nMP hex vs. MP 5,1 hex

[akadmon]

Has anyone here replaced a 5,1 six core with a nMP six core? I've seen Virtualrain's 4,1 quad vs. nMP hex review, but find it hard to believe that the improvement over a 5,1 hex (with Radeon 5870 and an SSD boot drive) can be anywhere as much as that. Btw, I'm mostly interested in Adobe CS6 and LR5 benchmarks.

 

[cinealta]

Has anyone here replaced a 5,1 six core with a nMP six core? Has anyone seen benchmarks for this pairing? I've seen Virtualrain's side by side of his wooy

The nMP 6-core is about 30% faster in 64-bit multicore benchmarks than the Westmere 6-core cMP. The additional cost is a lot though because, with the nMP, you also have to get an external Thunderbolt hard drive enclosure to match the 4 SATA2 bays, 4 PCIe slots and 2 optical bays of the cMP. A PCIe-SSD card is about $40, and a USB 3.0 card is about $15, for the cMP. Unless you need the dual, high-end GPUs (eg for FCPX) of the nMP it may not be worth the additional cost for such little performance gain.

http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

 

[ozbimmer]

You may find this helpful

http://www.barefeats.com/tube04.html

 

[akadmon]

You may find this helpful

http://www.barefeats.com/tube04.html

Wow! Not much there for the money. Looks like I can hold on to my cMP for at least another year, even longer if I can get a video card that can drive a 4K display at 60 Hz.

 

[iBug2]

External thunderbolt enclosures are cheap now. I just bought Caldigit T3 for 650$ which comes with 3 drives so the enclosure costs around 250$.

 

[sirio76]

@Akadmon
A stock nMP vs strongly and pricey upgraded old macpro. Very unfair review on barefeats lately, seems like they have some advantage in raccomanding GPUs from their "pal", and other options from third party vendors.
For an honest comparison thay have to review the stock new one against the stock old one, those score will look very different.

Anyway, you hardware is still recent so it's fine to upgrade the GPU and add an ssd to speed up your workflow, but I do not think you can get 4k@60hz even after a GPU upgrade.

 

[iBug2]

@Akadmon
A stock nMP vs strongly and pricey upgraded old macpro. Very unfair review on barefeats lately, seems like they have some advantage in raccomanding GPUs from their "pal", and other options from third party vendors.
For an honest comparison thay have to review the stock new one against the stock old one, those score will look very different.

Anyway, you hardware is still recent so it's fine to upgrade the GPU and add an ssd to speed up your workflow, but I do not think you can get 4k@60hz even after a GPU upgrade.

Yeah I don't really like the barefeats comparison. They are basically comparing a beefed up old one to a stock new one. The old one does not really come with GTX780 GPU, or a internal SATA 3 RAID PCIe card yet they included those results in the test like it's some kind of a standard thing.

 

[wonderspark]

They should compare stock for stock, but then also compare beefed for beefed and dollar for dollar. I like the barefeats test, because it represents what is possible for less than the cost of a nMP.

 

[deppest]

They should compare stock for stock, but then also compare beefed for beefed and dollar for dollar. I like the barefeats test, because it represents what is possible for less than the cost of a nMP

+1, I want to know what can be done in terms of performance upgrades and costs with the old MP to equal or better the nMP's performance. there's still some live in our old rigs