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MP All Models Buy cheap 7,1 or Studio
- Thread starter hornedrum
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That’s still damn good!
My afterburner card is still stuck in shipping. Need long range supersonic shipping drones!
These must be the bargain buy of the year. 2019 Mac Pros are damn solid machines and just keep going.
Now if that guy above got a brand new machine, where is the black keyboard and mouse?
They look as they should.
The iMac Pro had the space gray keyboard, the Mac Pro does not. It came with black keys. And he did get the black mouse.
edit: I just checked, and the new Mac Pro accessories has the same colour as the 7.1 had
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In the video title screen noticed non Apple mouse and what looked like one of the old G5 era clear plastic and white USB keyboards.
I'd say it is likely well and truly overkill for audio production. AS above people are still doing professional level audio work on 5,1 and earlier.
Given that, you DO need to bear in mind that it will go end of support sooner than an apple silicon device.
However, there's a lot to be said for having a Mac with a large amount of RAM, slots for PCIe storage, etc.
The only single concern I'd have would be longevity of software support, but if you've got your tool-set, know it runs on the hardware, etc. its probably an awesome buy to get that spec for half of what you'd spend on a new studio!
But... he could have this NOW, for a fraction of the cost, and it will still be overkill for audio production for several years (again as above, there are still audio professionals doing high end stuff using 5,1 and earlier!).
🤷♂️
When the 7,1 gets too old, upgrade to the M6 or M7 or whatever is current at that point, in the meantime I say save the money!
Whilst Windows can't run NATIVELY on Apple Silicon, I don't know what they've done on M series to make virtualisation work so well, but it works seriously well on Parallels in a VM.
Like... feels better than a lot of native PCs.
Maybe they were bought by a leasing company and they were asset tagged but never ended up getting issued.
Yes, Hrutkay channel is about old Apple vintage products. I have watched several of his videos, because I like the old Mac Pros. So it makes perfectly sense for him to display that as well. And he also mentions this in the start, by comparing the 7.1 to a vintage unboxing, and the last from the Intel era.
Since they were "new" but had an asset tag for Meta - we can assume Apple made them specifically for Meta, i.e. they were never 'unboxed', just had the tag applied at the factory by Apple/Foxconn.
Who knows how the eBay reseller got ahold of them. SHI is a leasing/asset company that would facilitate this for a company like Meta.
If I remember right that solution has an annoying subscription fee. Native windows doesn’t.
Sure, but you get the benefit of virtualising other stuff, OS snapshots, etc.
In the context of running windows on a machine worth several thousand dollars, to run software costing hundreds or thousands of dollars - sure it's a thing, but not insurmountable imho.
If the ability to roll back to a snapshot or spin up a "clean" copy of Windows from a sys prepped clone saves me a couple of hours it has paid for itself.
I just snared a W3275M Xeon today. 
Waiting for it to be shipped.
28 core 2.5ghz, W6800X + Afterburner card here we go!
Waiting for it to be shipped.28 core 2.5ghz, W6800X + Afterburner card here we go!
I just snared a W3275M Xeon today.
28 core 2.5ghz, W6800X + Afterburner card here we go!
how's the afterburner going to fit into your (3d modelling / rendering?) workflow?
Ahh right, I'll be interested to see how it goes. Mine seems to be idle most of the time, and I'm honestly a tad disappointed it doesn't seem to do more than ProRes Encode / Decode.
Can you disclose price (and even seller)?I just snared a W3275M Xeon today.
28 core 2.5ghz, W6800X + Afterburner card here we go!
I just got the CPU. Putting it in the machine I already have. The seller had just a few of those CPUs, they are gone now.
I would love the 2x W6800X Duos like you have, very envious.
As I understand it, one reason the afterburner card is so expensive because it's a massive FPGA (field programmable gate array - look it up, basically soft-reconfigurable "hardware"). FPGA are great for prototyping, but expensive vs. fixed function hardware due to their programmable nature (which is why after building it and testing it in low-volume in FPGA, apple built it into Apple Silicon - at much much lower cost).
It would be neat if somebody figured out how to re-program it - because if it is indeed a big FPGA, it could be programmed to do basically anything "in hardware" assuming there's enough logic gates available on the device.
It is. Did a search on the internet a few weeks ago, about this. And Apple is hiring people who have skills in this area, in several countries. But I didn't find any information if there is any who has reprogrammed this card.
FGPA / Emulation engineer
Intel might have a tool for Linux
Intel FPGA AI Suite
On AMD side
AMD FGPA
Yeah, and that's what I think a lot of us had hoped it would become, a dynamically reconfiguring tool. BUT I think the existence of such a thing is a different tech path to the one Apple wants to follow (buy a new device). The Afterburner's going to end up like the eMate 300 (which I also own).
True.
Oh for sure I have no doubt Apple have no interest in reconfiguring it.
As far as they're concerned it's a 5 year old EOL product that has functionality built into all new M series processors. It's not in their interests to bother with it. Also, for Apple the Mac Pro is a video production workstation. The FPGA side isn't useful because it is already programmed to do the job they wanted it to do.
But... it would be cool if someone else could unlock it to play with the FPGA side.
Apple will no doubt continually need/want FPGA engineers outside of the afterburner card for prototyping designs internally before putting them into volume production. You can bet they're using FPGA internally to test/play with new designs prior to producing them for real.
The Afterburner card is just one of those things that got released as FPGA because the volume isn't there really to mass produce it for the Mac Pro and the market for that machine is not price sensitive. i.e., Apple just absorbed the FPGA costs by keeping the cost of the afterburner card high. Because they could. Because at the time nobody had anything else that did its job anyway.
Also, as it was the first product with that functionality the FIELD PROGRAMMABLE part in FPGA enabled Apple to patch it with a macOS update if and when required if say, some showstopper was found in the design.
But the fact that it is built into every M1-pro onwards chip now should tell you how much cheaper (and smaller!) it is to mass produce once you spin up a fab to do it in actual (ASIC) hardware, not field programmable hardware
Ultimately real ASIC hardware is faster, cheaper (once you get to the market scale where fabricating in volume is feasible), smaller, etc.
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I found this about PCIe in the Mac Pro. And I suppose the 2023 Mac Pro is similar to the mac Studio
source: PCIe in Mac Pro
source: PCIe in Mac Pro
I just saw that the 7.1 has dropped to 2 to 2.5 grand in the UK on eBay. That’s pretty tempting, I too was considering a Mac Studio with M3 or M4 if that’s what it gets this year, but a 7.1 is adaptable and you can repair it yourself and upgrade it. But how long will Apple support it for with sorftware?
That's the real question
macOS 15.x support seams realistic. Beyond that is quite the risk.
I speculate that GPU improvements I'm the Studio M3/M4 will advance beyond the best PCIe GPU supported in a 7.1. Possibly there will be an edge case. But in summary, a Studio M3/M4 should be more powerful, not much more $, and will get ~10 years of macOS support.
I'd love to have a 7,1 but the value proposition slides quickly with every passing month.