macbook pro i7 studio peformance?

[pie55]

hi
I"m thinking of upgrading my pro tools system to Studio.
I currently have an hd 3 accel system with PT 8.1.1.on a mac pro 8 core with 8 gigs of ram. its fantastic for recording, but it's old and many plugins don't support it any more.


I bought a Lynx aes/ebu pcie card in a thunderbolt chassis to pair with my Aurora silver converter using with a Macbook Pro 2.3 ghz i7 quad prosessor. I plane to use this rig for mixing and the tdm system for recording.


My question is will Protools studio with the macbook pro i7 have similar plugin (better or worse) and track counts than my TDM system?


Or should I wait for the m4 chips to be available in mac minis? I stumbled across the Macbook Pro. really want to do research before I buy Protools Studio.


tks

[Darryl Ramm]

I cannot follow exactly what you are planning to do. Upgrade Pro Tools to Studio on the Mac Pro or the MacBook Pro or both?

Are you expecting to be able to round-trip sessions back onto the TDM system? For example to do retakes?

What exact Pro Tools are you running on the MacBook Pro now?

What are the exact Mac model numbers/date names/EMC codes and specs. The first issue may be if the systems are compatible with a good macOS and Pro Tools studio combinations, have enough memory, etc.

HD3 is just not powerful compared to most modern processors including even the i7, especially when mixing. But ultimately you are going to need to test this yourself. You can do that with Pro Tools Ultimate for a free one month trial (it is all the same software with well documented marketing limit differences). Or if you want you can rent studio for a month to test.

You are going to have to look carefully at all your plugins, you may need to purchase upgrades or repurchase some plugins.

[pie55]

thanks for the reply
my goal is to keep recording with the TDM system and mix with the macbook pro using Studio.


no round trips between systems. just move the session to Protools studio for mixdown.
I forgot to mention, I only have one PCIe aes card from Lynx so I only have 16 i/o for the upgrade to the macbook pro and protools studio.
but my tdm system has 32 i/o and it's really stable.


at some point i want to upgrade to 32 i/o with Protools studio, but I feel this is a good 1st step.


right now i don't have any protools on the mac bookpro. I have a os hack enabling the right os for the new Protools.




thanks for recommending free trial of ultimate. didn't know there was such a thing.


tks

[Darryl Ramm]

OK with no useful information about the MBP, you need to make sure it's compatible and suitably sized to run modern Pro Tools, starting with memory. I would not even start trying to run with less than 16GB.

[pie55]

macbook pro specs....


2.3 ghz quad core i7,
16 gigs ram 1600MHZ DDR3
os 14.5

graphics intel iris pro 1536mb

[pie55]

my main question is, will using the macbook pro i7 have the same ( or more) processing power as my Mac Pro 8core hd3 accel system.


currently by the time I'm finished a dense mix I've used up all my TDM power and a lot of my CPU power.


I know a lot of my plugins will need to be updated...

[loopzilla2]

It'll be more - WAY - WAY more.

I had HD6/Mac 5,1 before I upgraded. Loved that system. Never ran out of DSP. HD3 was crippling for real mixes.

Now is better. I have a mid-2015 i7 MacBook Pro for remote work. I want to upgrade to a new laptop, but this still runs every session my Mac Studio/HDX rig can throw at it (with 1024 buffer). We've come a long way in 16 years. :) Be happy. You'll be absolutely amazed. You won't miss the HD3 rig. Laptop is more powerful and nearly all modern AAX plugins sound better than HD-era TDM offerings. Enjoy!

[Darryl Ramm]

Nobody can give you a hard and fast promise of power between these two systems, starting with we have no idea of the workload on the systems and for example how much native plugin workload you have on the Mac Pro/TDM system. As I said TDM systems are not powerful. But OTOH you only have a quad core MacBook Pro. It's not a theoretical question about what might work, you need to get focused on showing this will work for you, with the particular plugins you want to use in mixes.


I would have preferred to see that MBP have a NVIDIA GPU. It's still not exactly clear what MBP you have because you have not given a model number, date code name or EMC number. The stuff reported in System Report, e.g. for my old Intel MBP:

Date code name: MacBook Pro 15-Inch 2019
Model ID: MacBookPro15,3

If you have more questions please give that information.

The challenges here are not necessarily going to be the CPU is not as powerful as needed but maybe more all the things should do to get a more modern Mac set up as best as possible, properly optimized, all the plugins you need upgraded/installed etc.

Starting with if this Mac was used, then wipe the drive and do a new macOS install (even if the reseller claimed they did). Make sure you don't set up iCloud doc/desktop sharing. Hopefully you can leverage the fast modern SSD (including because you don't have huge amount of memory to run a large disk cache with), and hopefully the MBP internal PCIe/NVMe SSD is big enough for you to run macOS, sessions and samples on. Follow the systems optimization guide (but I'd leave Spotlight indexing on for now unless you have external HDD or very slow old external SSD).

[pie55]

macbook pro 15" late 2013
macbook pro 11,3
os 14.5


I used a hack to install this new os


loopzilla2, you mentioned the HDX card. I will not have one of those. With out one, will my system still hold up do you think?



I'd like to record at 88.2 24bit. AS of now my plugins include a bunch of waves,psp, urs, and I"m thinking about getting into uad plugins both native and uad2.
looking into getting ultimate trial...

[pie55]

so I got the ultimate trial working. wow! so much more powerful than my mac pro!

next get my plugins working