OntheRez Offline Upload & Sell: On
|
I'm hoping this thread will allow users of the Mac Pro to share what they're doing or are planning to do to enhance performance while they wait to see if the new Mac Pro becomes a viable choice.
A few caveats: (1) If you're a Windows user, we don't hold it against you. Arguing the difference between the OS' got old in early 1985. People using Mac Pros are unlikely to switch though I'm sure it happens. (2) I'm well aware of the "Hackintosh" and while I agree that superior components can be purchased for less than the cost of a Mac Pro, many people (including myself) don't wish to invest the time and energy in building such a box nor the increased OS maintenance required with system changes. (3) Most who use Mac Pros value their durability and reliability over absolute speed. I've owned 3 starting with a G5 and have never had any hardware problems with Apple's gear. I have had an occasional problem with something I added, but it always resolved to a third party add on. (4) I want the new Mac Pro to succeed wildly so that Apple realizes that it is profitable to continue to innovate in the niche field of power users who need powerful work stations.
I'm passing on the new Mac Pro at this time for two reasons: First and most important is that it is a version one. I stopped doing v. 1.0 years ago. Second, I counted the change in my pocket and - well, not this year
I'm currently running a mid 2010 dual quad 2.4GHz. (5,1) It has never whimpered or done anything but work. I did have an eSATA card failure once. Vendor promptly replaced it.) Among the first things I did was get it to 32GB RAM. I acknowledge that most individual programs don't need this much, but UNIX loves RAM and I generally have more than one thing going on at a time. RAM is not particularly expensive so I as a rule of thumb go to the max at first opportunity. (I have had excellent service over the years from both Crucial (Micron) and OWC.) I put the fastest video card available at the time in it, the ATI Radeon HD 5770 w/ 1GB VRAM.
My cameras and shooting requirements have changed tremendously in the last four years including becoming a part-time sports photographer/reporter for the local paper. Also, each newer edition of camera creates larger RAW files and my PS skills have improved as I'm doing increasingly complex things. The programs also get fatter. There is never a fast enough computer, but I began to note the lag acutely when facing deadlines with 2k photos to cull, pick, and process for sending in.
Options. It is possible to upgrade the processors in virtually all of the Intel based machines. OWC and others will do this but it is very spendy. It's also possible to buy used Mac Pro's off eBay and move your drives and such to them. eBay is always a crap shoot so it's not worth it to me. A quick check on buying new and faster Intel Xeon E5 processors suggests they start around $300 @ and go up fast. My conclusion. It's not cost effective to upgrade processors unless you wish to do a lot or work. In that case it might be smarter to try a Hackintosh. This approach has a fairly good support community, but you are on your own out there. You need to be sure you are comfortable with that.
Passing on processors I started looking for disk performance as it is the next major thing. I finally decided to buy an OWC "Accelsior PCI-e SSD" as the boot and application drive. Cost is directly proportional to size, but they begin at $300. I can say unequivocally that this is the single best "bang for the buck" current Mac Pro owners can do. It does nothing to actually increase processing power, but everything else is dramatically quicker. It will come as a surprise how much disk activity Adobe products do even when there is plenty of RAM. (Note: There is some uncertainty/disagreement over what if any effect there will be on performance of a program like Lightroom on an SSD. 15bit's excellent study suggested there was none though he acknowledged the finding to be controversial. The PCI-e based SSD is quite different than a standard SSD replacing a spinning platter and if it is placed in a "16x" slot on the Mac Pro motherboard it has - at least in my tests - demonstrated significant improvement, not in actual processing times but in everything else related to file handling.)
Emboldened by this success, I considered going to an SSD for photo storage. I long ago dedicated drives solely to the pix collection and its backup. I knew this wouldn't produce dramatic improvement, but suspected it would help. Deciding to "future proof" the purchase I went with a so called "6G" drive whose speed the current Mac Pro can't fully utilize as it's disk I/O is limited to "3G". The slower SSDs are cheaper, but I expect at some point to move this drive to a Thunderbolt enclosure so didn't want to limit performance by older drive speeds. I'd say this choice failed to satisfy a current cost/benefit ratio (though there was perceptible improvement), but rationalize it by noting that the device will likely migrate if/when I get a new Mac Pro.
Finally I was faced with graphics performance. It's obvious that my performance is limited by the older card particularly as I watch PS redraw the screen line by line. The only viable alternative I could find was ATI "Sapphire HD 7950" but this in the Mac version approaches $500. I couldn't see the pay back in it so haven't changed. I'm still trying to find out if it is possible to use the non-Apple blessed version of this card in a Mac Pro, but haven't gotten a definitive answer. If someone out there has information on video options for Mac Pros I'd love to hear about them.
So at a cost of about $900, I have a machine that will keep me in business for another 12-24 months. By that time there will be TB options at reasonable prices and the price of SSDs will continue to drop. (Both are already occurring.) It's even possible that some software vendors will start to take advantage of the new Mac Pro's hardware. Pixelmator (which I grow increasingly interested in) just released an update that specifically uses both of the new Mac Pros GPUs.
Anyway, over-long but hopefully helpful. What have the rest of you done?
Robert
|