Anyone using a Xeon (Nehalem Core i7, bla bla) Mac Pro, etc?

[Chazz]

About to put an in an order for one. I'm thinking the base 8 core unit , maybe with the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB (which adds US $200 over the stock NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB). I've been waiting for some online reviews but have not seen anything yet.

And when I say "put in an order" I mean with our IT department, not Apple itself. We'll see if they approve it. I was approved for the last generation 8 core machine but this one (which I've been holding out for) is a fair bit more expensive.

Any experiences? Any opinions?

[Karl Ottenstein]

There are some online reviews via MacRumors and elsewhere. Really impressive. My 1-year-old Mac Pro is doing just fine, but I'm envious of anyone who may get this new one with all of the component speed boosts.

I just hope that Apple is really ready to introduce this one. I got my early 2008 Mac Pro right away and had two months of h*ll with system crashes, reboot on wake, graphics glitches - none of which Apple acknowledged, but which all were finally resolved via various software and firmware patches after a couple of months.

I'm not sure how much value the new one will have over the old Mac Pro for ArchiCAD work - but it will offer a dramatic speed increase for Artlantis, C4D or other rendering work! Hope it gets approved for you!

Cheers,
Karl

[Chazz]

Of course, I did find some reviews after posting (though did not find any during my initial search). Things are changing quickly as the systems roll out fast and furious and I imagine many more benchmarks will start popping up.

Sounds like it could be better to get the faster 4 core rather than the slower 8 core. Karl, didn't you say that AC can utilize (at least for certain operations) a full 8 cores?

[Karl Ottenstein]

Chazz wrote:
Sounds like it could be better to get the faster 4 core rather than the slower 8 core. Karl, didn't you say that AC can utilize (at least for certain operations) a full 8 cores?

Yes, there are extremely brief moments when I can see AC 12 use 8 cores - like for 1 to 2 seconds tops when generating a hatched, shaded elevation. (So, with 4 cores, it would 'cost' you an extra half second to second for those elevations.) Most of the time, only 1 or 2 are being used - sometimes 3+. So, at least with 12 (no idea about the future), 2 to 4 cores are adequate for ArchiCAD.

For rendering, it is another matter, as I said. Both interaction and final render in Artlantis is stellar with 8 cores - and will be even more so on the new Mac Pro's because of faster memory and hyperthreading, giving a virtual 16 cores.

Interestingly, not much else on my Mac uses more than a few cores - even Final Cut Express, disappointingly, will not use all cores to improve rendering speed. (I gather that the Final Render of Final Cut Pro is supposed to really take advantage of the hardware.)

If AC is your main thing, then fewer faster cores may make sense, possibly along with a really fast boot drive that would also contain your local copies of libraries. (See Bare Feats reviews of the velociraptors, etc.) I was surprised, though, to read that it sounds like the Mac Pro uses a different motherboard for the 1-processor (4 core) vs 2-processor version, since I read somewhere that the 1-processor version doesn't have sockets for another processor or additional memory. So, the only way to upgrade in the future would be to buy an entirely new motherboard, it looks like...

??

Karl

[Anonymous]

From what I've sen so far the new machines don't represent enough of a bump to justify upgrading after only a year. I really don't spend much time waiting for my machine except when I am running multiple sessions of XP and Vista, and that is mostly doing file translations which I expect would not see much benefit from the new hardware.

It also appears that the base 8 core machine at 2.26 GHz is not any faster than my current one and the bump to the faster chips is way too expensive (at least for my budget).

I think on this one, if you already have last year's model, it's best to wait until a speed bump or two brings down the price of the faster configurations. Of course for those with older machines this is a great upgrade.

[Chazz]

Well this is depressing.... The faster chips are soooooo much more expensive (a US $2600 premium) and anything less does not appear to offer much of a performance benefit over previous generation hi-end hardware. In my case I'm looking to replace (or augment) a MacBook Pro so, I'll benefit no matter what.... But maybe I'll look to refurbished "old" hardware....

Thanks Karl and Matthew for your sage counsel.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Matthew wrote:
From what I've sen so far the new machines don't represent enough of a bump to justify upgrading after only a year.

I agree for ArchiCAD use, and for the small Artlantis renders that I do. Like you, Matthew, I'm completely happy with the responsiveness of my prev-gen Mac Pro.

For somebody who does large renders and lots of them, it looks like a significant improvement from some preliminary results posted on MacRumors (attached). It will be good to see what Bare Feats reports when they do their benchmarks.

If someone spent all day rendering or working in a program like Artlantis that can utilize all cores, the 40% speed increase would feel pretty real. That doesn't represent very many of us though.

The apparent 26% increase for single threaded performance (e.g., most of ArchiCAD) might feel pretty good too. Like you say, not enough to justify replacing my 1 year old Mac Pro, but for sure for someone with an older machine.

Cheers,
Karl

[Karl Ottenstein]

Chazz wrote:
Well this is depressing.... The faster chips are soooooo much more expensive (a US $2600 premium) and anything less does not appear to offer much of a performance benefit over previous generation...

Ouch. I did not check the pricing until you said that! That pretty much took care of my machine-envy issues. 😉

Thanks,
Karl

[Chazz]

[Chazz]

The most startling discovery I've found in researching this is that some people are saying that putting RAM in is 3 of the slots is faster than populating all 4. Pretty counterintuitive. This page has been changing a lot so I'll just quote some of the juice:

UPDATE ON MEMORY INSIGHTS
Though the "sweet spot" theory is not supported by the latest After Effects results, we can say with certainty two things:
1. After Effects and other high-end apps do benefit from more memory. Note the difference between going from 3G to 6G in the 4-core Mac Pro and from 6G to 12G in the 8-core Mac Pro.
2. After Effects and other high-end apps do benefit from more cores. Note that the 8-core 2.26GHz beats the higher clocked 4-core 2.93GHz test unit.

But we still contend that 6 sticks are better than 8 (in the case of the 8-core Nehalem). Putting memory in the first three slots of each memory bank produces faster memory transfer speeds than filling all four slots on each bank. We ran a memory stress test with DigLloydTools which does a memmove() to all of unused physical memory. We put 12 GB (6 x 2G) in first. Ran the test. Then installed 16GB (8 x 2G) and ran the test. Here's what we got for max combined read/write throughput: