New Mac pro 2013 and PTHD

[Dism]

Originally Posted by Ray JB

Anything is a rumor until released.

Uh... no.

When it comes to a company making a statement like that, they might as well be liable. It's why you never hear anything about the next iPhone until it comes out.

Avid has the same policy.

If Avid tomorrow came here and said, "Next month, we are releasing a new Thunderbolt device." You can bet your ass they will be releasing a Thunderbolt device next month.

[ilulilu888]

Rumor or not , the "new" 5.1 generation is outdated by so many scales
I agree with those who say that it is stupid to buy a new machine for so much money that dosent have a thunderbolt port or USB three ....I bought my Mac pro 4 years ago , and didnt plan to upgrade... But avid seems to be dropping HD accel users and ditch us in the middle of the road... So before that happens it might be a good idea to get this 5.1 macpro that might very well be the last tested and qualified machine for HD TDM.....
I really do not know what to do.... HDX Is way too expansive for me right now , HDN is expansive too and IMHO would not suffice for my needs... Espacilly my future needs , I love my hd rig and wish I can still use it for at least 3 more years , but it seems that my Mac pro is ageing.... Slowly but surly.... Wish I had enough $$$ for HDX but right now there aren't enough plugins for the aax.... So iguess that the new Mac pro is a good investment....? Or do I?

[Dism]

Originally Posted by ilulilu888

Rumor or not , the "new" 5.1 generation is outdated by so many scales
I agree with those who say that it is stupid to buy a new machine for so much money that dosent have a thunderbolt port or USB three ....I bought my Mac pro 4 years ago , and didnt plan to upgrade... But avid seems to be dropping HD accel users and ditch us in the middle of the road... So before that happens it might be a good idea to get this 5.1 macpro that might very well be the last tested and qualified machine for HD TDM.....
I really do not know what to do.... HDX Is way too expansive for me right now , HDN is expansive too and IMHO would not suffice for my needs... Espacilly my future needs , I love my hd rig and wish I can still use it for at least 3 more years , but it seems that my Mac pro is ageing.... Slowly but surly.... Wish I had enough $$$ for HDX but right now there aren't enough plugins for the aax.... So iguess that the new Mac pro is a good investment....? Or do I?

Hackintosh is the best way to go right now. If you buy a Mac Pro new right now, you will kick yourself next year when something 3 times more powerful comes out for the same price or less.

[ilulilu888]

No way hakintosh...... Too much of a macaddict....
There will always be something faster smother better and newer...
I am trying to be as realistic as possible:
I'm not going to spend 10000$ on HDX , or 12500$ with a new Mac pro(cause my 3.1 macpro isn't qualifyed......
I am not going to spend 5000$ on HDN or 7000$ with a new powerful iMac (cause my 3.1 is not powerful enough to hold an heavy native system...)
I do have an HD 3 accel system with tons of TDM plugins ....all of them are 100% legal .... I might as well stick to it and get the best machine possible for running this system hoping that this setup will last at least 3-4 years.... By then the HDX will be more reasonable and the 5.1 Mac might still be in perfect shape to work with it.... I know that my current Mac pro is rock solid , trustful , fast - but unfortunatly not powerful enough to handle some new VI's and native plugins....or at least allot of them...
I had some thoughts about magma chassis.... And getting some more hd accel process cards which are cheap now.... But that is very expansive...... And un reasonable..... Even more then just getting a new Mac pro...
B the way can someone explain what do I gain from adding more process cards? I do not expand voice count? Right? It just gives the system more juice for TDM handling ... Am I'm wrong?

[RCN]

The Mac Pro 6 Core is a bad ass machine,(3 grand)) along with HD or HDX it's super power... What else do u need? Thunderbolt, who cares!!! Great for laptop or Imac, not sure bout usb3, is that faster than FW800?

[Dism]

Originally Posted by RCN

The Mac Pro 6 Core is a bad ass machine,(3 grand)) along with HD or HDX it's super power... What else do u need? Thunderbolt, who cares!!! Great for laptop or Imac, not sure bout usb3, is that faster than FW800?

USB3 is faster than FW800 for sure.

Modern Mac Pros also do not have SATA3, which makes using SSDs in the SATA ports a waste of money. It also has painfully old GPUs.

It's a badass machine, but overpriced. My $1300 machine benchmarks the same (and it's only a quad) and runs OSX. It also has USB3, SATA3, PCIe3.0... none of which are on a "modern" Mac Pro. If you buy it new now, you're wasting your money. Mark my words.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by RCN

The Mac Pro 6 Core is a bad ass machine,(3 grand)) along with HD or HDX it's super power... What else do u need? Thunderbolt, who cares!!! Great for laptop or Imac, not sure bout usb3, is that faster than FW800?

Ah yes the Apple koolaid effect. what else do you need, for starters how about....

1. Displayport over Thunderbolt so you don't have to have different displays/monitors for you Mac Pros and MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs, etc. Or don't have to buy a display with a new Mac Pro now that you may to throw away next time you upgrade your Mac Pro.

2. SATA III/6 Gbit/s motherboard support especially for all the new SATA SSD drives, a frigging MacBook Air has SATA III. This is just a stupid bottleneck on SSD performance.

3. PCIe 3.0 for leading graphics/future card compatibility (including graphics and interesting developments in things like PCIe Flash storage, etc.).

4. Better standard power supply support, especially for mix of multiple cards that require auxiliary power like high end graphics and HDX cards.

5. Motherboard Thunderbolt support (especially to share peripherals with desktop Macs, I can buy a HD Native Thunderbolt adapter to use in the field but I cannot connect it to my MacBook Pro in the studio, what a stupid waste. I will soon be able to get a Thunderbolt UAD Apollo with reduced latency than Firewire 800 thanks to Thunderbolt but can't use it via Thunderbolt on a Mac Pro. Folks doing video have some great high performance RAID/striped disk and new gen video IO boxes they cannot get to at all without Thunderbolt. Just wait until somebody develops Thunderbolt host to host transfer, I'd love to do that for cloning/backups from laptops etc. to a large central computer.

6. USB3 - Significantly faster than FireWire 800 and will be ubiquitous and relatively low cost thanks to becoming standard on all PC motherboards. While rafts of low cost/high performance peripherals will be USB3 especially single drive external storage including new SSD storage devices. I want my FW800 ports as well for now but Firewire 800 as a viable technology/chipset ecosystem is amongst the walking dead and USB3 will sever off its head...

7. SATA fan-out, physical packaging and cooling that is better designed for building large Multi-drive 2.5" SSD based systems while also allowing legacy 3.5" rotating disk installs.

8. and for bonus points... PCIe slot count/packaging/motherboard switching that better accommodates potential use of several PCIe SSD storage cards along with other cards. You sort of want to hedge your bets here in the SATA vs. PCIe storage wars for high-end IO applications.

All these things should be shipping in Mac Pros today, they are all achievable, all that seems lacking is effort by Apple. I would need to be desperate to buy a current Mac Pro, if you can live on what you have hang in there....

Of course if your system is a maxed out HDX system and you are not really pushing host processing, especially with heavy VIs then you may not care. But folks looking for a big monster VI machine are likely being hindered by these systems today and will continue to miss out as incompatible peripheral and other technology appears that these systems cannot leverage.


Darryl

[RCN]

Ah yes, the never ending technology, and it gets the best of us... No arguments out of me but if you look at the OP's initial post it'll explain my post a bit better... "New Mac pro 2013 and PTHD"... The new 6 Core will get the job done, the latest and greatest won't make that much of a diff.. ( my opin)

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by Dism

Modern Mac Pros also do not have SATA3, which makes using SSDs in the SATA ports a waste of money.

I don't think this is entirely true. An SSD is still significantly faster than a mechanical hard disk even on SATA2 bus, especially bearing in mind the near zero access time of SSD. Admittedly, PT10's disk cacheing has rendered that advantage moot for audio recording.

However, I can get massively higher sampler polyphony counts from an SSD than a 10K RPM Western Digital drive on the same 6 core Mac Pro.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by RCN

Ah yes, the never ending technology, and it gets the best of us... No arguments out of me but if you look at the OP's initial post it'll explain my post a bit better... "New Mac pro 2013 and PTHD"... The new 6 Core will get the job done, the latest and greatest won't make that much of a diff.. ( my opin)

The new 6 core will get a job done but wether it will get the job done depends on the job, and it will be significantly less of a job than possible with a well built Hackintosh, PC or where the current Mac Pro should be. And Yes I read the OPs interest in native power and VIs and lack of interest in going HDX. When magically VIs run on HDX DSPs and don't put broad demand on CPU, memory and IO I'll stop caring about the host computer as much.

Again the real message is the Mac Pro is so far behind the curve at the moment if you can wait to see what the promised 2013 update looks like then do so.

Darryl