$3000 Budget: Refurb Mac Pro 8-core 2.4 or new iMac?

[gnomeisland]

eSATA is 6Gb/s. However, that is a single connection. You can get HBAs or RAID cards with multiple connections, though. 4 or 8 are quite common, giving you considerably more performance than Thunderbolt.

Now that storage arrays are finally coming out for TB I think that's a better deal than eSATA. You can get 4X or 8X port adapters for eSATA but I don't know of any transparent way of tying that bandwidth together. Plus you've got to be on an 8 or 16 lane PCIe bus or you'll bottleneck before you hit TB speeds. Remember TB is a 4 lane PCIe interface over that tiny wire.

eSata will probably provide the speeds the OP needs but I think TB is still a much better tech for external storage. Although less proven and prevalent at this point.

 

[Transporteur]

Now that storage arrays are finally coming out for TB I think that's a better deal than eSATA. You can get 4X or 8X port adapters for eSATA but I don't know of any transparent way of tying that bandwidth together. Plus you've got to be on an 8 or 16 lane PCIe bus or you'll bottleneck before you hit TB speeds. Remember TB is a 4 lane PCIe interface over that tiny wire.

eSata will probably provide the speeds the OP needs but I think TB is still a much better tech for external storage. Although less proven and prevalent at this point.

TB maxes out at about 800MB/s. A single PCIe 2.0 lane already provides 500MB/s, so a two lane slot is already faster than TB. However, those before mentioned 4 or 8 port eSATA cards usually use a 4 or 8 lane PCIe slot.

The transparent way of tying bandwidth together is called RAID. Nothing different to TB in this case as you'll need a RAID to reach transfer speeds of 800MB/s (two SSDs/6 mechanical drives in RAID0). eSATA can easily reach transfer speeds of 2GB/s, it's a simple question of scaling the hardware.
With TB, you're limited to 800MB/s for a single port.

 

[HXGuy]

No problem for the quad core. You really shouldn't focus on the processor too much. RAM and IO are much more important these days as you will most likely never max out your processor unless you're doing video rendering or alike.

Don't get me wrong, the octad is not a bad machine (in fact I've got the same machine from last year and I'm more than happy with it), but for your requirements, there are better ones available (quad/hex).

Good info, thanks.

So...looking at what's available now on the Refurb Macs...

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/mac_pro?mco=MjEwNzM3NTk

Which would you say is best for a $3000 budget? And honestly, if I could spend less...or spend it more wisely, I would rather do that. I know you said the Hex is good, and it's $3,149 but that's with 3GB RAM and I'm going to want at least 12GB, so the price will go up quite a bit, especially once you add tax and such.

How would that $2,119 2.8Ghz Quad do with a bunch of RAM, say 16GB?

 

[anim8or]

I would say that you are more likely to start taking on video work so i would try and budget for the mac pro, the expandability (limited as it is) will benefit you should you choose to take on any kind of video design...

As for the software using more cores... this is also a good possibility, yes the i7 can Hyper Thread, but why hyper thread when you can use REAL cores instead of virtual cores....

The Mac Pro will also let you install 64GB of RAM over the 16GB that you can with the iMac.

eDIT: in response to the above... RAM is MUCH cheaper from 3rd Party than from Apple, you will be able to max out the RAM for very cheap....

 

[HXGuy]

The Mac Pro will also let you install 64GB of RAM over the 16GB that you can with the iMac.

eDIT: in response to the above... RAM is MUCH cheaper from 3rd Party than from Apple, you will be able to max out the RAM for very cheap....

Yea, I was actually just looking on Newegg and 16GB (4x4GB) is $289.

Also though, the Quad and Hex 2010 Mac Pros can support up to 16GB, not 64GB.

Edit: Hmm, looks like that may be a typo on the Refurb Mac specs. If you go to the new Macs, it says the dual-processor systems support up to 64GB and the single-processor up to 32MB.

 

[Transporteur]

Good info, thanks.

So...looking at what's available now on the Refurb Macs...

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/mac_pro?mco=MjEwNzM3NTk

Which would you say is best for a $3000 budget? And honestly, if I could spend less...or spend it more wisely, I would rather do that. I know you said the Hex is good, and it's $3,149 but that's with 3GB RAM and I'm going to want at least 12GB, so the price will go up quite a bit, especially once you add tax and such.

How would that $2,119 2.8Ghz Quad do with a bunch of RAM, say 16GB?

I'm not sure where your company stands in terms of upgrades down the line, but the most sensible machine you can get today is indeed the 2.8GHz quad. Upgrade it directly to 16GB of RAM (using third party of course) and get your IO sorted (SSD for boot, another one for scratch, mechanicals for storage is advisable). Including all those upgrades you should stay just under $3000.
Now if you feel that the CPU isn't enough in one or two years (you mentioned the planned life time will be 4 years), you can easily drop in a 6-core processor that will set you back another $300 to $400.

Personally, I think this is the only sensible way to get the most for your money. Buying a machine (such as the octad) that will be slow today (besides being extremely expensive if you add the updates you need (RAM and IO)), isn't really smart. Your software MIGHT catch up with the hardware in a couple of years, but do you really want to compute slowly till then? I wouldn't. The quad will be faster today and there is no doubt about it, and in two years, pop in the hex core if performance doesn't cut it any more. That will still be cheaper than the 8-core today and be faster in any way.
I hope that makes sense.

 

[anim8or]

Yea, I was actually just looking on Newegg and 16GB (4x4GB) is $289.

Also though, the Quad and Hex 2010 Mac Pros can support up to 16GB, not 64GB.

Edit: Hmm, looks like that may be a typo on the Refurb Mac specs. If you go to the new Macs, it says the dual-processor systems support up to 64GB and the single-processor up to 32MB.

The Quad can take 32GB... as can the Hex... as long as the RAM are matching pairs then 8GB RAM modules will work.... so 4x8GB sticks!

 

[HXGuy]

I'm not sure where your company stands in terms of upgrades down the line, but the most sensible machine you can get today is indeed the 2.8GHz quad. Upgrade it directly to 16GB of RAM (using third party of course) and get your IO sorted (SSD for boot, another one for scratch, mechanicals for storage is advisable). Including all those upgrades you should stay just under $3000.
Now if you feel that the CPU isn't enough in one or two years (you mentioned the planned life time will be 4 years), you can easily drop in a 6-core processor that will set you back another $300 to $400.

Personally, I think this is the only sensible way to get the most for your money. Buying a machine (such as the octad) that will be slow today (besides being extremely expensive if you add the updates you need (RAM and IO)), isn't really smart. Your software MIGHT catch up with the hardware in a couple of years, but do you really want to compute slowly till then? I wouldn't. The quad will be faster today and there is no doubt about it, and in two years, pop in the hex core if performance doesn't cut it any more. That will still be cheaper than the 8-core today and be faster in any way.
I hope that makes sense.

Makes perfect sense actually. I didn't know you could just drop in a Hex processor into it at a later time, that sounds great.

As for the IO stuff you mentioned...especially the SSD, how would you set that up? We need a lot of storage and also backup (using Time Machine). If I understand boot disks correctly, the OS and Apps would be installed on the SSD boot disk right...but what about the files you are actually working on? If they are on a slower disk, when opening, working on them, and saving, will you get a benefit from the SSD?

Edit: A couple more details on the system we are currently using if it helps in your assessment.

2.3Ghz Dual G5 PowerMac
6.5GB RAM
(1) 1GB HDD
(1) 750MB HDD

We are totally tapped out on space, sometimes having to delete really old files to clear up space so we need a lot more for future use. Would like one of the drives to be setup for Time Machine specifically...how does that interface with an SSD drive?

The system is painfully slow, even showing the Desktop through Expose takes a second, or having the Dock pop up.

Thanks for the continued help, much appreciated.

 

[thermodynamic]

You can calibrate the display, you just want to buy a 3rd party system that will do that for you. I'd go for the iMac at this point. I love my 2008 MP and 30" display, but if I were in the market, I'd buy a new imac.

I'm leaning that way as well, and absolutely - color calibration will improve color accuracy a great deal.

 

[Transporteur]

As for the IO stuff you mentioned...especially the SSD, how would you set that up? We need a lot of storage and also backup (using Time Machine). If I understand boot disks correctly, the OS and Apps would be installed on the SSD boot disk right...but what about the files you are actually working on? If they are on a slower disk, when opening, working on them, and saving, will you get a benefit from the SSD?

Don't get me wrong, SSD is no must, it sure does speed things up, though.
My suggestion (only suggestion, final assessment is totally up to you ) was two SSDs.
A medium sized one (80 to 120GB) for the OS and all your apps and libraries. That size should suffice, even for large libraries and cache files.
Then a second smallish (40GB) one where you keep the files you're currently working on (scratch). There is a variety of graphics users here that have this kind of setup and I've only heard positive feedback.

As for storage, I read from your posts that this will be a standalone machine, no servers, correct? In that case I'd use 2TB drives (they are cheap). Use one or two to store your data internally and external storage to back everything up.
The Mac Pro comes with a 1TB drive. I'd use that drive for a bootable clone of the OS drive and create another partition for a TimeMachine (versioned) backup of the scratch drive. That way you always have the machine up and running in case that either of the OS or scratch drive fails in a matter of minutes.
To backup the storage drives, I'd recommend an external enclosure with sufficient storage and use that with either TimeMachine or any form of rsync (rsync, CCC, SuperDuper).
Considering that the Mac Pro has only 5 internal ports for hard drives (plus one optical), that might actually be the only way to back up your data.

Edit: I just saw that the 3TB drives are actually quite cheap in the US. So you might not need an external solution for your primary backup after all.
1 OS SSD, 1 scratch SSD, 1 bootable backup (1TB), 1 3TB storage drive, 1 3TB backup drive.

 

[HXGuy]

Does the Mac Pro support 3TB drives? Looking at the specs online, it only lists 1TB and 2TB drives. http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html

For Time Machine, I understand that you need a larger (much larger?) drive than the drive you are backing up so that it can store a lot of versions of the same file? If the Time Machine drive is 1TB and your main drive is 1TB, then it will only store the most recent version, correct?

What I had in mind, prior to considering SSD, were 2 1TB drives, one as a boot/scratch drive and the other as a storage drive and then a 2TB drive to back up each. That should be enough space for the next year at least. (Currently there is 1.75GB in the system but 750MB is being used for Time Machine so really only 1GB is for boot/scratch/storage).

 

[observer]

why not lower end?

I agree with all the proposals people have made here. But the new low-end iMac is already a significant step up from what he has, isn't it? Why not spend $1500 and get a base 21.5, add 16G memory, get a big external Firewire800 drive, and wait till the MP develops? That would allow experience with a faster system, develop new workflows, etc.....

 

[Transporteur]

Does the Mac Pro support 3TB drives? Looking at the specs online, it only lists 1TB and 2TB drives. http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html

For Time Machine, I understand that you need a larger (much larger?) drive than the drive you are backing up so that it can store a lot of versions of the same file? If the Time Machine drive is 1TB and your main drive is 1TB, then it will only store the most recent version, correct?

OS X > 10.4 supports volumes up to 8EB (8 million TB), so 3TB won't be a problem. Apple lists only 2TB drives because they don't sell 3TB ones. Same with RAM, up till a few months ago, they listed the quad Mac Pro with 16GB RAM max because they didn't offer 8GB sticks.
Concerning RAM and hard drives, you can't go after Apple.

As for TimeMachine, you're right. If you want to make use of versioning, you need a larger drive (hence my recommendation for the 1TB drive for your current work files on a small 40GB SSD, that would give you plenty of versions for each file).

If you don't want to jump on the SSD train, your double 1TB drive and 2TB for backup is fine as well, albeit considerably slower of course.
But besides the 2TB TimeMachine volume, I'd always consider a bootable clone of your boot/app drive. If that drive fails, restoring from TimeMachine is a real pain in the arse. So additionally, I'd recommend a second backup drive only for that purpose (1TB in your case).

 

[HXGuy]

Bootable clone...does not compute.

I get what it means...but how is this done/setup?

 

[Transporteur]

Bootable clone...does not compute.
I get what it means...but how is this done/setup?

Simple. Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) does it all for you. All you need is an empty drive or partition. You can even schedule the cloning process.
I've got my backup scheduled every night (computer starts in the middle of the night, clones the boot drive and backups all the data on the other drives, and goes to sleep an hour later), so in case that my primary boot drive bites the dust (you never know with SSDs as there are no warnings such like the clicking noise of a mechanical drive), I can start the system from the clone and continue my work as if nothing happened.
In that case, I order a new drive, clone the drive again and be done with it.
With TimeMachine, you have to install the OS again, migrate all your stuff etc. etc.. It takes time and doesn't always work 100%. Very inconvenient if you ask me.

The software is free btw, in contrast to SuperDuper (the alternative), which costs a few bucks if you want a schedule backups.
I much prefer CCC.

 

[Digital Skunk]

To the OP . . . there should be no discussion about this at all, you have two choices:

1. If you can wait then wait for a machine that's upgradeable all the way down to the daughter board. If you have to keep it for 5 years, then the Mac Pro is the answer hands down. Waiting for TB is your choice, personally I'd wait for TB since it's not going to be backward compatible.

2. Grab the iMac and sell it when the Mac Pro comes to market. Again, if you need a machine right this very minute no questions asked then the current iMac with your 30" ACD attached is the better solution. I wouldn't put money on it lasting 5 years though, or if something like the HDD crashes it being a quick user serviceable part.

I am in the same boat, and I am holding out for the new freelance space (in the new house) so I can grab nice furniture . . . and the new Mac Pro to see if I really want to kick out another $500.

In the end, I am still going to lean toward the expandability and easy access granted by the Mac Pro over the iMac, even though that all in one goodness of the iMac is just SWEET!

 

[HXGuy]

Ok so...I think I've decided...2.8Ghz Quad Core it is. I figure it's better to spend less on a relevant system today and upgrade more often.

I would like to go the SSD route for the boot and scratch drives but a couple questions...

Why go with 80HB - 120GB on the boot and 40GB on the scratch? Does the boot need to be that big? I imagine only the OS and the Apps will be taking up space...everything else like be on the scratch disk or on the storage drives once the project is done with, right?

For the backup drive...say it's 1TB, would it be best to make 3 partitions on it...1 for a clone of the boot drive, 1 for a Time Machine of the boot drive and 1 for Time Machine for the scratch drive? Or is a Time Machine partition for the boot drive not necessary?

If I do that...it would take up 3 drive bays, leaving one for a storage drive. I would then need an external drive as you mentioned to do a Time Machine back up of the Storage drive.

Again thanks for all the advice...this is the best thread ever!

 

[HXGuy]

Another quick thought that popped into my head...

Can the DVD optical drive on the Mac Pro be switched out for a hard drive...so you would have 5 internal drives total?

We use the DVD drive, but very very rarely, and could do it with an external if it's possible to convert it to a hard drive.

 

[Ravich]

Yes, and Mac Pros have 2 DVD drives anyway, so theoretically that would be 6 internal drives?

Edit: to clarify, there are 2 superdrive bays. The mac pro only comes with 1 DVD drive though.

 

[HXGuy]

So there is cabling in place for a 2nd optical drive? Which means you can have 4 internal hard drives in their proper places...plus another internal hard drive where the 2nd optical would go...and still keep the DVD drive in there?

 

[HXGuy]

Another thought...

Can't the boot and the scratch be the same SSD drive? What would be the down side to this setup?

Then have a mechanical HDD with one partition as a boot clone and other as a TM for both the boot and scratch?

In this case, I could do one 128GB SDD vs a 60GB - 80GB for boot and another 60GB for scratch.

 

[sbb155]

I agree with all the proposals people have made here. But the new low-end iMac is already a significant step up from what he has, isn't it? Why not spend $1500 and get a base 21.5, add 16G memory, get a big external Firewire800 drive, and wait till the MP develops? That would allow experience with a faster system, develop new workflows, etc.....

sage comment

 

[gnomeisland]

Another thought...

Can't the boot and the scratch be the same SSD drive? What would be the down side to this setup?

Then have a mechanical HDD with one partition as a boot clone and other as a TM for both the boot and scratch?

In this case, I could do one 128GB SDD vs a 60GB - 80GB for boot and another 60GB for scratch.

I have a very different setup with very different needs but I think the issue here is speed, redundancy, and reliability.

SSD drives are (theoretically) capable of saturating the SATAII bus used on MPs. So by have one SDD as your boot (which will includes the OS, Apps, and misc user files that's why it's larger--you want some room to grow!) and another as scratch your computer and read/write the system/app driver at full speed while accessing the scratch drive at full speed. Plus SSD drives wear in proportion to the amounts of writes to the drives. You will write to your scratch disk very often so you don't want to wear out your mission critical OS & App disk with all the writes you need to make to you scratch SSD.

Coming from a mechanical drive setup I understand your point but SSDs work differently. In truth you probably want an SLC SSD for your scratch drive because they wear out less quickly than the more common MLC type SSDs however the difference in cost plus the advances in MLC SSD drives (most SSD drives are this type) means you can buy several MLC type SSD drives and get a longer total life span (we're talking ~ a decade) than a single SLC type SSD. Plus replacing a scratch disk when it wears out in 3-4 years won't interrupt your workflow if it is JUST used as a scratch disk.

As far as having a mechanical drive for both the boot clone and Timemachine, there are fewer speed reasons not to do this as your backups hopefully won't happen at the same time and not a critical points in your workflow; however, mechanical drives are cheaper than dirt right now. Less than $0.05/GB so given the extra peace of mind of having to have TWO drives fail in a addition to your OS & app drive fail is really a good idea. Not many people except high-end enterprise systems did this kind of redundancy five years ago because it was cost prohibitive. Now it is not. I have a RAID-Z drive for my client files with a separate drive doing regular backups of those files AND a separate drive Timemachining my work computer. A little over done? Possibly, but the extra $150 it cost me will be worth it the instant there's ever a problem.

So good questions, but buying two smaller SSDs and two smaller back up drives really is a smarter way to go.

 

[Chris7]

... I suspect Photoshop is the app you use that requires most power. From what I gather, Photoshop benefits more from fewer, faster processors than more, slower processors...

(I did not read more than a few posts on this thread, so please kindly disregard my comments if they have already been addressed.)

I have read this online also, with one blogger site advising to actually disable all but 4 cores for PS CS5. He had specs printed that showed that PS ran slower on 8 cores than 4 cores. I assume the problem will almost certainly be fixed with CS6, if your company pays for the upgrade.

You may want the freedom to upgrade the graphics card in a few years, as graphics cards seem to be getting better quite fast. E.g., PS CS5 requires a graphics card with at least 256 MB VRAM, which was an upgrade (that unfortunately I did not get) on the Mac Book Pro, just early 2008.

I have no experience with Mac Pro's, BTW.

 

[nanofrog]

So there is cabling in place for a 2nd optical drive? Which means you can have 4 internal hard drives in their proper places...plus another internal hard drive where the 2nd optical would go...and still keep the DVD drive in there?

Yes.

The ICH has a total of 6x SATA ports. 4 are used for the HDD bays, and one per ODD bay, one of which is occupied by the OEM DVD drive that ships with the system. So the 2nd ODD bay is empty, and has a connector you can plug into another HDD or SSD.

BTW, from the other thread, I was under the impression you already have a 2009 MP.