The $32,000 Mac Pro Killer

[jtgstitch]

could this be a shitty way of saying im ritch and that he can afford 128 of my computers

[DrMacintosh]

1 hour ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

Usb c? Haven’t seen to many thunder bolt drives

There are a lot on the market. Also USB-C is slow compared to TB3. 40GB/s is too fast to just say "use USB-C" instead. 

1 hour ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

You can Hook these up to any pc.

Most are designed with TB2-3 in mind and are intended to work with the Mac and Logic Pro. Most audio professionals are Mac based because of Logic and all its plug ins and macOS having accelerated audio.  

[jtgstitch]

im sayin its overkill

[Letgomyleghoe]

44 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Also USB-C is slow compared to TB3. 40GB/s is too fast to just say "use USB-C" instead. 

When are you going to be bottlenecked by usbc? It’s like pcie 4.0

[DrMacintosh]

1 minute ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

When are you going to be bottlenecked by usbc? It’s like pcie 4.0

USB-C is USB. It had no PCIe access whatsoever. Thunderbolt 3 has 4 PCIe lanes. 

[Letgomyleghoe]

2 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

USB-C is USB. It had no PCIe access whatsoever. Thunderbolt 3 has 4 PCIe lanes. 

I was saying it’s like the pcie 4.0 argument, it’s just there, not needed. I dont think I’m that dumb.

[DrMacintosh]

Just now, Letgomyleghoe said:

I was saying it’s like the pcie 4.0 argument, it’s just there, not needed. I dont think I’m that dumb.

Which is that it’s so fast that nobody can benefit from it? Well that’s simply a bad argument. Faster external storage arrays, PCIe access, and daisy chaining are things people use Thunderbolt for everyday. 

[Letgomyleghoe]

12 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Which is that it’s so fast that nobody can benefit from it? Well that’s simply a bad argument. Faster external storage arrays, PCIe access, and daisy chaining are things people use Thunderbolt for everyday. 

Specifically speaking for storage devices and their speeds

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Luscious said:

Intel now has the Xeon 6250L - four of those would give you 32 cores running at 3.9GHz with a 4C/8T turbo of 4.5GHz. When a 32 core Rome part tops out at 2.9GHz and a single 28 core Xeon is even slower, there's an argument to be made where brute frequency wins over just throwing more (slow) cores at a workload. For single threaded tasks it's a no brainer.

If you're buying a system with 32 cores for single core or low thread count performance you're doing it wrong. Also did you price check that CPU? Xeon 6250 and 4TB ram would be half the cost and still more expensive because 4 sockets.

 

I know why Intel makes these SKUs and it's actually not so much for frequency reasons it for those with memory intensive applications that don't benefit from core/thread count.

 

Spending 8 times as much for not that much more performance gain really is not a no brainer.

 

You do also realize that the build shown in the video specifically wasn't supposed to be practical or one recommended, it was purely about spending the same amount of money as the Mac Pro ticking similar kind of boxes like aesthetics, even though I hate that case but w/e.

[GDRRiley]

7 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I know why Intel makes these SKUs and it's actually not so much for frequency reasons it for those with memory intensive applications that don't benefit from core/thread count.

you don't love paying 6.5k for a 8 core when you could get the epyc version for 2.1k or 3.1k for the 16 core frequency optimized parts?

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

you don't love paying 6.5k for a 8 core when you could get the epyc version for 2.1k or 3.1k for the 16 core frequency optimized parts?

Well that and there are perfectly fine and more sensible Intel options as well. If people think it's hard getting good I/O options for what is a server optimized board then try a quad socket, those are even worse lol.

 

 

4 USB, VGA and serial, just what I was looking for in my workstation build . And this is actually generous compared to Supermicro quad socket boards.

[leadeater]

11 hours ago, Commodus said:

It feels like this undersells the Mac Pro somewhat.  Yeah, that Windows PC is a monster performance-wise (and you could certainly build a more focused system), but it seems like the Mac Pro would be better if you had more peripherals or had to deploy multiple systems.  You probably wouldn't want to custom-build several PCs for a movie studio -- Apple would let you hit the ground running.

Well you can buy proper systems with support from HP, HPE (different company), Dell, Lenovo, Puget etc so I don't see this as unique or a benefit towards Apple. For a really long time F1 teams have been using HP Z800 series workstations, now slightly different model naming. Same goes for Pixar etc.

 

Very high end big budget places don't gravitate towards Apple which is this price range. Apple's market isn't actually what people think or argue it is. Not saying this Mac Pro doesn't have it's place or doesn't make sense but if you are going for the complete top end build possible that is where I would say it doesn't but if you need Mac OS then sure this is your only choice, but I can't think of anything that would require that hardware configuration and also be Mac OS only.

 

Let's all remember you don't have to spend $32k on a Mac Pro or any PC either.

[Thaldor]

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

Most are designed with TB2-3 in mind and are intended to work with the Mac and Logic Pro. Most audio professionals are Mac based because of Logic and all its plug ins and macOS having accelerated audio.  

Not really, Lightning is almost non-existent in professional music gear, Thunderbolt having some support but not really more than USB. The thing is professional music gear really doesn't need that much digital-data moved around that fast and when FireWire was been retired someone really took a long coffee break to think what they really needed. The result was music industry went to the net, one single connector that already has huge support among computer world, that can handle tens even hundreds of devices and connections without problems when correctly setup, that can reach long distances and even split to multiple connections after them, that is dirt cheap to include and use and is good enough for controlling and monitoring; RJ-45 (and with some tricks even WLAN is possible) with D-subs emerging as "collection" ports. Who would have guessed that brands as "Netgear", "Cisco" and "TP-Link" would be seen in the music industry in the year 2020.

[MultiGamerClub]

Quattro RTX 8000 being used as a Display Adapter.. Oh my god.

[UpTheDons]

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intro kinda reminded me of a gamers nexus worst build of the year vid. Love that scene tho.

[Lord Vile]

Well sure I'm gonna get a $32,000 PC so I can run Logic... Oh wait. Well at least I can develop for the Apple ecosyst…

[Curious Pineapple]

6 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

There are a lot on the market. Also USB-C is slow compared to TB3. 40GB/s is too fast to just say "use USB-C" instead.

No external storage device can make use of that bandwidth, and on a large system like this there is little need to be fannying around with external devices when you can have a bunch of PCie 4.0 16x slots inside the machine.

 

Maybe for some specific use cases such as high speed cameras where you need to shovel that raw data into RAM in realtime, but then PCIe slots with more lanes would probably be a better solution.

[sub68]

16 hours ago, minibois said:

I can hear it too (more so at 13:57).

That is I'm pretty sure the sound of clothing moving against the Lavalier microphone used.

yeah sounds like lav was moved

[sub68]

the intro reminded me of the channel super fun vid when he pranked them by "robbing"

[sub68]

17 hours ago, THE ABSURD BIRD said:

Great video, but I noticed audio issues in several places for example at 13:57 and 13:31 (hopefully this is is not an issue caused by my headphones/EQ). 

sounds like it got muffled in the shirt linus was wearing that happens a lot

[Commodus]

9 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

Usb c? Haven’t seen to many thunder bolt drives, I know they’re out there, but definitely not as widespread as usbc drives.

USB-C too, but there are nuemrous Thunderbolt drives -- usually high-speed SSDs (including RAID arrays) for pros who need storage as good as their internal drives.

 

9 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

You can Hook these up to any pc.

Yes, but as the video pointed out, the Tyan board is pretty lousy for I/O.  A pro musician would have both a powerful machine and all the audio interfaces they need... well, so long as they're either USB-C/Thunderbolt native or have adapters.

 

9 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

Fan curves+noctua 1500rpms and a decent cpu cooler.

Well, first, few people build high-end workstations themselves... and second, that doesn't give you things like passively cooled GPUs (yes, even a dual Radeon Pro Vega II Duo setup has no fans on the cards themselves).

 

9 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

Isn’t the xeons multi threaded performance worse than threadripper? Don’t quote me on this but I’m pretty sure.

Haven't seen equal core count comparisons.  Most benches are for the "omg 64 cores" Threadripper and Epyc chips, and that's arguably AMD's greatest advantage regardless.

 

9 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

That’s true, but is also possible to have 1tb of ram on a pc afaik, you would need a custom/ server motherboard, I hate the “consumer” argument, most server boards are available to consumers too, just not marketed.

It is, but like you suggested, you usually need a server or high-end workstation-class board, as well as a CPU that can address that much memory.  One of the big reasons Threadripper is a no-go for this class of machine is the 256GB memory ceiling... that's enough for many tasks, but not enough for others.

 

9 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

That is true, are there any productivity programs that aren’t made by Mac that are mac only, and would be a basis of choosing Mac? legitimately not sure on this one

There are quite a few Mac-only productivity apps that are worth checking out, like Pixelmator Pro... but "buy a Mac Pro for it" worthy?  Not so sure, I'm looking into it.  One important consideration is that MacOS is built on Unix roots and has a native Unix command prompt, so the Mac Pro a good system if you need Unix for some serious number-crunching but still want a friendly GUI and mainstream apps like Office (I know Windows has that Linux kernel thing going, but it's not the same as it being the foundation of the OS).

[Commodus]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well you can buy proper systems with support from HP, HPE (different company), Dell, Lenovo, Puget etc so I don't see this as unique or a benefit towards Apple. For a really long time F1 teams have been using HP Z800 series workstations, now slightly different model naming. Same goes for Pixar etc.

 

Very high end big budget places don't gravitate towards Apple which is this price range. Apple's market isn't actually what people think or argue it is. Not saying this Mac Pro doesn't have it's place or doesn't make sense but if you are going for the complete top end build possible that is where I would say it doesn't but if you need Mac OS then sure this is your only choice, but I can't think of anything that would require that hardware configuration and also be Mac OS only.

 

Let's all remember you don't have to spend $32k on a Mac Pro or any PC either.

Oh, I'm not denying that you can buy ready-made workstations, and in some cases they'll definitely be the better picks.  It's just that you'll probably pay more for similar performance than the "PC Pro," and if the choice was between this custom-built system and easy deployment of the Mac Pro, I suspect some outfits would go for the Mac Pro. 

 

I'd say the sweet spot is for video/music/photography shops that could benefit from one of the middle configurations -- say, 16 cores, 384GB of RAM, one of the upgraded GPUs.  The option of very high-end configs is more to get Apple's foot in the door for purchasing options and, to some degree, to serve as a declaration of intent: we're serious about pro machines again.  The real question is whether Apple will remain committed and offer timely hardware refreshes.

[Letgomyleghoe]

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

Yes, but as the video pointed out, the Tyan board is pretty lousy for I/O.  A pro musician would have both a powerful machine and all the audio interfaces they need... well, so long as they're either USB-C/Thunderbolt native or have adapters.

Pcie slots.

 

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

Well, first, few people build high-end workstations themselves... and second, that doesn't give you things like passively cooled GPUs (yes, even a dual Radeon Pro Vega II Duo setup has no fans on the cards themselves

Yeah coil whine/ loud gpu fans can be annoying asf.

 

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

Haven't seen equal core count comparisons.  Most benches are for the "omg 64 cores" Threadripper and Epyc chips, and that's arguably AMD's greatest advantage regardless.

 

Yeah that’s a tricky one

 

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

One important consideration is that MacOS is built on Unix roots and has a native Unix command prompt, so the Mac Pro a good system if you need Unix for some serious number-crunching but still want a friendly GUI and mainstream apps like Office (I know Windows has that Linux kernel thing going, but it's not the same as it being the foundation of the OS).

Had no idea this was thing lmao, wouldn’t have expected that from Apple.

[GDRRiley]

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

I'd say the sweet spot is for video/music/photography shops that could benefit from one of the middle configurations -- say, 16 cores, 384GB of RAM, one of the upgraded GPUs.  The option of very high-end configs is more to get Apple's foot in the door for purchasing options and, to some degree, to serve as a declaration of intent: we're serious about pro machines again.  The real question is whether Apple will remain committed and offer timely hardware refreshes.

384gb of ram is likely overkill for most work. you could go with a 3950x if you could live with 128gb or move to thredripper to get 256

 

I doubt it. for the longest time it was every 1-2 years a hardware update and that isn't going to happen other than GPU upgrades.

[Commodus]

40 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

384gb of ram is likely overkill for most work. you could go with a 3950x if you could live with 128gb or move to thredripper to get 256

 

I doubt it. for the longest time it was every 1-2 years a hardware update and that isn't going to happen other than GPU upgrades.

You'd think so, but I've seen multiple examples of apps gobbling up a lot of that memory.  A many-track audio edit can chew that up, for example, and that's not uncommon in studios.