do i buy a macpro 5.1?

[orph]

hi i have a macpro 3.1 8core 2.8ghz, I mostly work in CS6 Photoshop/ACR/premier and trying to learn AE/davinci resolve (i also do some web work but as thats about as intensive as text edit )

recently iv had my eye out for a newer macpro 4.1/5.1 and saw a 5.1 4core 2.8ghz for sale near me.

so do you think ill gain much if any speed moving to a 4 core macpro 5.1 ?
or will it need to be upgraded to a 6c cpu before i get any benefit?
do the geekbech scores from http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks tell me all i need to know,
5.1 4c 2.8ghz SC 1992 MC 7499
3.1 8c 2.8ghz SC 1535 MC 10410
5.1 6c 3.33Ghz SC 2530 MC 13950 (just added for fun, thats the kind of score if the cpu is swapped)

faster single core and slower multi core if all cores are used, id gess the 5.1 is about as fast as the 3.1 with 6 cores being used?

and what kind of price is a 5.1 worth now in the uk ? im not shore if it's cheep or not

 

[MarkC426]

hi i have a macpro 3.1 8core 2.8ghz, I mostly work in CS6 Photoshop/ACR/premier and trying to learn AE/davinci resolve (i also do some web work but as thats about as intensive as text edit )

recently iv had my eye out for a newer macpro 4.1/5.1 and saw a 5.1 4core 2.8ghz for sale near me.

so do you think ill gain much if any speed moving to a 4 core macpro 5.1 ?
or will it need to be upgraded to a 6c cpu before i get any benefit?
do the geekbech scores from http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks tell me all i need to know,
5.1 4c 2.8ghz SC 1992 MC 7499
3.1 8c 2.8ghz SC 1535 MC 10410
5.1 6c 3.33Ghz SC 2530 MC 13950 (just added for fun, thats the kind of score if the cpu is swapped)

faster single core and slower multi core if all cores are used, id gess the 5.1 is about as fast as the 3.1 with 6 cores being used?

and what kind of price is a 5.1 worth now in the uk ? im not shore if it's cheep or not

The only retailer in the UK I know that sells 5.1 macs is https://create.pro/
I have read mixed reviews about them, some people rave, others have had bad experiences, so not sure.
Jigsaw24 used to sell loads, until the EU B.. S... about the fans being 'unsafe if you put your hand in the back' , stopped them selling them.

 

[orph]

well iv been looking at ebay mostly and gumtree, create.pro is above my budget.
saw a 4.1 4c 2.66 ghz which was at a good price but missed it made me sad it was cheep id have been able to get it and a 6c 3.2ghz cpu + bits for under £600

this one costs more than that so id not be able to pick up a cpu for a bit

anyway back to the point do you think a mac pro 5.1 4c 2.8ghz is a upgrade from my old mac pro 3.1 8c 2.8ghz?


ps
I had to google the fan thing, not shore what to say about that.... it did mention some electrical stuff to so maybe thats the problem but the fans im not shore if i can even figure a way to hurt myself on them
can you open the mac pro while it's on, maybe thats how? (used to have fun watching my G5 open back in the day, relay miss the clear door)

 

[MarkC426]

It really wound me up at the time, it's like if you open the bonnet of your car and put your hand in.

Anyway, not too sure about bus speeds etc, but purely based on clock speed, your 8 core at 2.8 must be faster than a 4 at same speed, especially when rendering.

 

[Digitalclips]

I'd wait for the new Mac Pro in 2013

 

[orph]

going to be a long time till the macpro 2013 is in my price range & the i7 imacs kind of beating it at the mo for most things i do.

 

[h9826790]

I personally will try to avoid Create Pro. Just some search in MacRumour then you will know why. They steal the ROM from the others and then said that they create the Mac EFI ROM for the GPU.

Stealing (and lying) is bad, but not the worst. The worst is that they have absolutely no idea how to fix the issues if anything goes wrong, because they are not the actual developer. And they may flash the ROM onto a wrong card. They don't even know how to Hex edit the ROM a bit to remove the original developer's name. So, the original developer get lots of complain from the customer who believe that he create those problematic cards.

A member here actually capture some screenshots from Create Pro's web page, which has the original developer's name on the system info's GPU ROM version! IMO, they are careless, lazy, can't be trusted.

 

[MarkC426]

I knew I had read some bad feedback somewhere.
Nicely pointed out.

 

[orph]

:E i think this has gone a tad off topic.
the macpro 5.1 2.8ghz 4c is still on sale near to me, i like local sales as it lets me try out in advance.

so do you think if i buy the 5.1 2.8ghz and swap the cpu to something like the W3670 (6c 3.2ghz) or W3680 (6c 3.33ghz) it will be noticeably faster in cpu tasks? (i think id get a W3670 as they seem to be about half the price of the W3680)

do you think it's worth the upgrade?

edit
total cost of 5.1 + ram + cpu is about £700 i hope UK price (ill keep my drives and GPU)

ps do you think it's worth me asking in the macpro section about the speed change from a 3.1 8c to a 5.1 4c/6c ?

 

[h9826790]

:E i think this has gone a tad off topic.
the macpro 5.1 2.8ghz 4c is still on sale near to me, i like local sales as it lets me try out in advance.

so do you think if i buy the 5.1 2.8ghz and swap the cpu to something like the W3670 (6c 3.2ghz) or W3680 (6c 3.33ghz) it will be noticeably faster in cpu tasks? (i think id get a W3670 as they seem to be about half the price of the W3680)

do you think it's worth the upgrade?

ps do you think it's worth me asking in the macpro section about the speed change from a 3.1 8c to a 5.1 4c/6c ?

Another option for you is upgrade to X5677 (which is cheap), so that the single core performance is almost double your current setup. And roughly the same multi core performance.

Since most job can only use one core / thread. You should able to see the difference.

 

[orph]

wow thats fast thanks h9826790 ^^ had a look on ebay and there about the same price or cheaper than the W3670.

when comparing the W3670 to a X5677 is it as simple as clock speed ? (id gess it is as there the same gen)

i do kind of lean towards the 6c but that might just be because im on a 8c now and it's scary to go to 4c but maybe im just silly.

been looking at pugetsystems article's a lot recently
this one for premier pro cc
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-698/
shows that about 6cores is good with a fall off after that which is partly why iv been leaning towards a 6c cpu
(and sometimes they think in dual cpu systems there's no gain from cpu 2)
im using CS6 but id gess its not to far of.

i also have been thinking about FCPX which last time i tried the demo it seemed to use every cpu ^^ which was super nice to see and max out my GPU at times, i never see that in PP cs6




also a funy one is that AE cc 2015 has been gimped by adobe
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-After-Effects-CC-2015-Multi-Core-Performance-714/
only uses 1 cpu by the look of it most the time ( they test with a pair of 10c xeons)
and AE 2014 use's both cpu's
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-After-Effects-CC-2014-Multi-Core-Performance-716/

 

[h9826790]

In my own experence, video editing can utilise more CPU cores, but for modern apps, mainly the export part maters (encoding). Analysing and rendering is more base on GPU performance (OpenCL or CUDA if applicable).

Photo editing use less core, but the time required to "wait" is nothing if compare to video editing. So, focus on video editing performance and pick the Hex core CPU should be a more reasonable choice. 3.46 vs 3.2 in photo editing won't make significant difference, but Hex 3.2 vs Quad 3.46 in encoding can make huge difference.

I suggested that you may consider X5677 simply because it's the low cost fastest (single core performance) CPU on 5,1. If budget avail, go for Hex core make much more sense. Another advantage X5677 over W36xx is the X5677 can boot with 64G of RAM but the W36xx is limited to 56G at this moment. But for normal video / photo editing, that 8G difference usual won't cause any problem. So, W3670 may be still the better choice.

 

[orph]

thanks for the advice ^^ and i relay did appreciate the advice of the X5677, ill have to do some google work to see how it compares. i know a guy who works with serves so ill ask him to, might even try to get him to do the cpu swap for beer .
ill have to upgrade the ram if i buy the one im looking at but iv got 18GB at the mo and the only time i ever see it getting full is when i play with AE, PP/photoshop never uses much for me so cant see me needing 56GB of ram before i need a new computer past the one im looking at buying.


in pp cs6 GPU helps but less than you hope most the time
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CS6-GPU-Acceleration-162/
that shows that after a gtx 650 there's almost no gain (in that test, id gess it's 1080p)

they also have a pp cc test
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Professional-GPU-Acceleration-502/
which seems to show until you hit 4k the gpu's not relay the limit & thats in a real artificial GPU stress test.

thanks for the help

edit-
did a ebay search and looks like both chips are about the same price
edit had a look on ebay and at the mo there's no W3670 in the eu they all seem to be from outside the eu so import tax but there are W3670 in from the eu so they end up the same price

 

[h9826790]

I can occasionally use more than 32G of RAM, but that's really lots of loads. Also, my Mac Pro always has 2 account logged in and media server running in the background.

In my case, my Mac run 24/7, only reboot for OS upgrade or short shut down for maintenance etc., the system usually stabilise at 22-24G of RAM usage, and the rest 8-10G are all used as cache. So, I will say 24G is quit a good choice. That will guarantee have enough memory for 99% of time. The 8G stick is quit cheap now, $60 should be good enough for 3x8G (however, I am not sure how's the cost in EU). And 3 sticks also is the best config to optimise the triple channel architecture.

I only use FCPX for video editing, may be that make the difference, but you are quite right, in my own experence, anything before 4K won't fully utilise the GPU (I have 2x 7950). However, the GPU is really much faster than CPU in rendering, even though it's not running in full power, I believe it's contribution still quite significant when compared to the CPU. But I really don't know much about PP CC, you better make the purchase base on your study rather than my irrelevant experience.

 

[orph]

wow thanks for the in depth reply. Iv not even touched 4K yet so it's relay nice to know that your mac can work with 4K, I relay cant see doing anything more taxing than that anytime soon.

Iv only been working with 1080p timelines for web which my 3.1's fine with relay, I think id get a big boost from having a SSD media drive on a pci card or even just move to FCPX and get a GPU that works well with it.
Stills/photos which relay iv hit the speed where I cant work much faster than my computer unless im doing something like batch exports which is when i grab some coffee so its not to bad.
Web work which is about as intensive as text editor

Im kind of hoping that if i have a 4.1/5.1 I can use it for the next year or two with a few upgrades then see if the 6.1's have drooped to a not silly price or maybe the imacs will be all I need by then.

 

[h9826790]

IMO, a proper upgraded 4,1 (5,1) should be good enough for most job in the next 5 years. Especially more and more software are going to the multi thread / GPU acceleration direction. That's the strongest area of the cMP.

A single PCIe slot can give us a ~6000MB/s SSD storage which is >3x the speed of the 2nd fastest Mac can do. Dual Titan X is also possible in the cMP for any GPU intensive job.

1333MHz memory looks a bit slow in today's standard, however, there are 6 channels avail in the cMP, the overall bandwidth still more than enough. And the memory performance is base on bandwidth, not the just the speed. 128G RAM size is again no.1 in the Mac world. ECC RAM sure have contribution to system stability and accuracy for long time calculation task (there is about 1 bit error per day on a 32G non ECC RAM config due to cosmic radiation. For a unlucky day, this error can crash the whole system. For a very unlucky day, the error can hide inside your final product and give you lots of headache).

3.46GHz 12 cores 24 threads, overall raw power only tiny bit less than the top end 6,1.

cMP is the only Mac that can use the 10Gb Ethernet network with a low cost PCIe card.

Anyway, I just want to point out that the 5,1 is still a very nice machine in today standard (thanks for it's upgradability). As long as you do it right, should be absolutely no problem for another 1-2 years 1080P editing, or web design job.

I agree that the iMac is better for photos work. High single thread performance, very nice monitor, high speed storage, reasonable RAM size. That's what photo editing need. cMP beat the iMac in 3 areas, but big lost on the single thread performance which effectively create a bottleneck. The iMac is a much more balanced Mac for photo editing job. However, if you want a Mac that can encoding the video in the background but still have enough resource for you to edit photos, I believe cMP should still a better choice.

 

[orph]

thanks for the advice, big help.

and yep if it can deal with 4K now and software is starting to catch up to GPU and multi core use now it's going to be fine for a long time, i may move to 4K but i relay cant see it being a big thing any time soon unless it's required for a job.
cant see 4K being replaced any time soon.

when i mentioned the imac i was thinking about 2-3 years time by then it may have hit the point where it's relay a valid option for most work but also by then apple may have changed but for now i think a 4.1/5.1 is all i need