Great price on the CPUs, they should be about 250 by this time next year. How are you powering your 780 btw?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Pro as a gaming machine?
- Thread starter Michael Goff
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Great price on the CPUs, they should be about 250 by this time next year. How are you powering your 780 btw?
Let me put it like this: if you want to buy a new Mac Pro for the sole purpose of gaming — don't do it. There are much more cost-efficient options out there. You can build a better gaming rig for around 1500 USD or Euro (depending on your location).
If you already have an previous-gen Mac Pro, why not? Just put a decent GPU in it.
If you already have an previous-gen Mac Pro, why not? Just put a decent GPU in it.
IlluminatedSage
macrumors 68000
I also love your signature line.
"Macs are becoming like North Korea. All sealed up, users told what they can and can't have, and nothing offensive about Kim Jong Un on iTunes on Xmas day."
true, you are limited on upgrading memory, hardrive/ssd, batteries or... software on your iOS devices.
ToroidalZeus
macrumors 68020
Wont even play Assassins Creed Unity.
Either your PC or the 5,1 (unless you get D700s; still a terrible performance : price ratio tho).
antonis
macrumors 68020
I'm afraid so, yes.
Default settings for most games doesn't mean anything in particular, anymore. Most games detect the GPU strength on their own and adjust the graphics automatically; they usually call this as "Default settings".
What I mean is, you may still be able to play some games in low/medium settings. But this is far from calling it a "gaming machine", anymore.
Last edited:
It won't excel at gaming I know that. It's still more than passable. Maybe I'll have to sit on a console and see what the difference is.
----------
I'll confirm that later. Assuming it goes on sale on Steam.
AlecZ
macrumors 65816
A Hobo
macrumors 6502
I got them for 400, total, not each! =P 185 each plus shipping.
I'm powering the 780 via internal power. not using a separate PSU.
AlecZ
macrumors 65816
It's decent for gaming, on par with a midrange gaming PC.
The only reason that makes sense is if you'd use a Mac Pro primarily for creative/professional work and like to do some gaming on the side, though.
Buying one primarily for games is madness. Get a gaming PC and a Macbook Air instead.
The only reason that makes sense is if you'd use a Mac Pro primarily for creative/professional work and like to do some gaming on the side, though.
Buying one primarily for games is madness. Get a gaming PC and a Macbook Air instead.
ROFL AT "THE DELUSIONAL"!
btw, if you boot into windows USE windows 7 64 bit, its the best OS of all time (yes i like it better than OSX, come at me bro)
tbh though, the economist would build a gaming pc, much cheaper and much better option than consoles, especially in this day and age.
AlecZ
macrumors 65816
I give Windows 2000 vote for best OS of all time. It was a solid workstation OS with all the gaming and media support. I couldn't believe why they would ugly it up with XP and Vista and then the Metro interface crap. I would have given vote to NT4 as it was rock solid, only 50mbs to install, and ran like a demon - but it had no USB support, no plug and play, and no built in firewall. My custom workstation at the time had dual CPUs, eight banks of RAM, workstation graphics card (upgraded every two months practically), dual Voodoo2 SLI, TV video capture card, and Soundblaster Live. A beast in the late 90s.
ToroidalZeus
macrumors 68020
AC:U is known for being one of the worst coded console ports of all time.
On my GTX 980 OC I get 50-60 FPS at 1080 Ultra and like 29-35 FPS at 1440p.
BF4 which is a properly coded game gives me north of 60FPS at 1440p.
So your system is vastly outdated if you are trying to run games at modern settings 1440p/Ultra. You'll be stuck at 1080p and possibly medium or low settings on the graphically intensive games.
Also your CPU would most likely bottleneck a GPU upgrade.
I would personally just gut your Mac Pro and put off the shelf PC components inside. Either X99-5820k or 5960X for the bling bling holla. It's worth noting that because of the overclock, a 6-core 5820k will preform similar to an 8-core Mac Pro and a 8-core 5960X will perform similar to the $7,000 12-core Mac Pro 😵
Last edited:
which method are you using to supply power to the 8pin and 6pin and for how long have you been doing it? Can you give idle and load readings from hwsensors app please?
I don’t doubt you are correct.
Not played ACU yet, as it’s still £50.
I’ll boot into Windoze later and use Fraps to see what level my games are running at.
One thing I want to maintain though is an OSX system that runs without issue. My 10.10 is a hacked copy yes but I can’t think of any way you’d tell unless you really know what you’re doing. I want to be able to install updates etc etc without seeing the no entry symbol. Will off the shelf components maintan that status quo?
(Ok so I’m looking for what really is going to be difficult to find but don’t we all?).
So. Yes I understand that Mac hardware is overpriced. But I like it. So want to have it. I don’t see it as any different from buying any other branded goods.
My quandry now is where is my money better spent?
I’m trying to work out as near as dammit an apples to apples comparison so that I’m pretty much where I am now, and to do so I’d have one of these two choices;
1. 6 Core 3.333GHz 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 upgraded with -
Mercury Accelsior PCIe card with 960GB storage. £700?
Upgraded graphics card. £?
2. 6 Core Late ’13 Mac Pro 6,1 upgraded with -
OWC 1TB internal SSD. £?
Thunderbolt dock(s) to plug in my current multiple hard drives. £?
Standalone Blu Ray reader. £?
(Apple want >£3539.00 for my ideal config if I leave the BTO options to them).
Last edited:
Hackintoshes are a pain to maintain that's clear. I only ever toyed with one once in an external drive running off a Sony Vaio laptop - 10.6.8, no graphics acceleration, no AHCI or internal drive support and I had to hack my own sound driver. Yet the damn thing boot in 15 seconds and had the snappiest GUI I ever saw even without graphics drivers. But maintaining updates on that? No thanks. I deleted it after my experiment.
At a price/performance ratio, even the iMac with GTX 780M or Radeon M295X would give you a better bang for your buck.
I've got twin nMPs with 12-core CPUs, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSDs and 12GB D700, but these are mainly used for heavy rendering work and 4K work. I tried gaming on it once, and the experience was about par, if not worse, compared to my GTX 780M-equipped iMac.
The D700/W9000 is a workstation card, optimized for stuff like OpenCL and workstation tasks, plus GPGPU work, and not really for games.
You'll be better off buying a Mac with TB2 and hook up a Sonnet IIID + desktop NVIDIA GPU to it. It'll give you 85-95% of the card's full performance. Source - http://forum.techinferno.com/diy-e-...0gbps-tb2-sonnet-echo-express-iii-d-win8.html
ToroidalZeus
macrumors 68020
The 6,1 is a terrible deal for gaming. Non upgradable GPU = half-foot already i the grave. The d500s aren't good for gaming either and the D700s are insanely expensive.
The best bang for the buck real mac would be probably a 4,1 or a 5,1 with a GTX 970 upgrade. Although I would get a 980 cuz if you are buying mac, you probably like overpriced hardware. You would also need to make sure the CPU doesn't bottleneck the GPU.
Compared to upgrading real Macs, Mackintosh isn't too bad.
I only have 2 issues currently:
First is HDMI won't work on my GTX 980 under OS X (not an issue since i use DVI) but still. Also this might be an OS X issue and not a Mackintosh issue
Second is I can't get the PC to wake from sleep mode under OS X. This is clearly an issue with X99 Haswell-E because Apple hasn't released native kernel support.
On the bright side I do not have to worry about video card boot screens or kext signing (because it's always disabled on my hack).
Plus the cost difference is unreal. I'm like 2000 (or more) USD less than a comparable Mac Pro 6,1.
Last edited:
Forget about the bottlenecks and PCIE versions - they make such a tiny difference because once the game data has been loaded onto the graphics card almost all the processing is done internally. I ran benchmarks on six core 3890 with the GTX 980 and it is as fast as all the tech review sites. In a couple of years the bottleneck will be more obvious but not so much on 12 cores running over 3ghz (x5675, x5680, x5690 will still be great)
Would love to load the games off an Intel P3500 NVME though. If I had gangsta cash.
Last edited:
Thats my main issue with the 6,1. Once its obsolete the danmed thing is close to death. As its a new unit though Apple should be supporting this for at least 8 years?
As to the Mackintosh route. I find the upgrade, (well just getting 10.10 to run on it), as being relatively painless. A Hackintosh though may be another thing entirely.
ToroidalZeus
macrumors 68020
I decided it wasn't worth buying a real Mac Pro so I don't know which CPUs are still good today and which are showing their age.
Ya right. Apples is one of the worst companies when it comes to hardware updates. Even if they do release GPU upgrades you can be sure they'll cost a small fortune.
For Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1 gaming only.
At the moment anything 4 to 12 core above 2.66ghz is fine especially if they have turbo boost and a modern GPU.
In two years anything 6 to 12 cores above 3ghz with a 2015 GPU will still run everything max. New bus architectures will start to appear for high end GPUS but PCIE will still have support.
In three to four years we start to see the CPU bottlenecks when paired with the best PCIE GPU available but you will still see good performance because the GPUs will do the bulk of the processing. Around this time PCIE will start to become phased out.
In five years the top games will require new architectures like Nvlink by default but they might run at lower settings on PCIE cards.