Big project for cMP - Need advice before buying

[Will.henri]

Hello everyone ! I know my last post was about a year ago but I keep reading a lot (this forum give me headache, too much stuff I dont know). A lot of thing happen since then and I'm ready to give a second life to my studio's computer. I try to avoid switching all my system to PC and I would like to keep these mac for another 3-4 years. So here's my plan, I would really appreciate that some pro check it and tell my if this is a good idea.

We got two computer in the studio and we use daily Premiere Pro, After Effect and Davinci :

A cMP 4.1 (I've upgrade the firmware to a 5.1)
- Stock. Only upgrade is 22gig of ram.

And a cMP 5.1
- 10.12.6 (I had to upgrade because a client give us a PP project with the new software)
- 2x 2,4 GHz QuadCore Intel Xeon
- 22gig
- GeForce GTX 680 2gig (with Nvidia and Cuda driver up to date, but I dont use CUDA with PP anymore, its always got some weird issue when I render)

So here's my big plan :

- CPU : change the 5.1 for x5690 (240$)
- GPU : Upgrade the 5.1 for a 1080ti and switch the 680 gtx in the other. (800$)
- RAM : I think of buying 2x 8gig and put one in each. So they will get like 3x8gig each + 5x1gig. (90$) (the one I have is already 1333)

For the drive, during my research a found this as a model :
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-4-Storage-Optimization-854/

Drive 1, System Drive : 1x SSD 500gig Evo 850 (150$) + racking (20$)
Drive 2, Media Drive : 1x 960 Evo 1T SSD NVMe (430$) + PCie Card (this is the part I really dont know)
Drive 3, Cache Drive : 1x 1T SSD Evo 850 (330$) + racking (20$)
Drive 4, Export Drive : I will use one of the HDD i've got already in.

So yeah, that's the plan... Just to let you know, I'm a Filmmaker, I only know the basic of computer, please dont be too rude with me haha. I have a couple of interrogation :

- For about 4k$ for two computer (canadian dollars ... yhea haha), will the performance worth it?
- For the GPU, anyone know wich cable I have to buy to get over the power issues (http://www.macvidcards.com/blog/the-pesky-power-issue-with-pascal-1080ti-and-titan)
- For the media drive, someone know which card should I get for the best performance / price value? I've heard about the Angelbird, the Lycom and the Squid. I don't know If it would be better to get a x2 M.2 or just one. In fact, I'm really lost here.
- For the booth drive or the Cache Drive, should I put them into a Pcie card or the real world performance will not be good enough for the value

I'll really appreciate if you take some time for helping me. Thanks !
Will

 

[h9826790]

Hello everyone ! I know my last post was about a year ago but I keep reading a lot (this forum give me headache, too much stuff I dont know). A lot of thing happen since then and I'm ready to give a second life to my studio's computer. I try to avoid switching all my system to PC and I would like to keep these mac for another 3-4 years. So here's my plan, I would really appreciate that some pro check it and tell my if this is a good idea.

We got two computer in the studio and we use daily Premiere Pro, After Effect and Davinci :

A cMP 4.1 (I've upgrade the firmware to a 5.1)
- Stock. Only upgrade is 22gig of ram.

And a cMP 5.1
- 10.12.6 (I had to upgrade because a client give us a PP project with the new software)
- 2x 2,4 GHz QuadCore Intel Xeon
- 22gig
- GeForce GTX 680 2gig (with Nvidia and Cuda driver up to date, but I dont use CUDA with PP anymore, its always got some weird issue when I render)

So here's my big plan :

- CPU : change the 5.1 for x5690 (240$)
- GPU : Upgrade the 5.1 for a 1080ti and switch the 680 gtx in the other. (800$)
- RAM : I think of buying 2x 8gig and put one in each. So they will get like 3x8gig each + 5x1gig. (90$) (the one I have is already 1333)

For the drive, during my research a found this as a model :
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-4-Storage-Optimization-854/

Drive 1, System Drive : 1x SSD 500gig Evo 850 (150$) + racking (20$)
Drive 2, Media Drive : 1x 960 Evo 1T SSD NVMe (430$) + PCie Card (this is the part I really dont know)
Drive 3, Cache Drive : 1x 1T SSD Evo 850 (330$) + racking (20$)
Drive 4, Export Drive : I will use one of the HDD i've got already in.

So yeah, that's the plan... Just to let you know, I'm a Filmmaker, I only know the basic of computer, please dont be too rude with me haha. I have a couple of interrogation :

- For about 4k$ for two computer (canadian dollars ... yhea haha), will the performance worth it?
- For the GPU, anyone know wich cable I have to buy to get over the power issues (http://www.macvidcards.com/blog/the-pesky-power-issue-with-pascal-1080ti-and-titan)
- For the media drive, someone know which card should I get for the best performance / price value? I've heard about the Angelbird, the Lycom and the Squid. I don't know If it would be better to get a x2 M.2 or just one. In fact, I'm really lost here.
- For the booth drive or the Cache Drive, should I put them into a Pcie card or the real world performance will not be good enough for the value

I'll really appreciate if you take some time for helping me. Thanks !
Will

Your OWC sled won't work with the 850 Evo, that's for large capacity 3.5" HDD, not 2.5" SSD.

For SSD, if you happy to run it with the native SATA port. You can either plug it into one of the optical bay SATA port, just leave it there with zero support. Or remove the case and just insert the SSD into the port (like the following pic). Both are zero cost option.

If you really want some support, you will need a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor, and make sure the adaptor has mount points on the top to fit the stock sled. However, IMO, it's really not required. I tried both zero cost methods, both work fine for more than a year already.

960 Evo is a good choice of high performance SSD, however, not that good on cMP. Since you mentioned that you just know the basic of computer, you better avoid that. At this moment, NVMe SSD is not natively supported in MacOS. That means you need to install 3rd party driver for that, and that means, you need to disable SIP for that, and that means more chance of messing up the system.....

If you want PCIe SSD, either try to get a SM951 AHCI, or Kingston HyperX Predator AHCI 960GB (if you really need this size).

Not an expert in your area, but I believe OS on the SATA SSD is good enough, no need to go for PCIe SSD. That may be a bit faster, but just tiny, not worth the money.

For Cache / scratch, they should go into the fastest drive, that means the PCIe SSD.

The media files go into the remaining SSD should be good enough.

However, that assume you spend more time on editing than copying files. If you just need little bit of time to do few regular / systematic editing. But most of time on copying very large files. Then you should use the PCIe SSD to minimise the file transfer time. But I believe editing is more important than copying. In general, as long as the copying speed is reasonable, you can leave it in the background, and then do your editing in the foreground.

Also, wonder why you go for 1080Ti if you don't use CUDA. That is expensive, high power consumption, not OOTB (in fact, it won't display anything at all without web driver), and may be problematic on powering it. I believe go for something like RX580 is more reasonable. But I really don't know how much performance difference between these 2 cards in your working software.

 

[Nabru50]

I've been looking into upgrading my storage options on my cMP as well.

This video shows some pretty drastic performance differences between a SATA 6G SSD connected via SATA II vs connected via some PCIe adapter. I'm not sure how noticeable it will be for booting/day-to-day tasks, but I'm tempted to spend a little extra and try connecting this m.2 SATA SSD with this adapter. It will be slower than NVMe, but it sounds like booting off NVMe would be impossible. As far as I can tell, it should at least work and perform a lot better than a regular 2.5" SSD connected to one of the 4 SATA connectors on the Mac.

 

[kschendel]

For one real world data point, I have both SATA 2 (drive bay) and NVMe SSD in my machine. It's running linux, not OSX, but I would expect speeds to be about the same. I can only occasionally tell the difference between the SATA and NVMe filesystems subjectively. If I'm running a long benchmark job that is I/O intensive, the NVMe is faster by maybe 25-40% on average, looking at total time of the benchmark, and depending on exactly what I'm trying to do. So, real world speeds don't necessarily reflect what you get from the black magic benchmarks.

I think I would suggest sticking with all SATA SSD to see if that is fast enough. If not then you can try a PCIe device, but unless you're using High Sierra I don't think you can use NVMe on OSX, so you'll need to find and AHCI unit and they are getting hard to find and relatively expensive.

N.B. My SATA SSD's are a Mushkin Reactor 1 Tb and an AData 128 Gb. The PCIe SSD is a Toshiba OCZ RD400. The high end Samsung's are probably a tiny bit faster but I seriously doubt that I would be able to tell in normal use.

If you need top speed, get one of the Amfeltec squid cards and load it up, or you could take a couple SATA drives and stripe them with RAID 0 in software. I doubt that either one is an ideal answer for you unless you have someone set it up for you, as it's likely to take some fiddling.

 

[leon771]

You state that you don’t use CUDA for rendering.
Will upgrading to 1080 ti give you any benefit over the 680 if not using Nvidia CUDA driver?

You’ve mentioned that these are production machines.
I can’t see the business case for spending $4k on out of warranty equipment.
I’d retire the machines as backup and replace them with Windows boxes.
I’m assuming you have a CC subscription so could download windows versions of your adobe apps.

 

[fendersrule]

I've been looking into upgrading my storage options on my cMP as well.

This video shows some pretty drastic performance differences between a SATA 6G SSD connected via SATA II vs connected via some PCIe adapter. I'm not sure how noticeable it will be for booting/day-to-day tasks, but I'm tempted to spend a little extra and try connecting this m.2 SATA SSD with this adapter. It will be slower than NVMe, but it sounds like booting off NVMe would be impossible. As far as I can tell, it should at least work and perform a lot better than a regular 2.5" SSD connected to one of the 4 SATA connectors on the Mac.

Zero, zilch, nada real-world difference between SATA 2 and SATA 3. I would have saved money and stuck with SATA 2 during my build if I knew what I know now.

Unless you have some insane workflow that involves moving around big files all the time, no reason to sweat over not having SATA 3. Save your money.

 

[h9826790]

I've been looking into upgrading my storage options on my cMP as well.

This video shows some pretty drastic performance differences between a SATA 6G SSD connected via SATA II vs connected via some PCIe adapter. I'm not sure how noticeable it will be for booting/day-to-day tasks, but I'm tempted to spend a little extra and try connecting this m.2 SATA SSD with this adapter. It will be slower than NVMe, but it sounds like booting off NVMe would be impossible. As far as I can tell, it should at least work and perform a lot better than a regular 2.5" SSD connected to one of the 4 SATA connectors on the Mac.

It depends on why you need the SSD, if using it for OS / Apps. You can hardly feel any difference by connecting it to one of the SATA II port. Because what you are utilising is the low latency, not high sequential speed. In fact, for day to day OS operation, the SSD rarely need to read / write above 250MB/s. Even it does, just for very short period of time. For most users, finish loading in 0.1 or 0.2s won't make any difference.

Anyway, here is the video that what speed of OS / loading apps from a 840 Evo connected to a SATA II port. I have a SATA III card, and I can tell you that there is almost no difference on day to day use. Especially when the APFS arrived, even file cloning has no benefit. It's mainly down to zip / unzip, or large file copying (to / from another partition) can utilise the SATA III speed from day to day task.

This is my SSD loading in the last 7 days. I did't quite a bit of video encoding in this week, little bit video editing, and some photos editing. The rest are almost down to some day to day task, zip/unzip, Safari, normal file's operations, backup, etc. As you can see. even though I now put it on a SATA III card. It can rarely utilise the max sequential speed, not even up to the SATA 2 limit. If your main usage is not copying files / benchmarking. This should be similar to the normal day to day demand.

 

[nigelbb]

You state that you don’t use CUDA for rendering.
Will upgrading to 1080 ti give you any benefit over the 680 if not using Nvidia CUDA driver?

If performance is OK on the 5,1 with the GTX680 then just buy another used GTX680 for $100 & save yourself $700 by not buying the 1080. With some of the money you save upgrade the 4,1 to a 3,33/3.46GHz CPU,

 

[orph]

hay i remember your last topic

the CPU upgrades will be relay good ^^ 2.4ghz to 3.46 with 4 extra cores will be a big boost

will there be problems from installing only a single one 8GB stick in to each computer? iv always installed ram in matched pairs? (it's super cheep on ebay, i got some x-server ram 32GB 4x8GB for less than £50 might be worth going for 2x8gb sticks for each computer as it's not a massive cost)

not shore about the GPU depending on your workloads you may not need a 1080TI, lots of stuff is not massively GPU dependent but some stuff is and can depend on resolution and workflows
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...017-GeForce-GTX-1080-Ti-11GB-Performance-912/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-After-Effects-CC-2015-3-Pascal-GPU-Performance-846/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-3-Pascal-GPU-Performance-840/
in this link you can see the GTX1060 is the same speed in most things to the GTX1080

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CS6-GPU-Acceleration-162/
tad older but shows the diminishing returns for some tasks

tho if your working in 4K then the rule of thum is to have 4GB vram on the GPU after that for some things you hit diminishing returns in a big way.

but resolve will love a nice GPU, might be worth asking on there forums for advice about what you may need based on
resolution and complexity of grading you do/need.

the newer Nvidia GPU's may give problems as there using the non native driver so if you get a pascal GPU do test all your software and check it's not having problems (im not 100% as im using a GTX770 with the native driver but there have been some reports of problems with 9xx/10xx cards)
for the ATI cards you may need to move to a newer version of osx (not shore also as i dont have one) but some of them have native support so you dont have to mess around as much.
a RX570/580 may be an option if you can use openCL

(all PP topics https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_articles.php?tag=Premiere Pro some nice one's on drive setups and scratch disk etc)

if you do need to move to windows later the GPU/drives etc can be re used (but the data on them will have to be transferred first for safety, or make a hack.

 

[Squuiid]

View attachment 714331

I like this a lot. Very cool!

 

[Will.henri]

Thanks again everyone.

@h9826790 I'll try the zero cost option! Look good.

960 Evo is a good choice of high performance SSD, however, not that good on cMP. Since you mentioned that you just know the basic of computer, you better avoid that. At this moment, NVMe SSD is not natively supported in MacOS. That means you need to install 3rd party driver for that, and that means, you need to disable SIP for that, and that means more chance of messing up the system.....

If you want PCIe SSD, either try to get a SM951 AHCI, or Kingston HyperX Predator AHCI 960GB (if you really need this size).

Maybe i'm wrong, but why AHCI are much expensive for something less '' futur proof '' ? Do you think I should wait for High Sierra and get a NVMe (or it's a myth haha)? Another option will be a classic SSD (not the M.2) with a card like that or M.2 is better?

You state that you don’t use CUDA for rendering.
Will upgrading to 1080 ti give you any benefit over the 680 if not using Nvidia CUDA driver?

You’ve mentioned that these are production machines.
I can’t see the business case for spending $4k on out of warranty equipment.
I’d retire the machines as backup and replace them with Windows boxes.
I’m assuming you have a CC subscription so could download windows versions of your adobe apps.

After reading all of you, I think I'll just buy a cheaper GPU. For now, we got too much client working in mac to switch.

hay i remember your last topic

the CPU upgrades will be relay good ^^ 2.4ghz to 3.46 with 4 extra cores will be a big boost

will there be problems from installing only a single one 8GB stick in to each computer? iv always installed ram in matched pairs? (it's super cheep on ebay, i got some x-server ram 32GB 4x8GB for less than £50 might be worth going for 2x8gb sticks for each computer as it's not a massive cost)

tho if your working in 4K then the rule of thum is to have 4GB vram on the GPU after that for some things you hit diminishing returns in a big way.

but resolve will love a nice GPU, might be worth asking on there forums for advice about what you may need based on
resolution and complexity of grading you do/need.

Yhea, me again ! Thanks for all the link from pudget, I have see the storage and CPU test but not all of them with the GPU. I'll take note for the 2x stick of RAM. And for the GPU, I was thinking of another 680gtx like @nigelbb said but its 2gig of VRAM and Resolve need more GPU than Premiere Pro. Do someone know a better option than the gtx680 and cheapper than the 1080ti? The 1060 and 1070 is a lot cheaper! I have to read more on this but if someone have a cue.

Really appreciate your help !