.2 providing beefy video card, HDD and RAM are upgraded. These legacy MPros help to speed up the h.264 rendering by 30-40 min over a single Mac! So it’s not at all useless if you know how to leverage and use it to the max.
I don’t know about others but to me the iMac is a desktop version of my latest 2014 MBPro 15″ Retina. The big issue is overheating when doing intensive effects. I do have laptop cooler for the MBPro. That seems to remedy the heat, but not sure how one can cool the iMac… Perhaps a noisy small fan blowing it in the back?
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Well I don’t buy new often.
My main windows laptop is still my 200;3 Sony Vaio. Only use it for one purpose now, once every fee months, but otherwisesgill running fine.
When I bought the 3.1 I bought way overspec for what I needed. The decision to go Mac was a bit ‘odd’ The Girlfriend liked their shiny screens ! And then the Apple store screwed me over and I did not get the shiney Apple screen!
So anything I can do to keep it or a similar style model like a 5.1 running with the rest of the kit the same, the better.
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[Sam Lee] “The big issue is overheating when doing intensive effects. “
I definitely hear the fan crank up when I’m running 4k footage in AE and using plugins like Form to do some 3D work – but nothing that requires any additional interference from me to keep from overheating.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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Prrvent overheating with SMC Fan Control app.
I just crank the speeds up to 85% and it keeps temps down below 28-30 deg C
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Whatever the case, the dilemma are: Resell value for the legacy Mac Pros are very low. So low that is heartbreaking to just donate it. Recycling to the trash it it an emotional thing because it once costed about $6-9K. Now, within $500-800. Hard to let it go to the trash. It’s great for doing headless slave rendering with Compressor 4.2. It still can edit 1080p w/ out much issues, media management, hdd-hdd transfers..
I personally still use an old 17″ MBPro back in 2006! It still works but definitely has overheating problem. If will freeze if it gets too hot. So extra fans blowing it on the back is a must.
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ypu should open that 17 inch MBP up and give it a good cleaning /blowing inside. Maybe even see if you can detach the CPU heatsink, clean and put new thermal compound. I can’t ssy 100 % that it does dry out and loose thermal efficiency, but that is whst I believe can happen.
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[John Davidson] “I think it speaks to the value of mac machines that – in many cases – they can just run forever. 7 years in computing is a lifetime. Imagine buying something today and knowing you were going to be running it until at least 2022.”
This is what most people don’t realize. Think about it… I just purchased a 5 year old 2010 Mac Pro as my “new” computer. I would never dream of buying a 5 year old PC!
I’m a relatively new Mac user. I’ve ben using PC’s for over 30 years (since their inception). Before that I had an Apple ][ Plus and the original Macintosh 128K! (both of which I still own) lol. My first introduction to modern Mac hardware was back in 2011 when I had a two year old 2009 Lenovo Thinkpad that was lumbering along. I couldn’t wait to get an upgrade. Then someone at work left and they had a 2009 MacBook Pro and it was recommended to me as an upgrade so I took it. I even transferred my extra memory from my Lenovo to it because it has the same CPU (Core 2 Duo), same Memory, same everything. The two laptops had the *exact* same specs. Much to my surprise, I couldn’t believe how fast the 2009 MacBook Pro was. It was truly an upgrade to me. I run a lot of virtual machines on my laptop for my software development work and the Thinkpad with Windows 7 could run one, maybe two before it bogged down to a crawl and became unresponsive. I could get 4 VM’s running on Mac OS X Snow Leopard with good performance using the exact same specs hardware. It was then that I realized that OS X was just way more efficient at memory management and multitasking than Windows 7 was and from then on I was hooked on Mac. And it’s not just me, I have a friend at work that was offered a brand new PC laptop or take someone’s 4 year old MacBook Pro and he happily took the 4 year old MacBook Pro over the new PC and it performs just fine.
My last PC workstation that I built was a 2012 Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz 6-Core, 16GB memory, 256GB SSD, NVDIA Quadro 4000 and I sold it to buy a 2010 Mac Pro 2.93GHz 12-Core, 24GB memory, AMD Radeon HD 5870. So I would rather use an older Mac Pro than a new PC. That’s a testament to the longevity of Apple hardware as John said. I’m continually amazed at how many people are still using their 2008 Mac Pro’s.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Sam Lee] “Resell value for the legacy Mac Pros are very low. So low that is heartbreaking to just donate it. Recycling to the trash it it an emotional thing because it once costed about $6-9K. Now, within $500-800.”
That’s not what I’m seeing. I bought my 2008 Mac Pro 8-Core for $740 on eBay. The original price was $2799. That’s 26% of it’s original value after 6 years. My 2010 Mac Pro 12-Core was $2275 on eBay with an original price of $6474. That’s 35% of it’s original value after 4 years. So I’m not seeing $6000 Mac’s going for $500… more like $6000 Mac Pro’s are going to $2000. They are retaining their value. I believe the amortization schedule for depreciating computer equipment is 5 years so if a 2008 Mac Pro is till worth 26% of it’s value after 6 years you are doing OK.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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