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D500 -vs- D700?

M

michael_aos

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 26, 2004
250
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Has anyone posted any comparisons between the D500 & D700?

I'm not doing anything with video / animation / games, nor do I have any plans to.

I ordered the D500 thinking it should be fine for general-purpose use for at least a couple years. I could cancel my order and switch to the D700 - which seems to be how most of the BTO's are getting - if there is a real advantage of the D700 over the D500 outside of video.
 
What are you actually doing? Without saying that the same question could be posed if the D500 is meaningful over the D300.
 
I'm waiting for Barefeat's review. I think they'll probably have a good comparison.
 
I predicted that the Hex+D700's would be the most popular choice (as seen in the poll). For me it comes down to this:

My reason for D700's was that the GPU side didn't look like after market upgradable so thats where I placed my priority, Apple thinks leveraging the GPU's is the future and I agree. The cost to get the top end D700's wasn't that bad compared to other upgrade options.

Offsetting that cost, I could drop from 1TB SSD to 512GB or from 8 core to 6 core but add Apple Care + Time Capsule.

As for the other parts....

The upgrade cost to Hex core wasn't too bad either although the jump to 8 core was significant but single core Ghz on the Hex was second best so that also had that area covered. It looks like the CPU is upgradable too so thats future proofed my nMP if I had made a mistake here.

As I wanted bootcamp I had to upgrade that SSD to 512GB, would have preferred 1TB but it was too much of a cost upgrade and decided that I would get an external Thunderbolt 2, 2TB drive for data. My old iMac has 256GB SSD and its been manageable for just OSX development so far.

16GB Ram, I have 12GB in my other workstation and its been border-line fine for what I do and if I ever need more ram, well its one area that I can upgrade myself for cheaper than Apple Ram.

Thats just my perspective, other people have priorities elsewhere. I am a 3D artist, programmer and gamer.
 
michael_aos said:
Has anyone posted any comparisons between the D500 & D700?

I'm not doing anything with video / animation / games, nor do I have any plans to.

I ordered the D500 thinking it should be fine for general-purpose use for at least a couple years. I could cancel my order and switch to the D700 - which seems to be how most of the BTO's are getting - if there is a real advantage of the D700 over the D500 outside of video.
Click to expand...

If it's general purpose you're perfectly fine with the dual D300 ... with room to spare actually. 2GB each of VRAM is more than enough if you're not doing any hardcore video, graphics work.
 
Will one see any performance gain between the video cards when powering multiple 4k displays?
 
I went with the 6 core and D700s.
I wanted the 8 core and D500s but the upgrade form 6 to 8 cores adds m,uchmore than the upgrade to D700s from D500s.
It also occurred to me that the GPU choice are almost certainly stuck for life. I can't imagine any scenario besides grey market where I would be able to buy an upgraded part. (ever try and get parts for an ACD?)
The CPU is socketed and even the SSD may be an upgrade at some point. The GPUs not so much.
I'm also kind of betting that more apps will take advantage of the GPUs down the road. Until then this is a good update to my current 2 core 2010 MBP which is starting to be too slow for my needs.
 
Anim said:
Apple thinks leveraging the GPU's is the future and I agree.
Click to expand...

That's what got me thinking about it too.

As I said, I don't do anything especially graphics intensive. I may want to drive 3x 4K displays at some point, but that's probably it.

If the OS and native (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, etc) and common (Java, etc) apps start leveraging the resources of the 2nd GPU it could extend the usable life of the system quite a bit.

I was kind of looking at the GPU options as "good, better, best" and figured the default offering was probably fine.

As an aside, I do also typically run BOINC w/SETI@home as my screen-saver. I don't know much - if any -- it would benefit from the D500 -> D700 upgrade.
 
michael_aos said:
Has anyone posted any comparisons between the D500 & D700?

I'm not doing anything with video / animation / games, nor do I have any plans to.

I ordered the D500 thinking it should be fine for general-purpose use for at least a couple years. I could cancel my order and switch to the D700 - which seems to be how most of the BTO's are getting - if there is a real advantage of the D700 over the D500 outside of video.
Click to expand...

See this thread which makes D300 > D500 in Heaven

https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=18581383#65
 
michael_aos said:
If the OS and native (Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, etc) and common (Java, etc) apps start leveraging the resources of the 2nd GPU it could extend the usable life of the system quite a bit.
Click to expand...

It depends what framework is required when that actually happens. Right now the latest spec in the wild is OpenCL 1.2, but it has been out for some time. OpenCL 2.0 is finalized at this point. It also will not guarantee a longer support cycle from Apple, although the only way that seems to be really bad is if you're on the wrong end of a transition period.
 
I'm deleting a user account on my Late 2012 Mac Mini. 2.6Ghz quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, Fusion drive.

CPU is ~50% utilized. 71.5% mds, 70% mds_stores, 45.1% diskimages-helper, 25% kernel_task (plus everything else). 800%=fully utilized

So 50% (~2-cores) idle, yet the fan in the Mini is SCREAMING!

If future versions of OS X were to speed some of these tasks up by offloading them to the GPU, that would be a reason for me to opt for the D700 over the D500.
--
 
I'm still toying with the idea of canceling my order with the D500 and submitting a new order with the D700.
 
Here's my 2-cents on this... Before I ordered, I was intent on getting the D300s as I knew they would be plenty of GPU for me... I don't game or do rendering. However, when I started building my BTO on the Apple site, the upgrade to the D500s was only a few hundred dollars (EDU pricing) so I thought, "why not?"... for the added VRAM and compute power that may come in handy down the road. It seemed like peanuts in the grand scheme of things... but the upgrade to the D700s was more difficult to justify :eek:
 
michael_aos said:
I'm still toying with the idea of canceling my order with the D500 and submitting a new order with the D700.
Click to expand...

I just canceled and went the other way.. the poor D500 marks for the price and the feasibility of CPU upgrades later sealed the deal for me.
 
wildmac said:
the poor D500 marks
Click to expand...

I saw the Heaven benchmark has the D300 & D500 performance effectively the same.

I'm still not sure how that's going to play out in real-life when "other stuff" starts to take advantage of OpenCL.
--
 
michael_aos said:
I saw the Heaven benchmark has the D300 & D500 performance effectively the same.

I'm still not sure how that's going to play out in real-life when "other stuff" starts to take advantage of OpenCL.
--
Click to expand...

I chose the D500 for the extra floating point capability..that is what you're paying for.

The D300 and D500 are within 1-3% speed difference otherwise on gaming benchmarks...which is useless for what I use it for.

I'd rather have the extra Vram as well.
 
Mgmx said:
I chose the D500 for the extra floating point capability..that is what you're paying for.

The D300 and D500 are within 1-3% speed difference otherwise on gaming benchmarks...which is useless for what I use it for.y

I'd rather have the extra Vram as well.
Click to expand...

Question for you....what does the extra floating point capability get you?
 
macpro2000 said:
Question for you....what does the extra floating point capability get you?
Click to expand...

If you look at the anandtech review....

D300 D500 D700

Single Precision GFLOPS 2176 GFLOPS 2227 GFLOPS 3481 GFLOPS
Double Precision GFLOPS 136 GFLOPS 556.8 GFLOPS 870.4 GFLOPS

So if you need the double precision GFLOPS, it'll likely be a boost.
 
michael_aos said:
I'm deleting a user account on my Late 2012 Mac Mini. 2.6Ghz quad-core i7, 16GB RAM, Fusion drive.

CPU is ~50% utilized. 71.5% mds, 70% mds_stores, 45.1% diskimages-helper, 25% kernel_task (plus everything else). 800%=fully utilized

So 50% (~2-cores) idle, yet the fan in the Mini is SCREAMING!

If future versions of OS X were to speed some of these tasks up by offloading them to the GPU, that would be a reason for me to opt for the D700 over the D500.
--
Click to expand...

You can't offload such tasks to the GPU. From what you are describing, there is no reason at all for you to get anything beyond the D300.
 
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