@mode11, thanks for the discussion:
In reviewing my posts, I definitely wasn’t as clear as intended. This thread was partially stream of consciousness as I got ready to order the gear and then assemble. I’m building on a moribund platform, but enjoy maxing out yesterday’s best to see what it can still offer. They’re damn capable, and cheaper by the day (for now).
I would also like to document this journey (however poorly) in order to give back to the general PC enthusiast community (but especially the Mac Pro) that has enriched my life in many ways.
I’ll try to elucidate on general objectives and how they drove individual component choices, even though they aren’t the latest, greatest, or most specialized tools.
I want a long-term primary battlestation:
- robust / solid build quality & reliability
- spare parts availability
- internal and external PCIe expansion
- upgradeable subsystems
- sufficient internal volume to cram a load of hardware
- capable enough to easily ingest and process large (workstation sized not cluster) projects and datasets from any discipline without impacting general UI responsiveness
- unobtrusive presence
- operate silently
- run Big Sur natively (not ready to proxmox or FreeBSD this one just yet)
- be interesting and of use to the community, especially as prices keep dropping
Regarding some of your points:
Hashcat and general MacOS forensics:
I have a dedicated cluster of Hackintoshed & proxmoxed HP Z820s & Z840s for long term jobs. MP2019 would only be for ‘low-hanging fruit’. Anything I might run an attack on for a few minutes or overnight. If it takes too long, I’ll pass the job off to the cluster. UI must remain responsive for whatever else I might do at the same time - including some Starcraft 2.
I have had a Z840 (Windows 10) dual 10 core Xeon with the liquid radiator CPU coolers like the G5 Power Macs hooked up to this same Cube3 chassis with 4 x Vega Frontier Editions 16GB, plus the internal Radeon 7800XT. Playing VR / Starcraft 2 / Heroes of the Storm (nothing too challenging) while the 4 Vegas were number crunching would definitely heat up a large room eventually, but with circulation and AC, fan noise wasn’t an issue. Gear was underneath the desk in this setup, and I wasn’t doing anything audio sensitive.
So why the Radeon Pro VIIs:
I find the cards intriguing, under-appreciated, (now) affordable, and a perfect complement to the capabilities of the W6800X duos.
- 4 will fit in Cube3 physically and within power limits (dual 550W PSUs)
- supported in Big Sur
- compatible with 2 slot IF link (when found at reasonable price)
- HBM2
- HIGH FP64 TFLOPs & VRAM for the money (if IF links can be found reasonably)
- not too power hungry
- CAN drive massive video walls if I need to throw a rave 😂
AI:
I'll eventually populate a rig with something like 4 x 3090 turbo plus NVlink just to make sure I can run 'most stuff'. But in general, I'll support the underdog and open source when it's not too painful. Only wish these Radeon Pro VIIs came with 32GB of RAM each like the MPX modules.
Original ebay price for 4 x Radeon Pro VII + (2) 2-slot IF links was about the same as a MP 2019 with dual Pro Vega II duos at the time, but I missed the MP auction.
Anyway, Still need to install the SSDs and NVMEs.
[edit]
@Regulus67 Thank you once again! Now I know what that extra connector on the GPU is for. And yes, I'm after 2 of the 2 slot versions of the IF link. Thanks for looking out.
