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Archive 2014 · Jack the Mac

  
 
OntheRez
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Jack the Mac


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



Jan 28, 2014 at 01:09 PM
Bieg
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Jack the Mac


2012 Mac Pro 12 Core 2.4 GHz, 64 Gigs of Ram. 2 Mercury Accelsior 960 Gig PCI Cards with Dual eSata ports on each. I use one as my boot drive and one is partitioned as a Photoshop scratch disk / working drive. 4 internal 3TB drives set up as 2 mirrored raids for photo storage and iPhoto / iTunes drives. Cal Digital PCI card that gives 2 USB 3 ports and 2 more eSata ports. An ATI Radeon 5870 GPU drives 2 Apple 27" displays. Multiple external Raid enclosures hooked to the eSata ports.

Great Photoshop set-up, I REALLY love the Mercury PCI SSDs.



Jan 28, 2014 at 05:50 PM
OntheRez
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Jack the Mac


Bieg wrote:
2012 Mac Pro 12 Core 2.4 GHz, 64 Gigs of Ram. 2 Mercury Accelsior 960 Gig PCI Cards with Dual eSata ports on each. I use one as my boot drive and one is partitioned as a Photoshop scratch disk / working drive. 4 internal 3TB drives set up as 2 mirrored raids for photo storage and iPhoto / iTunes drives. Cal Digital PCI card that gives 2 USB 3 ports and 2 more eSata ports. An ATI Radeon 5870 GPU drives 2 Apple 27" displays. Multiple external Raid enclosures hooked to the eSata ports.

Great Photoshop set-up, I REALLY
...Show more

Dual Big Accelsiors!? WOW! I want! Very nice system. I didn't mention my external backup system as I figured it would be variable by a person's needs. I'm using eSATA mirrored RAID for photos only and an eSATA 1TB as a Time capsule for all other data.

The Cal digital PCI Card sounds interesting. I need to look it up as I'm dying for USB ports. Do you find the 5870 to give good enough response when you render? I'm still looking for better video.

I wonder if on Adobe products anyway if the 12 core out performs my dual quad since both are running at the same speed?

Robert



Jan 29, 2014 at 09:24 AM
Bieg
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Jack the Mac


I don't do a lot of video but the GPU is fast with Photoshop. The 12 cores are used by some of the filters and plug-ins I use but not all. The USB3 card is good and also gives 2 more eSata ports.


Jan 29, 2014 at 10:16 AM
aubsxc
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Jack the Mac


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.)

PCIe based flash drives may be a little faster in some benchmarks, but offer no real benefit in daily usage for most users when compared to less expensive, conventional SATA 6.0 Gbps SSD drives. A current gen SSD hooked up to a SATA 6.0 Gbps port cannot (in most cases) max out the available bandwidth (about 600 MB/s), and latencies running on a SATA port vs. PCIe should not be significantly different either. If your older Mac does not have a SATA 6.0 Gbps port, you can add an inexpensive PCIe based SATA controller for not a lot of money (assuming MacOS has the drivers).

While a modern SSD drive will be bottlenecked by the bandwidth of the older SATA2 port (which is capped at 3.0 Gbps or about 300 MB/s), it will still not make a significant difference to the user experience (as opposed to running it on a SATA3 port at 6.0 Gbps). This is because the real benefit of using an SSD is that they offer very low latencies compared to mechanical drives (orders of magnitude difference). The overall bandwidth gains, while nice, are not that significant.



Jan 29, 2014 at 11:52 AM
Bieg
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Jack the Mac


The Mercury Accelsior PCI SSDs max out the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on my machine. There is nothing faster for these machines. BTW they only need a 4 lane PCI slot to do that.


Jan 29, 2014 at 12:18 PM
aubsxc
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Jack the Mac


Bieg wrote:
The Mercury Accelsior PCI SSDs max out the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on my machine. There is nothing faster for these machines. BTW they only need a 4 lane PCI slot to do that.


I don't dispute that at all. My point was that a modern SSD will provide 500 + MB/s speeds when hooked up to a SATA3 controller, and increasing this speed by 50 to 60% will provide no practical benefit to most users of PS/LR, or enhance the user experience in any way. There are better things to spend your money on. You can buy a TB SSD drive for $500 or less these days. A 960GB OWC PCIe drive costs more than twice as much, and caps out at speeds around 800 MB/s.



Jan 29, 2014 at 07:28 PM
Bieg
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Jack the Mac


Remember the Mercury Accelsior cards give you two eSata ports each. They are upgradable also.


Jan 29, 2014 at 07:42 PM
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Jack the Mac


I have systems with both MB Connected PCIe and SATA III SSDs and the PCIe type is noticeably faster with "practical benefits" across the board offering "enhanced the user experience" at every turn! The motherboard connected types are close to (or slightly over) double the speed and if your system can support the PCIe type you would be insane not to take advantage of them.




Jan 30, 2014 at 06:11 AM
OntheRez
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Jack the Mac


It might be useful to point out that the new Mac Pro is essentially using the SSD in a PCI-e channel for its internal drive. I've never looked for a Mac compatible SATA3 controller but I'd guess that with a 6G device it would have good performance. (Have no idea what the cost of such card would be.) It's an old saying but probably still true: "Bus speed always trumps cable speed." I've found the Accelsior to give a dramatic improvement across the board and bought one of the smaller ones because I keep all pix on an internal 6G SSD and all other data on a reasonably fast internal RAID 1.

Another observation, I was advised by OWC tech to plug the card into a 16x slot for maximum performance. It's not required but gives an extra edge.

This thread has veered off into a SSD discussion while I was hoping someone would chime in with thoughts on video upgrades. Smoke on the Water has a series of blog articles on NVIDA cards with Mac Pros and currently suggests that the GTX 600 series give excellent value. (Prices seem - depending on the model - to range between $200 and $275USD.) There is a suggestion that OS X 10.8.5 natively uses several of the "unofficial" NVIDA cards. (The blog author shared a technical Oscar for his contributions while working for Lightworks.)

I keep getting the suggestion that use of this type of card requires that an older stock card to be in the system, but can't get clear on that. I'd run out of slots if such was true. Anyone have any experience on this?

Robert



Jan 30, 2014 at 12:34 PM
Bieg
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Jack the Mac


Adobe recommends that you only use one GPU. If you do use two they should be the same cards.



Jan 30, 2014 at 01:15 PM
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Jack the Mac


No, you don't need the stock card. But if the card isn't an EFI card (read Apple distributed) then you can't see your boot screen. No big deal tho, you don't need to see it usually. There are utilities for booting into you PC partition if you have one which negate the requirement of the boot screen for that as well. The recommendation /should have been/ to keep your stock card handy. There may come a time when repairing or troubleshooting the system when you will need the boot-screen. When that happens just pop in the stock card and go.

Also I don't think I would recommend the 600 series when the 700 series is so much faster at CUDA and OpenCL. And the prices are not all that different.

A GTX 770 (2GB) starts on ebay for about $250 or so.

GTX 780 (3GB) starts at about $300 to $350.

Although I hate ATI cards myself the OpenCL and game frame rates are higher for the same dollar paid - in almost every case!

All that said my original GeForce 7300 GT (256MB) or my 8800 GT (512MB) edit images in PS at exactly the same speed as my GTX 570 or even a GTX 790. If there is a difference it's now humanly perceivable. Now games and CUDA or OpenCL apps behave differently between those cards.

This is also true of new MacPros as well. The GPU, for most photo editing and cataloging apps just doesn't matter.



Jan 30, 2014 at 01:18 PM
aubsxc
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Jack the Mac


OntheRez wrote:
It might be useful to point out that the new Mac Pro is essentially using the SSD in a PCI-e channel for its internal drive. I've never looked for a Mac compatible SATA3 controller but I'd guess that with a 6G device it would have good performance. (Have no idea what the cost of such card would be.) It's an old saying but probably still true: "Bus speed always trumps cable speed."


It depends on what you're doing. PS and LR will not be bottle-necked by a 500 MB/s + SATA SSD (or even a 300 MB/s SATA SSD), and adding 50% more bandwidth to the drive will make no difference for anything you do with these applications. If you use other software that relies heavily on nonvolatile storage I/O bandwidth in excess of the SATA3 bandwidth, a PCIe based flash drive MAY make a difference. But, for the price of 1TB of PCIe SSD storage, you can buy 2x 1TB SATA SSDs AND a 256MB SSD for your system partition AND still have money left over to take your wife out to a movie. That makes PCIe based flash a hard sell in my book. Of course, if you have money to throw away, price is not a factor, and you don't need to prioritize what you spend your money on. But considering the topic of the thread (upgrading your older MacPro for service in the present day), I think its a relevant point.


I've found the Accelsior to give a dramatic improvement across the board and bought one of the smaller ones because I keep all pix on an internal 6G SSD and all other data on a reasonably fast internal RAID 1.

Dramatic improvement over what? A modern day SATA3 SSD at 600 MB/s?

Another observation, I was advised by OWC tech to plug the card into a 16x slot for maximum performance. It's not required but gives an extra edge.

The theoretical peak speed of the OWC drive is 820 MB/s. The bandwidth of a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot is 800 MB/s (twice that for PCIe 3.0). An x4 slot will not bottleneck the OWC drive.

This thread has veered off into a SSD discussion while I was hoping someone would chime in with thoughts on video upgrades. Smoke on the Water has a series of blog articles on NVIDA cards with Mac Pros and currently suggests that the GTX 600 series give excellent value. (Prices seem - depending on the model - to range between $200 and $275USD.) There is a suggestion that OS X 10.8.5 natively uses several of the "unofficial" NVIDA cards. (The blog author shared a technical Oscar for his contributions while working for Lightworks.)

I keep getting the suggestion that use of this
...Show more

I don't know specifically about MacPros, but you do not need a big GPU to realize significant gains with functions that use OpenCL in PS/LR. A GTX 650 to 660 or a GTX 760 is the most card I would buy for a PS/LR workstation, and yiou could get by fine with a lesser card as well (like a GT 640). The cheapest GTX 780 costs about $500 and is way overkill unless you are a gamer. Save your money for something that will actually make a difference.





Jan 30, 2014 at 07:21 PM
OntheRez
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Jack the Mac


Bif and aubsxc,

Thanks for the feedback on cards. I had the suspicion that really high end video cards wouldn't do much for my work. I've never owned a game so there's nothing in game performance that interests me. It is interesting that the older 8800GT are perceptually similar to the newer cards. With regards to the EFI, I've encountered references to flashing the ROM so that Mac OS reads the card as "ok" and provides all the benefits of an "approved" card. I'll keep researching it and report back if/when I do something.

Robert



Jan 31, 2014 at 09:55 AM
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Jack the Mac


You can flash them but it's piracy. You should at least know that going in. And the guys doing it are often crooks, charging double or triple over the prices they paid for the card.


Jan 31, 2014 at 12:05 PM
Bieg
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · Jack the Mac


Just a word of advice, I would go for the best card that is fully supported by Apple so you don't have to worry every time they upgrade the OS. Peace of mind is worth more to me than any small gain in performance. Make it bulletproof before fast and fragile if your living counts on having a running machine.


Jan 31, 2014 at 12:57 PM
OntheRez
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · Jack the Mac


Bifurcator wrote:
You can flash them but it's piracy. You should at least know that going in. And the guys doing it are often crooks, charging double or triple over the prices they paid for the card.


Thanks Bif. In the back of my mind something was itching with that "What's wrong with this picture?" The bios would of course be an Apple copyright/patten.

Just a word of advice, I would go for the best card that is fully supported by Apple so you don't have to worry every time they upgrade the OS. Peace of mind is worth more to me than any small gain in performance. Make it bulletproof before fast and fragile if your living counts on having a running machine.


Bleg. Good advice. What's saving a few bucks against system stability? A real false economy there. I'll be getting something that has official support.

Thanks again,

Robert



Jan 31, 2014 at 04:20 PM
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · Jack the Mac


Actually, the way it's been going once a card can work (naturally) EFI or not, officially supported or not, then all successive versions of OS X support it too. So there's no need to worry about future versions of OS X blowing away your ability to use a particular card. This is not likely to change either.

So the only considerations you need weigh are if the card will work at all, if you need the boot screen or not, and if your PSU will support it power-wise. And that's really it. If you wanna dabble in ROM files you can get on one of the sites geared toward doing that and do it yourself with very little trouble.

And finally as GPU's progress it's fairly important not to choose an over-spec card. For example attempting to use a GPU which is made to use PCIe v2.0 16x slots in a machine with only PCIe v1.1 or a PCIe 3 card in a PCIe v2 motherboard will result in performance about the same as if you would have chosen a matched card in the first place. You might get support for the newer DX or OpenGL versions but the speed won't be there.

And to be completely honest… If you wanna get into messing about with high-performance GPUs and GPGPU systems then you should get yourself a windows machine.

MB $250
CPU $250
8GB $100
PSU $100
HDD $100

is all ya need and a whole new much more complete and robust world will open up to you for GPU fun. Also all of the compatibility issues and limitations will disappear immediately! And if you were changing over instead of adding on another system then with just a little hobby work you could keep the same MacPro case, PSU, HDD, and maybe the RAM too so all you may need in that case is the MB and CPU.





Feb 01, 2014 at 06:16 AM





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