Buying a cMP and my head is starting to hurt please help!

[slrm94]

Hi Everyone,

First Off sorry for all the writing. Would you have a look over the "new" MacPro im specing out and play spot the stupid decision

OLD MAC+BUDGET:
I have been looking to upgrade the my faithful MP for a while .......
Mac Pro (Early 2008), 2 x 3 GHz Quad-Core, 24 GB 800MHz DDR2, ATI Radeon HD 5770, 4TB (2xSamsung Spinpoint F1's + 2xSamsung Spinpoint F3's). It's main jobs are Logic Pro, Adobe AE+Photoshop, Media centre for the house.

I am throwing everything I have at this which with bank loans will be about £4000ish (which after looking at prices means the New Cylinder is out the window )

NEW MAC:
I started looking for a good source for 2012 MacPros and found CreatePro in the UK. I will buy most bits separately apart from the GPU's which they charge £50 to fit (is that worth it/am I right in thinking with the GT120 included the 980ti might not even be flashed so It's simply a case of plugging them in?)

Processor: 3.46GHz 12 Core Xeon X5690 Mac Pro 5,1 (2012) £2,195.00
GPU / PCI-e slot 1: Nvidia GTX 980ti 6GB with GT120 £795.00
Memory: 48GB (6x8GB samsung DDR3 1333mHz ECC Ram) £120.00
Total: £3,110.00

The RAM seems suspiciously cheep, most sites seem to range from £320 - 380 (Crucial) so not sure if to buy my own, what do you think?

My headache began when specking out the parts...........
NewMac
Processor: 3.46GHz 12 Core Xeon X5690 Mac Pro 5,1 (2012) £2,195.00
GPU / PCI-e slot 1: Nvidia GTX 980ti 6GB with GT120 £795.00
Memory: 48GB (6x8GB) £120.00
STORAGE PCI: Samsung 960 Pro 1TB £512.79 - Audio Drive+Scratch Disk
STORAGE PCI: Angelbird Wings PX1 with Samsung SM951 512GB £487.00 - Boot Drive
STORAGE SATA: Western Digital Red Pro 4TB £199.00 - Archive
STORAGE SATA: Western Digital Red Pro 4TB £199.00 - Archive
STORAGE SATA: Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB £86.99 - Download Drive
OldMac
STORAGE SATA: Western Digital Red Pro 4TB £199.00 - Archive

TOTAL = £4,594.78

My dilemma after choosing the above kit was; if the old MP becomes a Media Centre then I don't know how to best transfer data between them? I thought I could directly connect using an Ethernet cable(Will drill a hole in the wall).
Obviously this limits transfers with 1Gig NIC's to 125MBps, so I have been considering fitting 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards but this seems like overkill as the WDRedPro max out at 218MBps and the cards are £230.47 each?

I could drop a 850 EVO in the old mac with the NICs but this would bring the total to over £5000 .... Can anyone think of a better method?

 

[CreatePro]

Hi Sir94, The Samsung 960 Pro is NVMe based, so won't work natively in the Mac Pro unfortunately.

The AHCI version of the SM951 is recommended, but difficult to get hold of at the minute.

 

[lowendlinux]

I would think very long and hard about spending 4500 of mine or someone else's money on a 4 year old computer.

 

[pastrychef]

That price is ridiculously high. You can probably get it at less than half that price.

 

[lowendlinux]

That price is ridiculously high. You can probably get it at less than half that price.

Prices here are higher than in the states though.

 

[carpsafari]

Prices here are higher than in the states though.

Dream on!

 

[lowendlinux]

Dream on!

About what? Hot women, sexy cars?

 

[mcnallym]

Would suggest that look elsewhere. MacVidCards had issues with them taking his work for there GPU's although the fact that they are shipping a Gt120 to give you a boot screen as well indicates possibly that they stopped doing that.

Can buy a 980GTX Ti version with proper MVC flashed EFI from macstoreuk.com for £660 including VAT here in the UK. They are proper official distributor/reseller for MVC.

Whilst the 960Pro won't work natively you can download an NVME driver to work with NVME, so it does work and is visible then however cannot use as a Boot Drive ( hence why the 951 AHCI is there as Boot Drive )

Just buy Lycom DT120's for M2 SSD into the PCI-E slots, however will find 951 AHCI hard to find as no longer made.

However you may find that a cheaper Sata SSD on a PCI-E card works as well ( outside of Benchmarks ) Just fire up, open the apps you want and leave them running.

Store your Data etc on the M2 NVME as will be working with Data more often then opening Apps this way.

 

[nigelbb]

I would think very long and hard about spending 4500 of mine or someone else's money on a 4 year old computer.

Make that a 6 year old computer. Here from the CreatePro website
We build all of our Create Pro Mac Pro 5,1 systems from refurbished A-Grade 2010 systems.
https://create.pro

Personally I think it would be crazy to take out a loan to spend £4500 ($5500) on an old cMP. You can buy a used nMP still under AppleCare warranty for half that.

The OP's current system could be upgraded with an SSD & GTX680 for about £250 which would be a far more cost efficient way of spending money with no bank loans involved & would deliver a considerable performance improvement.

 

[Silencio]

Sadly one reaches the point of diminishing returns upgrading a Mac Pro 3,1 pretty quickly these days. Memory is the real sticking point for me — harder to find and more expensive than DDR3, and the Mac Pro 3,1's max out at 32GB, IIRC.

I don't think many, if any of the target applications listed above take great advantage of multiple processors, so a single processor 6x3.46GHz Mac Pro 5,1 would be cheaper to get and still be a dramatic upgrade over that 3,1. Again, maximum RAM is a limiting factor at 48GB for a single processor Mac Pro 5,1. (There is a thread elsewhere about installing 4x16GB DIMMs for 64GB total; I haven't been able to make it work just yet.)

10Gb ethernet cards with Mac drivers are still very expensive. I haven't priced low-end 10Gb switches, but they're also not cheap. If you're doing a one-time bulk transfer of data from one machine to the next, just install the source and target drive in the same machine and copy directly. The drive sleds for the Mac Pro 3,1 and 5,1 are slightly different, so it's not exactly swap and go, but close enough.

 

[pastrychef]

10Gb ethernet cards with Mac drivers are still very expensive.

If you don't mind used, 10GbE cards can be found on Ebay for cheap. I outfitted my old 5,1 with a 10GbE card for $55 and then later did the same for two hackintoshes at $32 each.

 

[G4DPII]

The RAM is cheap as it won't work in an 08 model.

 

[Ph.D.]

I also am of the opinion that the cMP (no matter the model) is now too old and obsolete as a platform to drop that kind of money on. It's sad, I know, but just don't do it.

 

[ActionableMango]

Obviously this limits transfers with 1Gig NIC's to 125MBps, so I have been considering fitting 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards but this seems like overkill as the WDRedPro max out at 218MBps and the cards are £230.47 each?

You could use both Ethernet ports together by enabling NIC teaming on both Mac Pros to double your bandwidth. Your switch will have to support NIC teaming too, or the two Macs will have to be directly connected to each other.

 

[nigelbb]

Sadly one reaches the point of diminishing returns upgrading a Mac Pro 3,1 pretty quickly these days. Memory is the real sticking point for me — harder to find and more expensive than DDR3, and the Mac Pro 3,1's max out at 32GB, IIRC.

RAM is cheap now for 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 systems. You can use 667MHz FB-DIMMs pulled from Xeon servers & there is only a slight loss in performance benchmarked by Barefeats as -4% but not noticeable in real life applications. You don't need the massive Apple heat sinks either. You can also buy 8GB FB-DIMMs for a maximum of 64GB but for some obscure reason maxing out the RAM decreases performance of PCIe SSD cards by 50% but this performance hit doesn't occur with 56GB. I have 56GB in my 3,1.
[doublepost=1482441936][/doublepost]

My dilemma after choosing the above kit was; if the old MP becomes a Media Centre then I don't know how to best transfer data between them? I thought I could directly connect using an Ethernet cable(Will drill a hole in the wall).
Obviously this limits transfers with 1Gig NIC's to 125MBps, so I have been considering fitting 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards but this seems like overkill as the WDRedPro max out at 218MBps and the cards are £230.47 each?

I could drop a 850 EVO in the old mac with the NICs but this would bring the total to over £5000 .... Can anyone think of a better method?

Why are you so concerned about data transfer performance between two Mac Pros? Most NAS boxes only have Gigabit Ethernet & getting >100MBps is around the speed that data is read from a hard disk. What data will you be transferring? If the MP is a Media Centre then you can easily stream several 1080p HD videos simultaneously over Gigabit Ethernet.

 

[slrm94]

Hi Sir94, The Samsung 960 Pro is NVMe based, so won't work natively in the Mac Pro unfortunately.

The AHCI version of the SM951 is recommended, but difficult to get hold of at the minute.

Do you mean as a boot drive or simply as storage?

 

[Wiltonian]

I can't see that you need such a high-spec Mac for your needs. Much more significantly, the base price for a 2010 cMP, even a 12-core one- is plain barmy, IMHO. Not sure why you need such hi-spec drives for Archive use. FWIW, I paid £450 for a quad-core 2010 cMP (eBay); £52 for new 2Tb Toshiba drives; £37.50 for 24Gb RAM, and have just paid around £100 for a 3.2Gb six-core CPU. Now I know you want a higher-spec than that, but even in the UK you can get a decent cMP for not too much.

 

[slrm94]

FIRST OF ALL THANKS FOR ALL THE REPLIES

Here we go

Would suggest that look elsewhere. MacVidCards had issues with them taking his work for there GPU's although the fact that they are shipping a Gt120 to give you a boot screen as well indicates possibly that they stopped doing that..

Yeah I read all about that … I had chose them as they have some good testimonials, have you ever used macstoreuk.com?

Can buy a 980GTX Ti version with proper MVC flashed EFI from macstoreuk.com for £660 including VAT here in the UK. They are proper official distributor/reseller for MVC.

Thanks for this they do seem cheeper weird site though. Just the card is £660 but on the build a Mac page the 980 is +£816.00 hell of a bump to plug it in? I speced the same machine for £2600 (12x3.4 | 48gb | 980ti) goes down to £2444 if I install the card …. THANKS!

If you don't mind used, 10GbE cards can be found on Ebay for cheap. I outfitted my old 5,1 with a 10GbE card for $55 and then later did the same for two hackintoshes at $32 each.

I do NOT mind
Will any NIC work in a mac/what cards did you use?

Why are you so concerned about data transfer performance between two Mac Pros? Most NAS boxes only have Gigabit Ethernet & getting >100MBps is around the speed that data is read from a hard disk. What data will you be transferring? If the MP is a Media Centre then you can easily stream several 1080p HD videos simultaneously over Gigabit Ethernet.

I'll be putting the old mac in another room so most downloads will be done on the new mac and transferred to the old one. I just wondered that if I’m spending a lot on drive speeds 200MBps for the WDRedPro's maybe I should look at network transfer speeds as this will mean I could buy cheeper drives if not? (I won’t be streaming anymore as each mac will be used direct in it’s own room and syncing software used to bulk copy data between the two periodically).

Make that a 6 year old computer. Here from the CreatePro website

We build all of our Create Pro Mac Pro 5,1 systems from refurbished A-Grade 2010 systems..

Yes I wondered this too, they offer two models of the the 12 core 3.46 a 2010 and a 2012 model ….. I wondered if that meant the box/MoBo was newer?

Personally I think it would be crazy to take out a loan to spend £4500 ($5500) on an old cMP. You can buy a used nMP still under AppleCare warranty for half that.

The OP's current system could be upgraded with an SSD & GTX680 for about £250 which would be a far more cost efficient way of spending money with no bank loans involved & would deliver a considerable performance improvement.

I have considered upgrading the 2008mp but my main upgrade reason is I’m maxing the CPU in LogicPro with the buffer set to high. I do feel weird buying an old machine for this much cash but that model runs rings around the nMP with 6 cores and the 12 core is £6,599.00

LogicPro Benchmark Test:

I then got the absolute maximum of 159 tracks. This was with the 2013 MacPro 6 cores 32 GB RAM
https://www.gearspace.com/board/apple-logic-pro/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest-98.html


I'm pleased to report that my friend who just got a 12 core 5,1 macPro fitted with 3.46 Ghz CPUs is getting around 230 tracks.
https://www.gearspace.com/board/apple-logic-pro/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest-99.html


Without going crazy on the cash I can’t another way of getting better CPU for any less? Do you guys think a PCI-E SSD would affect CPU or should I consider an iMac? Pretty similar cost of £3,554.00 for the i7 with 1tb Flash and the benchmarks seem similar to the 6 core nMP:


I got 146 tracks before the pop up with overload.
Following spec:iMac 27 5k, late 2015, i7, 4.0 Ghz, 1TB SSD, 32 MB
https://www.gearspace.com/board/apple-logic-pro/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest-98.html

 

[pastrychef]

I do NOT mind
Will any NIC work in a mac/what cards did you use?

I used SolarFlare SFN5122F. I wrote about it HERE.

 

[slrm94]

I used SolarFlare SFN5122F. I wrote about it HERE.

Nice Thread! It's all about the bottleneck's

 

[nigelbb]

Did you look at the nMP systems on eBay? Some new some with long AppleCare. All cheaper than the cMP system you are contemplating purchasing.
Alternatively a brand new fully specified iMac will be way faster than your current setup & still cheaper than your proposed purchase.

 

[h9826790]

Do you mean as a boot drive or simply as storage?

Both

 

[DPUser]

http://barefeats.com/tricktb3b.html

You don't need to run in RAID, and these are readily available now.

 

[slrm94]

Both

Hi, Just to double check I read on Barefeats that the AHCI would work as boot and the NMVe as data only:
http://barefeats.com/hard211.html
There is no 'native' support of third party NVMe flash blades by OS X. As of this week, a driver is available from MacVidCards that provides support for NVMe blades on all models of Mac running OS X. That driver enabled us to include the Samsung 950 Pro NVMe flash blade in our benchmarking. CAVEAT: MacVidCards states "...you will only be able to use (NVMe) drives for storage of data. You can only use the AHCI version for an OS X boot volume.

Are they wrong/has something changed?

 

[h9826790]

Hi, Just to double check I read on Barefeats that the AHCI would work as boot and the NMVe as data only:
http://barefeats.com/hard211.html
There is no 'native' support of third party NVMe flash blades by OS X. As of this week, a driver is available from MacVidCards that provides support for NVMe blades on all models of Mac running OS X. That driver enabled us to include the Samsung 950 Pro NVMe flash blade in our benchmarking. CAVEAT: MacVidCards states "...you will only be able to use (NVMe) drives for storage of data. You can only use the AHCI version for an OS X boot volume.

Are they wrong/has something changed?

Nothing changed. You can search for that thread, the driver is a bit buggy, I personally won't recommend anyone use NVMe aSSD apart from testing purpose. Unless you don't care about the protential trouble (data lost, KP, etc).