Not quite. My personal experience is that a 430VDC electric shock without current limit hurts. Are you going to tell me it doesn’t? Personal experience does have a place.
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Apple Made Me Buy a Windows HP Workstation
- Thread starter Mark Holmes
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What's your point again? The amd firepro graphics cards were already outdated when Apple put them in their nMP in 2013. What's the point of using a dual gpu design if the card used is average at best? That's just wasting your money at the customer's expense. They installed an average graphics card at a point in time were it was already old inside a system that's not upgradable.
I can't stress this enough: the only reason to buy a nMP, even at launch, was the design, low carbon footprint and thunderbolt 3 at the cost previously possible upgradability. To me, and this is me being completely judgemental, they turned the nMP into a fashion object that's attractive to the average consumer at best who doesn't really care about hardware peformance.
And to be honest, as a professional (it is even weird for me having to say this, because this is so self-evident), what comes first is technological innovation and hardware performance and not design and low carbon footprint... They simply turned the Mac Pro into an overpriced average consumer product. Given the product Apple put out, Phil Schiller's "can't innovate anymore, my ass" has been amongst the most laughable statement I've ever heard from an Apple spokesperson ever. The entire presentation and Apples product unveiling came across to me as if they had gone completely mad.
Professional colleagues of mine were simply shocked and later on numb by what Apple put out into the world.
To put it simple, as a professional, working with software, you need a very strong system from the start and upgradability, unless the product introduced is at least 3 years ahead of its time. It might've been a dandy machine for people who have not upradated their Mac Pro for a very long time or for those who have never owned one in their life. But even they begin to regret their purchase, noticing that they are stuck with the same graphics card for as long as they work with that particular machine, looking for an external graphics solution via thunderbolt.
For professionals, the nMP has been a bad product all around, who care about performance and upgradability.
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The base model starts at $1700-ish but it was the 64 GB RAM modules that sent the price up the most, by $2000. You can fiddle around here to see what you can come up with. Have fun! I'm not sure how the computer reacts if you opt for cheaper non-HP RAM in this machine.
http://store.hp.com/us/en/Configure...r163_us/en/pc_comm/workstations/z640/shopnow2
There is little doubt that product designers, engineers, architects, researchers, scientists and many others are all in the same boat as 'the movie people' on this one.
Since the MSI Vortex PC came out it became evident it was not always about the design, but about who designed it. The many people who adamantly disliked the nMP haled the Vortex as revolutionary. The contradiction and irony is so evident. In many cases its just a smokescreen.
I don't think anyone is haling the Vortex as revolutionary. They took the nMP idea and gave it modern consumer hardware components, which fits the product vision a lot better. Although, on a side note, they kind of ruined the design at the same time.
They turned a minimalist trashcan into an asymmetrical floating potato.
That's one thing I hate about gaming PCs. They try so damn hard to look cool, all they do is end up looking dorky.
The nMP case is a monolithic machined piece of anodized aluminum. The impression I get from its design is quality, strength, compact power, and a style that is understated and classy.
The Vortex case appears to be a dozen or so pieces of injection molded plastic shells screwed together with a bunch of little screws. Then they added red glowing lighting effects all over this Tupperware, not to mention the Ferrari/Lamborghini-reminiscent badge slapped on front in order to woo over male teenagers. The impression I get is cheapness, lots of little parts, acres of plastic, and in-your-face garish gamer styling. All it needs are some UV-glow liquid cooling hoses running everywhere in order for them to hit the perfect Vortex of Vulgarity.
I'm just talking about the case design of course, since you asked. The internal equipment is another matter completely and that is arguably more important.
Machines like SGI O2 were there years ago
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This little beast on the far right
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I actually ended up buying from B&h Photo and Video in NYC. They either have worked out a discount with HP or the HP website is such a mess that I couldn't figure out how to get the same system through them. I actually couldn't get the exact configuration from B&H (I wanted a 512GB SSD) so spent like half an hour trying to make it work on the HP site to no avail. I've been really happy with B&H over the years so just got it through them:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1170651-REG/hp_p0c92ut_aba_z640_series_p0c92ut_tower.html
Maybe that's what I was really asking. I'm sure we all took a close look at the iFixit teardown of the nMP. And if so, the teardown of the MSI Vortex should be of similar interest. Watch it and see what you think:
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Should've built your own PC yourself.
Personally I can't wait to see what Apple's Senior Vice President of Innovation Proctology will be able to pull out of his ass at WWDC 2016!
Um, no. Did that years ago when we edited our first feature. I've found there is a lot to be appreciated in a professionally built workstation. Like stability.
It certainly does. But....your trying to associate a scientific fact ( Electric shock ) to a personal opinion. Not the same thing. What you have done is known as an association fallacy. Comparing a fact to an opinion in an attempt to say they are the same thing. Personal experience is talking about a single person, not everyone.
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Say what you want about the Vortex, it's Mobil GPUs can be swapped at will. The MXM GTX980s are in fact full desktop versions on MXM board.
Compare this to the 6,1 running 2011 GPUs on Mobil boards that exist no place else. Lower clocks and power compared to the desktop version and no future. The 6,1 is dead in the water with 2011 GPUs you can't replace.
When I typed that 3 years ago I got called a lot of names.
But I was right.
Ugly as the MSI Vortex is, the owners will be slapping dual 1070s or 1080s in the next year while 6,1 prices CRATER along with demand for 2011 era AMD hand warmers. Once 7,1 comes out EBay will be flooded, prices will drop like a paralyzed falcon.
Compare this to the 6,1 running 2011 GPUs on Mobil boards that exist no place else. Lower clocks and power compared to the desktop version and no future. The 6,1 is dead in the water with 2011 GPUs you can't replace.
When I typed that 3 years ago I got called a lot of names.
But I was right.
Ugly as the MSI Vortex is, the owners will be slapping dual 1070s or 1080s in the next year while 6,1 prices CRATER along with demand for 2011 era AMD hand warmers. Once 7,1 comes out EBay will be flooded, prices will drop like a paralyzed falcon.
No, you got called a lot of names because you just don't get it. The 6,1 is the best thing since sliced bread! Who cares if the GPU's are old, the monitor still can be seen. What matters is how many replies and views are in that "other" thread! Nothing what you say matters! Not to mention I stopped fighting and resisting the 6,1 wave. It's bigger than all of us so I switched to the other side!
Ask yourself, why Industry is going into stacked, multiple GPUs on single interposer. Ask yourself, how you will be able to fit 40-50 GPU dies in any tower internally? Ask yourself, why Thunderbolt was codeveloped by Intel? Because external expansion IS THE WAY TO GO, to mitigate increased production costs of silicon on smaller nodes. That is very reason why AMD is already loud about scalability of the GPUs. That is why it is important for any OS to see all the GPUs connected to a single computer as a single GPU cluster.
It is the way to go for whole industry. All you people all the time rumble about in this thread and other threads, is dead idea of computing. I have been writing this for 2 years now, since Apple presented Mac Pro. You were not listening, even if every proof that I provided is getting into place(Mantle, HSA, Scalability, external expansion). Small form factor is the way to go for any type of computer. You will have 1-2 GPUs Fury Nano sized, regardless of brand(it is form factor for all HBM GPUs) inside the computer, and if you will want you will get another 40-50 GPUs is a GPU cluster box. You want to know what are 2 key reasons driving this? Efficiency, and production costs.
Mac Pro like computers, even if you like it or not, will be in close future the go-to design. And yes, Apple have made a bad decision. They shown the Mac Pro too early. But right now in, 2016 there is more to think about it, than it was in 2013.
If you know how to build and configure a machine for workstation use then you will make it stable whether it is a built-to-order Mac Pro, an old cMP, modified cMP, a Hackintosh or a Windows PC.
I have built hundreds of PCs -- I used to work at a company doing this and investigating the various integration problems in a specific configuration. Anybody can slap parts together. The problem is achieving the final level of integration and reliability. You can get lucky, use a *supposedly* well-known configuration and it might work. Or maybe one of the components has undergone a running change in manufacturing, microcode update, etc. which leads down a rabbit hole of trial-and-error debugging, returning parts, trying new ones, more tests, etc.
Nowadays it can often work well but there is always the risk of hitting one of these problems which can be very frustrating and time consuming. That is why large PC manufacturers have integration and test departments. Some engineer is sitting in front of a logic analyzer studying an infrequent, transient glitch caused by an incompatibility between components:
https://joema.smugmug.com/Computers/Tektronix-TekMSO72004/n-6z8VhG/i-52kXRLG/XL
They send trace files to their counterparts at other companies trying to figure out whose component is responsible for some difficult-to-reproduce problem.
A home PC builder cannot do this. They must simply hope that the individual components work perfectly and they don't get caught in a tedious, infrequent integration problem that saps time and patience. Usually it works pretty well, in fact I am typing this on a PC I built. However despite my extensive experience I am tired of doing that and do most of my professional video editing on an iMac.
That is exact definition of Post-PC era. Getting rid of custom built computers. Buying whole computer rather than bits that you can stick like Lego. If you will want custom built PC - workstation parts(Quadros, FirePros, Opterons, Xeons). It is to help with shrinking desktop PC market, and increased production costs.
Thanks for the lecture but there are many thousands of people who build their own workstations and don't have these issues. I've been doing it since 1996 and the days of NT 3.51 and never had a problem that couldn't be fixed quickly if it was a build issue. Keep the software and hardware configuration clean and efficient with the options that you need for optimal performance, and nothing more than that. This is how companies provide workstation solutions and it's easy for home builders to do the same. All those dozens of builders, testers and bench markers on YouTube can't be wrong can they?