Hello, I'm contemplating buying a 7,1 due to the face that they are almost half the price of a mac studio. Currently I'm using a 5,1 with 48gb ram 3.46 duel cpu and a radeon rx6800. I use davince resolve a ton and as you can imagine things are slowing down or outright won't work. Is it worth going to a 7,1 with 96gb ram 16 core cpu mpx 580x, 2tb ssd and using my radeon rx 6800 for resolve in it? my rx6800 is flashed to use in the 5,1 does it need to be flashed back to stock to use in the 7,1?
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MP 7,1 buy a mac pro 7,1??
- Thread starter Gnx231
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Depends on you budget restraints, which you don't say. You're better off with Apple silicon, and there are Mac Minis that run Resolve just fine.
The main reason to get a 7,1 is peripheral connectivity. How do the finances work out thinking of it as a 3 year capital expenditure? Even if next version of macOS is the final one for Intel, that would give you two more years on a supported release.
Also, the pricing thing comes down to whether an AS machine with the amount of RAM you want is available for less than the 7,1, and that RAM quantity is fixed etc...
Thats what i was looking for. The 7,1 is $1700. if I went the AS route I would buy a studio and it is $5000. refurbished is $3800. So you think 7,1 will be fast enough for about 3 years?
You can get a Studio with 32 GB and 2TB for $2,600. That may very well be all you need, and you won't be buying into the past. And it's M2 Max with unified memory will certainly be faster than the 7,1, even with 96 GB. Its easy enough to check it out with Apple's 14-day returns.
I'm sure Apple's marketing department would love for him to believe that.
There are other gotchyas about AS - in my case I use SwitchResX to run two of my smaller displays at higher than their physical resolution, to match the physical scale of my main display. Can't do that with AS, so an AS upgrade would have included the cost of replacing monitors.
With regards to lasting 3 years. Say 2024's OS release is the final one for Intel, Apple keeps full support & security upgrades for the 3 most current releases, so that means the 2027 release will mark the end of security updates.
Will it be fast enough for 3 years? that depends on your particular use case. Put it this way - the slowest part of your workflow could be when you run out of ram, and have to page out to disk. A 7,1 can fit more RAM than many AS machines have storage.
Apple refurbished store has M1 Max, 2TB and 64 GB for 2600. If Budget is tight, look at that option. M1 Max would still be better and much faster than old Mac Pro. You will also get longer support.
I wouldn't say the 7,1 in any way would perform badly with Resolve. The 6800 is beefy and would likely give an M1 Ultra a bit of a challenge to keep up if you'd start pushing GPU-heavy effects such as denoising. Resolve is also excellent with core-scaling, so a 16-core Skylake-X CPU will perform very well.
HOWEVER, the looming dark cloud of MacOS support ending is such a big thing to ignore here. If you were about to buy a used PC-workstation with similar hardware it would have been much easier to say "go for it". It would probably have been cheaper and you would be able to upgrade to newer and better GPUs down the line as well. Here, you are essentially locked to the last supported GPU being the 6900 XT unless you bootcamp the machine and switch to Windows anyway.
Since this is a Mac thread about Macs I will shut up about that option. I'd recommend you check out refurbed Studios. Don't go for a Mini or similar if this is going to be your only Resolve-machine. Their GPUs are fine for basic use but will not outperform a 6800.
HOWEVER, the looming dark cloud of MacOS support ending is such a big thing to ignore here. If you were about to buy a used PC-workstation with similar hardware it would have been much easier to say "go for it". It would probably have been cheaper and you would be able to upgrade to newer and better GPUs down the line as well. Here, you are essentially locked to the last supported GPU being the 6900 XT unless you bootcamp the machine and switch to Windows anyway.
Since this is a Mac thread about Macs I will shut up about that option. I'd recommend you check out refurbed Studios. Don't go for a Mini or similar if this is going to be your only Resolve-machine. Their GPUs are fine for basic use but will not outperform a 6800.
Actually you need more since the GPU siphons off the unified RAM.
Either way my vote is against the 7,1; even though I own one and it is great, future is Apple Silicon. I would actually wait until after WWDC.
Not really, as some one who pushes the RAM to max, it avoids maintaining memory pages separately for CPU and GPU. And Ofcourse it depends on software, but most of the updated ones are more effecient in AS. I have a Linux workstation, it’s a mess between RAM and 25 GB VRAM for my Nvidia 4090. With a faster NAND SSD chips, I can easily load 175 GB memory using 64 GB RAM and 100+ GB swap on my M1 Max MBP. I am in no rush to upgrade, though I would love Apple to release a MBP with 256 GB RAM. Good luck using swap in external GPU.
No, should just work.
You also want fast GPUs. Unfortunately the best ones are W6800X Duo MPX modules with 64GB and 2x GPU onboard. They are available but expensive. If you watch online you might find open-box examples cheaper.
If you really want a Mac Pro however, they can run Windows (and very reliable as well in my experience). Then you have the possibility to use newer Nvidia GPUs.
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I use a 7,1 very similar to what you've suggested & have also been using this a lot over the last five years or so for DaVinci resolve Studio (Also have an old 5,1 very similar to yours as well). Attractive price there BTW! In any case, I suggest the primary spec you omit is for the GPU & as you know NLEs can be very GPU intensive & also unfortunately, Apple still don't support Nvidia.
You'll be needing at a pair of the fastest GPUs that the 7,1 can support & for best performance in Resolve, a matched pair of exactly the same spec. Don't know about any flashed RX6800 support or not. Problem is for Apple, the AMD GPUs which are supported are overpriced and underspec'd Do some research on the GPUs in particular. Given the cost and/or other limitations, it could be that the 7,1 might not be such a bargain after all & perhaps then best to compare to a big GPU core Mac Studio. Or, in this particualr case, you may well be better off with a good custom spec Win11 PC ...
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No, it will work plug-n-play.
My RX6800XT was also flashed and was running in my 5,1 before I upgraded to my 7,1
After I flashed my RX6600XT it still worked in the 7,1 as well - because that's what I used to do the flashing (in the Windows side). I had it connected via an egpu enclosure if that makes any difference (I didn't have the extra power cables back then - I do now).
The RTX 4090 only has 24GB of VRAM; not sure if that was a typo or not.
Having 100GB+ of swap probably isn't the best long term plan and will wear your SSD out faster. Real RAM is always going to be better than using swap. More efficient or not, the GPU on Apple Silicon still uses RAM. At least the data doesn't have to be moved around like in the traditional CPU RAM vs GPU VRAM model.
All my argument is that if you need xxx amount of RAM, you should then add whatever amount you expect to be using with the GPU in addition to that. Which kinda sucks since you are forced to buy Apple RAM at inflated prices.
On my 7,1 the difference in performance from 32GB of RAM to 240GB of RAM was night and day and my theory is that system RAM was getting hammered by the fact that I had more VRAM than system RAM. 🤷♂️
Yeah it was a typo. When you need to efficiently use the RAM, Apple silicon is way ahead. It is not a simple Math of Unified memory takes more memory because GPU uses the same RAM. I run Linux workstation with 4090, more often than not, because of GPU’s inability to access 128 GB RAM, there is additional processing that happens to prep the batches to be sent to GPU VRAM. Constant loading, offloading of this becomes a huge bottle neck and GPU performance takes a hit, because it is waiting on batches to be ready for processing. My batch size in Linux workstation is smaller, but MBP, though with slower GPU avoids constant transfer between CPU/RAM to GPU.
Last thing I care about is wearing my SSD few years earlier instead of 15 Years. If I have to get Nvidia with more than 50GB memory, I am looking at 10K for two RTX A6000 GPU, or 25K for a A100. Or 8-10 bucks an hr for A100 or H100 cluster, to say the least. My MBP cost me like 3700, cheaper than other options. I hated when Apple removed the upgradability for MacPro and Mac Mini, but I may consider if they can get the unified memory to 512Gb on Mac Pro. Compared to these costs, Apple RAM is a bargain, more like whole Mac line is a bargain If you need more than 24 GB of GPU memory.
I don’t have to worry about having System RAM, VRAM and so on with Unified memory. With the speeds of SSD going up, I would love to use more Swap if I need on occasion. My cloud costs have drastically gone down, as most of my dev/testing work is on Mac. And when I am ready, I run in cloud for minimum time needed, unlike before most of my tuning happened in cloud.
Fair assessment. My M3 Max is very good at everything I have thrown at it. So yes in the terms you describe then Apple silicon is a bargain compared to the high end nVidia stuff; but then again the high nVidia stuff also has ECC memory, based on your needs it doesn't sound like that matters. For some it might.
I am really hoping that the 2 steps backward to regards of the Mac Pro means that we get to leap frog either on the M4 release or M5. Only Apple knows their roadmap unfortunately.
ECC could be an issue. My Linux workstation has ECC RAM. Problem is it is no good when it is limited to 24 GB GPU RAM. Anything less than 24 GB, 4090 is faster, but that’s a limitation I learned to live with for now. At the end of the day, they are all tools. My mac, Linux workstation and cloud all have their role in the workflow.
I see this becoming a vague tangent about your own needs and workflow. OP stated they used DaVinci Resolve which is not notorious for hogging that much VRAM.
True. However Apple silicon would work much better because of the hardware encoders and decoders present.