New Mac Pro

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by LightWing

Balancing performance against cost/price. The 8TB is 10% the cost of what the other member proposed. If money is no object then have at it. :)

You are buying these high-end machines for performance. If you have spend ~$6k-$10k on a system (the $6k entry system likely makes little sense for many users, with a dinky CPU) why the hell would you be worried about a few hundred dollars more for two TB of super fast PCIe storage. Claiming that is an issues make no sense.

If you are so cost sensitive you will not be looking for a new Apple Mac Pro.

And if you are looking at IO performance not capacity... then the PCIe SSDs totally blows away other options. A large RAID box, with many HDD or several SATA SSDs are required to match the performance of a single little M.2 PCIe/NVMe card. Even for more cost sensitive users the days of HDD are numbered.

HDD still makes sense for *large* asset/NAS systems etc.. HDD sure still makes sense for back-up and especially archive.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by LightWing

Balancing performance against cost/price. The 8TB is 10% the cost of what the other member proposed. If money is no object then have at it. :)

False economy. What you're proposing is to go on a fool's errand. Ask yourself if that cost savings is really there especially when you factor in the time and frustration of having a monster machine that's choked off due to a slowwwwwwwwww drive. First thing I did when I got my 5,1 cheesegrater was to drop the 7200 rpm spinner system drive for an ssd mounted on a pcie card. Really makes for a great PT experience.


I'm not as rich as Croesus but I know what my time is worth and I know my aggravation limit with slow systems.


Besides do you really want the extra heat load that spinner will put into your system? I think not.

[LightWing]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

You are buying these high-end machines for performance. If you have spend ~$6k-$10k on a system (the $6k entry system likely makes little sense for many users, with a dinky CPU) why the hell would you be worried about a few hundred dollars more for two TB of super fast PCIe storage. Claiming that is an issues make no sense.

If you are so cost sensitive you will not be looking for a new Apple Mac Pro.

And if you are looking at IO performance not capacity... then the PCIe SSDs totally blows away other options. A large RAID box, with many HDD or several SATA SSDs are required to match the performance of a single little M.2 PCIe/NVMe card. Even for more cost sensitive users the days of HDD are numbered.

HDD still makes sense for *large* asset/NAS systems etc.. HDD sure still makes sense for back-up and especially archive.

So where do you propose the current average Mac Pro user to go? They lose OS support with the release of Catalina. Likely to NEW Mac Minis (no monitor), iMac (BASE are almost as fast as the base Mac Pro, cost $1.7K less AND you get a Monitor), iMac Pros (BASE are faster than the base Mac Pro, cost $1K less AND you get a Monitor) or Mac Pros (no monitor).

[LightWing]

Originally Posted by musicman691

False economy. What you're proposing is to go on a fool's errand. Ask yourself if that cost savings is really there especially when you factor in the time and frustration of having a monster machine that's choked off due to a slowwwwwwwwww drive. First thing I did when I got my 5,1 cheesegrater was to drop the 7200 rpm spinner system drive for an ssd mounted on a pcie card. Really makes for a great PT experience.


I'm not as rich as Croesus but I know what my time is worth and I know my aggravation limit with slow systems.


Besides do you really want the extra heat load that spinner will put into your system? I think not.

So I did as you sig mentioned and viewed your system profile. Looks like only your Boot/System/Apps drive is SSD at 1TB in a pci slot and 2@2TB + 2 @4TB drives in an external enclosure via FireWire and those are "slow spinners".

Seems you're a perfect candidate profile for the BASE new Mac Pro with the added cost of another 16GB RAM and also understand THEIR SSDs are PROPRIETARY. You could of course use your current Boot SSD "slot card" assuming Catalina or the manufacturer provides you with the appropriate drivers.

Finally, where do you, other Mac Pro 5.1 and some Mac Mini users go since Catalina is dropping support for those systems?

Likely to NEW Mac Minis (no monitor), iMac (BASE are almost as fast as the base Mac Pro, cost $1.7K less AND you get a Monitor), iMac Pros (BASE are faster than the base Mac Pro, cost $1K less AND you get a Monitor) or Mac Pros (no monitor).

So there you have the Apple line going forward with the release of Catalina...ONE thing is for sure, the new Mac Pro is built for those 1%ers who really need a boatload of tracks and/or high speed video production.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by LightWing

So I did as you sig mentioned and viewed your system profile. Looks like only your Boot/System/Apps drive is SSD at 1TB in a pci slot and 2@2TB + 2 @4TB drives in an external enclosure via FireWire and those are "slow spinners".

Seems you're a perfect candidate profile for the BASE new Mac Pro with the added cost of another 16GB RAM and also understand THEIR SSDs are PROPRIETARY. You could of course use your current Boot SSD "slot card" assuming Catalina or the manufacturer provides you with the appropriate drivers.

Finally, where do you, other Mac Pro 5.1 and some Mac Mini users go since Catalina is dropping support for those systems?

I only run spinners until I can afford ssd's big enough as I don't want to split sample libraries up. The two 4TB drives are internals and the two 2TB drives are my backups in an external enclosure. All 7200 rpm drives. You've looked at my profile and you'll see I don't have a machine with earthshaking power like the new Mac Pro.

Who says you need to run the latest OSX anyways? Remember that those who live on the bleeding edge are doomed to get cut by it. Change out your video card to a Metal compatible one and run Mojave.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by LightWing

So where do you propose the current average Mac Pro user to go? They lose OS support with the release of Catalina. Likely to NEW Mac Minis (no monitor), iMac (BASE are almost as fast as the base Mac Pro, cost $1.7K less AND you get a Monitor), iMac Pros (BASE are faster than the base Mac Pro, cost $1K less AND you get a Monitor) or Mac Pros (no monitor).

I don’t know and I think worrying about an “average user” makes no sense. There will be specific sets of users with specific needs. Some might end up with an iMac, Mac mini or MacBook Pro...

Many users will do nothing or do incremental hardware updates to their current cheesegraters. SSD, CPU and memory upgrades etc. they will have access to the latest Pro Tools releases for years... and then get to decide if they can stay on non-latest releases or not. Their call.

I don’t get why you are worried by any of this. The new Mac Pro was a dramatic reset from the stupid trash can. Apple also stretched into the high/end with the iMac Pro and so that likely helped Apple think they could push new-cheesegrater minimum system configuration price points into stupid territory. I would have fought to keep low-end configuration prices lower, but hey Tim does not return my calls. These systems are for folks with a problem and high-end budget. I would expect the Mac Pro low-end pricing to fall over time.

This is also a point of technology transition and industry CPU technology and supply problems. Not a time for non-sophisticated folks to spend lots of $$$ on stuff they do not have a very compelling need for. The new Mac Pro is stuck on PCIe 3 thanks to Intel lagging there. I would have preferred to see an AMD Thread ripper with a full complement of PCIe4 slots. But they don’t have a Thunderbolt 3 story today, should in future as a part of USB 4. And I’ll bet both vendors have More CPU security related changes and mitigation’s to deliver, with who knows what performance impacts. And Intel is hand waving about PCIe5, no doubt in large part because they fon’t Have PCIe4 today. And personally I’d like to see Apple repair the NVIDIA relationship and get back to using their GPUs....

So some significant changes coming to the personal computer industry in the next 1-2 years. Again all good reason not to jump into some new shiny toy unless you need to and understand what you are getting into.

OTOH for folks who need massively powerful expandable Mac systems... whoa this is a nice box.

[YYR123]

Like someone has so aptly said....

“If you care about the price the machine is probably not for you”

[JFreak]

High-end machines very rarely are a good match for average users... folks, you need to know the difference of WANTING something and NEEDING something

[ProtoolsLover]

Originally Posted by JFreak

know the difference of WANTING something and NEEDING something

Best advice for anyone that does what we do, apply it to EVERYTHING😀

[EmilILönneberga]

Originally Posted by LightWing

So I did as you sig mentioned and viewed your system profile. Looks like only your Boot/System/Apps drive is SSD at 1TB in a pci slot and 2@2TB + 2 @4TB drives in an external enclosure via FireWire and those are "slow spinners".

Seems you're a perfect candidate profile for the BASE new Mac Pro with the added cost of another 16GB RAM and also understand THEIR SSDs are PROPRIETARY. You could of course use your current Boot SSD "slot card" assuming Catalina or the manufacturer provides you with the appropriate drivers.

Finally, where do you, other Mac Pro 5.1 and some Mac Mini users go since Catalina is dropping support for those systems?

Likely to NEW Mac Minis (no monitor), iMac (BASE are almost as fast as the base Mac Pro, cost $1.7K less AND you get a Monitor), iMac Pros (BASE are faster than the base Mac Pro, cost $1K less AND you get a Monitor) or Mac Pros (no monitor).

So there you have the Apple line going forward with the release of Catalina...ONE thing is for sure, the new Mac Pro is built for those 1%ers who really need a boatload of tracks and/or high speed video production.

It is way to early to tell if the cMP 5,1 actually will be dropped. If I remember correctly it wasn’t supported in the first Mojave Beta either. Nevertheless with a few modifications the beta runs already natively on a cMP 5,1. No bigger patching needed. You only need a Metal compatible GPU to achieve graphic acceleration.