MP 14,8 2023 Mac Pro M2 Ultra - my potential use case

[SDAVE]

Update 9/10/23.

OWC Accelsior 8M2 arrived on Friday. Opened up the Mac Pro and seated it without issue. On boot up it recognized the drive right away and the SoftRAID setup was a piece of cake and it runs in the background unobtrusively. Been copying over large data sets from old computers onto it at very fast speeds. Only quirk is that in the finder window, it shows up twice. Doesn't affect performance or functionality, from what I've read this is a known and widespread bug with OS X Ventura. No big deal.

2 monitors are up and running with the Mac Pro under the desk. Right now I have a Mac Studio Display and an Eizo Coloredge CG2700X running side by side. One slightly annoying thing was I had to spring for a 1.8M Thunderbolt 4 cable to get the monitors oriented on the desk the way I wanted. That sucker was not cheap ($129)...

Overall, it's a sweet setup, very pleased and no issues to report!
Do I regret not saving some money and having a Mac Studio sitting on my desk instead? Speaking for myself, no.

That's about it, appreciate everyone's thoughts and assistance!

This is the kind of use case the 2023 Mac Pro is for, it's not for every body.

I just hope Apple allows for larger RAM options + PCIe GPU support in the future.

I have a feeling they will, they just had to go this route this time.

 

[Calaveras]

I went from a cMP to a 2013 MP 'Trashcan' almost 10 years ago.
(us mortals didn't get the 2013 MP until 2014. I think only a few lucky souls got theirs in 2013)
I had almost exactly the same reservations about the small form factor.
But 2013 was a bumper crop of work for me so tax wise it made sense to make a large computer purchase at the end of the year.
Turned out getting a little shelf unit that sits under the desk solved all of those 'problems'.
And they really turned out to just be excuses for why I didn't want to replace the cheese grater.
I got a mini wire rack shelf at a container store or BB&B or something. I forget it was 10 years ago.
Computer and raid enclosure on top shelf.
2nd drive enclosure and DSP boxes on bottom. Powersupplies underneath the shelf with velcro to tame the cables.
In the years since I've not regretted it. I haven't been able to upgrade the vid card. But then I also haven't had to monkey with any vid card foolishness.
Cables and power supplies for external storage havent been an issue. It took a little while to set it all up when I moved. Maybe 20 minutes longer than if they were internal. But I like the peace of mind of having all my long term digital stuff sitting on a RAID5 volume. Also, the cheese grater weighs a non-trivial amount. It's a pain to move, and my knees still have scars from the old one.
All of the peripherals and the cylinder Mac itself still don't add up to the monolith-like weight of the Mac Pro tower.
I'm planning on jumping on a Studio instead of Mac Pro when I upgrade next year.
PCIe storage cards are still niche enough to keep the prices inflated when compared to NVME or SATA SSDs. Video can saturate that kind of bandwidth. But even medium format files arent that bad on an external SSD or raid volume.
TBH the only reason I'd be moving to a new Mac Studio is because I don't count on Apple supporting the Intel stuff much longer. They supported POwerPC for a while after they started on Intel, but that was a different era of Apple where the Macs were more important to the bottom line and the company in general.