MP 7,1 For those having received their MP7,1 what are your thoughts - good or bad ?

[bxs]

Subject: For those having received their MP7,1 what are your thoughts - good or bad ?

We have yet to receive our 16-core, 1x Afterburner, 1x Radeon Veg II, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and Wheeled MP7,1 and expect to be impressed with it when we start using it.

We will immediately upgrade it as follows...

Promise Pegasus J2i with 1x 8TB and 1x 16TB HDD
12x 32GB R-DIMMs (placing the stock 4x 8GB on shelf)
Sonnet/Samsung PCIe x16 card with 4x Samsung blades set up as HFS+ RAID-0

Our expectation for adding the above items is that we will have zero issues.

We have no high expectations for the Afterburner (AB) benefits as we use Adobe software exclusively, but our hope is that in time (maybe over following year) the AB will become beneficial.

We expect the J2i will behave itself.

We expect the Sonnet/Samsung card will behave itself and provide Very fast i/o in the range of 4 to 6 GB/sec.

Should our exceptions be realized ?

For others who have any of the above upgrades to their MP7,1, are you satisfied with their performance and reliability ?

If you were to reorder (purchase things differently) would you do it again or do something else ?

I know we are only into the MP7,1 offering by no more than two months, so the issue of reliability is a bit unrealistic to quote.

Thanks...

 

[barnyard]

So far I'm loving it. As far as recommendations, I upgraded the stock 32GB ram immediately to 6x64GB LRDIMM = 384GB for significant savings and left expandability for the future. You may want to consider the same versus maxing out your slots.

 

[RyanFlynn]

I’m very happy with mine, with identical specs to yours as ordered. I went with the sonnet 4x4 card and 4tb mvme drives in raid zero for 16tb of 6GB/s storage instead of the j2i. I’m very happy

 

[Kedbear]

Coming from a 5.1, i bought 16-core, 192GB ram, Vega II. I use Da Vinci Resolve. An export with OFX plugins that took me 45mins on the 5,1 takes 1 minute on the 7,1 (granted my 5,1 wasn't specced out with a powerful graphics card etc). So it makes a huge difference for me. Also, finally realtime playback with nodes of 4K media etc. And it's silent. Expensive but it just works so very happy just wish it was cheaper!

 

[bxs]

So far I'm loving it. As far as recommendations, I upgraded the stock 32GB ram immediately to 6x64GB LRDIMM = 384GB for significant savings and left expandability for the future. You may want to consider the same versus maxing out your slots.

With our limited budget we opted for the 12x 32GB R-DIMMs which we purchased early on for some $1,511 from NVTEK in order to provide us with 100% of the max memory bandwidth.

We run intensive memory multi-threaded Fluid Dynamics codes that rely heavily and are very sensitive to the memory bandwidth. This aspect is influenced by the processor's L3 cache being a shared resource among the processor cores. This 384 GB RAM is what we need for our workload today and foreseeable future. So this is a done deal at this time for us.

Had we purchased the 6x 64GB LD-DIMMs (97% of max memory bandwidth) that would allow for us to upgrade to above 384GB at a future time would have cost us $2,035 for LD-DIMMs (an extra $524). Thus if we have to or need to go above 384GB and buy 12x 64GB LD-DIMMs later on we do face having to spend up front some $4,070 with today's prices. This number maybe higher or lower over the future years. Of course we could sell our 12x 32GB R-DIMMs to lower this $4,070 by some $1,000. The only reason we can see for expanding our RAM of 384GB is if we were to upgrade our 16-core processor to a higher core count processor in the future.

The savings of the $524 was useful for purchasing the J2i and its extra 16TB HDD.

The 3% difference between 12x 32GB and 6x 64GB DIMMs seems small I agree. However running our Fluid Dynamic s codes of a 14 day time frame could result in the code having to run for an extra 10 hrs.

We are aware also, that LD-DIMMs offer a slightly lower memory performance than the R-DIMMs. Not by much, but given our Fluid Dynamics codes can run for multiple weeks this difference in our opinion would be noticeable for us.

Our overall goal was to maximize the memory performance with minimal cost and to keep within our budget limitations. We believe we have done this.

I will add that while our Fluid Dynamic codes will at times be purposely run in the background, this will allow our Film video editing work to proceed with a decent amount of performance on this single MP7,1.

 

[profdraper]

The hardware has been flawless, fast, quite, connects to everything, has taken every PCIe no fuss (older cards migrated here). TB buses /loads running well, ditto the PCIe pool loads. There is however the Apple silliness of requiring a wired keyboard /mouse to be able to get into diagnostics, recovery or boot options.

Catalina on the other hand has been a bit of a dog, slowly has come together but has hardly been consistent or reliable. Takes some finessing and poking in my experience. There have been a few instances of refusing to re-boot and requires a SMC reset. Permissions & overall 'security' have been a PITA, but then, there has been much migration going on in my case.

Have lost many 64bit apps or plugins. Slightly older versions may require paid updates or just don't work. Unlike the latest version of Catalina 10.15.2, all of these same apps continue to function perfectly on Win10 1909.

I would expect that Catalina and some apps (eg FCPX) will /should be be updated in the near future for the MP7,1. I don't see that some of the software is making full use of the hardware just yet & in particular the Vega II. Possibly firmware update /drivers needed as well. Ditto for many of those bench-testing apps, some are just producing incorrect results and/or missing features.

 

[bxs]

The hardware has been flawless, fast, quite, connects to everything, has taken every PCIe no fuss (older cards migrated here). TB buses /loads running well, ditto the PCIe pool loads. There is however the Apple silliness of requiring a wired keyboard /mouse to be able to get into diagnostics, recovery or boot options.

Catalina on the other hand has been a bit of a dog, slowly has come together but has hardly been consistent or reliable. Takes some finessing and poking in my experience. There have been a few instances of refusing to re-boot and requires a SMC reset. Permissions & overall 'security' have been a PITA, but then, there has been much migration going on in my case.

Have lost many 64bit apps or plugins. Slightly older versions may require paid updates or just don't work. Unlike the latest version of Catalina 10.15.2, all of these same apps continue to function perfectly on Win10 1909.

I would expect that Catalina and some apps (eg FCPX) will /should be be updated in the near future for the MP7,1. I don't see that some of the software is making full use of the hardware just yet & in particular the Vega II. Possibly firmware update /drivers needed as well. Ditto for many of those bench-testing apps, some are just producing incorrect results and/or missing features.

Thank you profdraper for you details related to my OP. 👍

Your 1st paragraph is most comforting to read. The aspect of having to use a wired kB/Mouse to interact with diagnostics. recovery or boot options is par for the course IMO; has been this way for some time now. This is an inconvenience but not insurmountable.

BTW... do you mean by "boot options" the ability to choose an alternate boot device/image via startup up with the Option key pressed ?

Catalina does have some misgivings as you've stated. The refusal to reboot is of concern to me. I've been running Catalina on my late 2016 15" rMBP13,3 and have not experienced the issue you mention about permissions and 'overall' security, and wonder if this is somehow related to the MP7,1 having the T2 chip whereas for my MBP13,3 not having it ?

It is understandable IMO that 3rd party applications and their vendors have some 'catching up' to be done, as they really have only had access to the MP7,1 for barely 2 months as of this time.

Again, thank you for your inputs. 👍

 

[astrorider]

I've never had a problem with Apple's wireless keyboards booting into recovery or selecting boot drives with iMacs or the 2013 Mac Pro. Just wait for the boot chime and hold the correct keys. But with the 2019 Mac Pro, it doesn't work during restarts, and only works if I shut it down, then start it up and hold the keys.

At first I thought maybe the issue with restarting was timing when to press the keys since there's no longer a boot chime, so after many failed attempts I tried fully shutting it down and starting back up, since at least then you can decide when to hold the keys based on the Mac's LED turning on. That has worked every time. Not sure if this is something to do with my specific setup or all 2019 Mac Pros, though.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I was super worried I'd have buyers remorse. But am super glad I took the plunge. I got a 28core machine with base graphics and 256SSD and upgraded memory, got a PCI card to drive a Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB U.2 SSD (and don't even bother mounting the useless apple T2 SSD) and I yanked out the 580x and put in an AMD WX 9100 card to drive my 6 30" Cinema Displays.

Works like a champ. Very quiet. Quieter than my old 5,1. Everything on it runs... just crisp. I don't want to jinx it, but kind of surprised how uneventful the move over was (and I was running High Sierra before, so it was kind of a major upgrade on a number of counts).

Im even more happy I did it despite it being a giant ripoff on a performance level in that, if apple doesn't make any more Mac Pros (always a possibility, look at the iMac Pro), then this gets me by. If they do upgrade this regularly, which would be great, I will wait till they get to over 64 cores and get Thunderbolt/USB 4 going and PCIe5 or so. So either I have the last of the Mac Pros, or will be ripe for a meaningful upgrade in say 2 to 3 years if they do upgrade it regularly.

Again, surprised as I thought I was going to feel a lot of buyers remorse, but in retrospect, really happy I took the plunge. As always, YMMV.

 

[jasonmvp]

With our limited budget we opted

Who's "we"? Got a mouse in your pocket? ...

My only regret, if you want to call it that, is that the W5700X wasn't available when I purchased my rig. And in fact: it still isn't. I don't know that I need the grunt of the Vega II, but I certainly can use something more powerful than the base GPU. I want the W5700X for its hardware encoder and decoder; that will help speed things up for me quite a bit. But: not yet.

Otherwise, the machine is flawless. Every piece of hardware I've installed in it has "just worked". In fact, all of my PCI-E slots are currently used except for the second MPX slot.

 

[bxs]

I was super worried I'd have buyers remorse. But am super glad I took the plunge. I got a 28core machine with base graphics and 256SSD and upgraded memory, got a PCI card to drive a Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB U.2 SSD (and don't even bother mounting the useless apple T2 SSD) and I yanked out the 580x and put in an AMD WX 9100 card to drive my 6 30" Cinema Displays.

Works like a champ. Very quiet. Quieter than my old 5,1. Everything on it runs... just crisp. I don't want to jinx it, but kind of surprised how uneventful the move over was (and I was running High Sierra before, so it was kind of a major upgrade on a number of counts).

Im even more happy I did it despite it being a giant ripoff on a performance level in that, if apple doesn't make any more Mac Pros (always a possibility, look at the iMac Pro), then this gets me by. If they do upgrade this regularly, which would be great, I will wait till they get to over 64 cores and get Thunderbolt/USB 4 going and PCIe5 or so. So either I have the last of the Mac Pros, or will be ripe for a meaningful upgrade in say 2 to 3 years if they do upgrade it regularly.

Again, surprised as I thought I was going to feel a lot of buyers remorse, but in retrospect, really happy I took the plunge. As always, YMMV.

Thanks for you inputs/respose to my OP.

So if you're not using the internal Apple's T2/SSD what are you booting up from ? The Micron supposedly ?

What Apps are you running that makes good use of the 28 cores ?

What kind of data migration did you use to import your previous user data etc ?

Is Catalina working for you without any serious issues ?

If you're booting up from the Micron all the time, is it always setup in Startup Disk to be the boot device ?

If you've 'abandoned' the use of the Apple's internal T2/SSD what are you using it for now ?

Thanks...
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Who's "we"? Got a mouse in your pocket? ...

Simple.... You're not joking, so I respond... I speak for our collective user base for the MP7,1.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Thanks for you inputs/respose to my OP.

So if you're not using the internal Apple's T2/SSD what are you booting up from ? The Micron supposedly ?

What Apps are you running that makes good use of the 28 cores ?

What kind of data migration did you use to import your previous user data etc ?

Is Catalina working for you without any serious issues ?

If you're booting up from the Micron all the time, is it always setup in Startup Disk to be the boot device ?

If you've 'abandoned' the use of the Apple's internal T2/SSD what are you using it for now ?

Thanks...
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Simple.... You're not joking, so I respond... I speak for our collective user base for the MP7,1.

I personally find the T2 to be a nightmare. Wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole with regard to my data. The T2 is a glorified NVRAM and emergency boot disk for me. And yes, I'm using the 15.36TB Micron 9300 Pro to boot from and basically be my "everything" drive. I have a 16TB Seagate Exos for my time machine. I have a 10Gb Synology NAS for my mass storage needs, around 50TB usable.

I did a COMPLETELY clean install. My 5,1 has been MigrationAssistance.app moved back from the PowerPC days. Tooooooo much cruft. So I just started brand new. Many things come over easily when you login to iCloud, like your mail settings and IMAP accounts, your contacts, and even iMessages in the cloud (even if you don't want to use iMessages in the cloud it's great for migration and then just turn it off once you are done).

I use the Synology to sync my /Documents and /Music folders so I have the same data everywhere. I have all my fonts in ~/Library/Fonts and they are sync'd by Synology too. I hand copied all my apps that I keep in ~/Applications to the new machine. I just hand copied my photo library over. The only difficult thing is I have a lot of archived email not up on IMAP, so I copied the ~/Library/Mail folder and then did an import on the new machine (which I think helped clean out a lot of crud through importing). The most tedious part is I am having to hand reset my personal preferences in each app, but that's not too bad. I just do it as it comes along. A few apps that I keep in /Applications I had to redownload and install. I try to keep non-OS-standard apps in /Applications to a minimum (only those that are finicky when installed to my local ~/Applications) like 1Password, MS Office, Acrobat, iStat Menus, and that's it.

As for Catalina, yea, it seems fine. I went in knowing I had to update a few apps to 64bit. They got updated recently, so it was relatively painless.

As for what I use the machine for. Word (I write a fair amount for work). Video and audio transcoding, but nothing to heavy, 4k is most I work with. Photos. Some music. A lot of document processing and OCRing too. It's an all around machine for work/life for me.

 

[Theophilos]

My impression of our 16 core version with 384 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage, and the Vega II GPU is positive overall.

When it came, I didn't bother testing anything first, but opted to install all the new RAM before the first boot. It took only 10 minutes from beginning to end and the machine booted without issues. I'm waiting on four Evo Plus 1 TB drives to install in a Sonnet 4x4 card before finalizing the set up.

In the meantime, like many others, I've noticed how little of the CPU, GPU, and RAM are utilized by everyday apps. One surprising exception was Logos Bible Software, which ramped the CPU up to 500% while indexing. I was happy to see that utilization.

The machine is absolutely quiet.

One small hiccup I had was a black screen upon the first (and so far, only) restart. The monitor went black and powered off. It remained like this for a good 4-5 minutes and then the machine suddenly booted up. I checked the RAM status and all seemed good. I'll try again today to see if it repeats, but so far, while the computer is running, no issues.

 

[Adult80HD]

I have had mine since 12/27 and like @ZombiePhysicist I was initially concerned I might have buyer's remorse--it's an expensive piece of kit. I got the 16-core version as it seemed to be the best compromise in terms of value and what I need to do/use the machine for. I need a powerful graphics card so I went with the Radeon Pro Vega II; I would probably have gotten the 5700 if it had been available. I got the 2TB SSD as I have nothing against the T2 chip (I actually think it's got some significant security advantages, but I digress), and that is plenty for what I will put on the main drive.

It has been a dream to own and use so far. Setup and installation was simple. The attention to detail inside and out is classic Apple, but taken up a notch IMO. I've never seen such a carefully engineered *interior* of a computer. I used to think the original cMP was amazingly engineered inside (and for the time, it was), but this takes it to a whole new level. I maxed out my RAM slots with 12x32 R-DIMMS as I don't need anything near that much RAM now and the price/performance was perfect. I also installed a HighPoint 7101A-1 card with four Samsung EVO 970 Plus NVMe drives configured in a RAID 0 array using the HighPoint software.

Installing the PCIe card and RAM required no tools and was fast and easy. It took more effort and tools to install the NVMe cards in the HighPoint card than anything else. BTW, I also replaced the fan on the HighPoint card as the one they ship with it is noisy. Apparently you can now order cards from HighPoint that will allow you to disable the fans as the cooling on the Mac Pro is so good the fan is not required. I am getting speeds up to 12 Gbps on the RAID array, and I have my main application data stored there. It's all backed up to a Promise array via TB3.

Everything has just worked. The machine is dead quiet. I have it on my desk only two feet from my head and I can't hear it--the HVAC in my office is louder than the Mac Pro. As others have noted it seems to barely slouch with any workload I throw at it. I run my e-commerce business from my machine; my heaviest use is image editing. Color accuracy is critical to my work, so I also got a ProDisplay XDR (more on that later). I shoot thousands of images per month, and do a lot of image stacking using HeliconFocus. All of my image management and editing is done in Adobe Lightroom. While the UI of Lightroom is a bit laggy on the XDR, that's a problem Adobe seems to have with all high-resolution displays, and hopefully they will address it. Importing and exporting images and rendering 1:1 previews is where I spend a ton of time, and the 7,1 does an excellent job there, Lightroom will use as many cores as it can to speed up those processes. HeliconFocus recently added AVX-512 support so image stacking is vastly faster than my 16" MBP. Overall import/exports and 1:1 rendering are about 2.5x as fast as the MBP and stacking in HeliconFocus is 3-4x as fast. The time I save on a daily basis will pay for the machine in a little over a year.

I get the feeling that this machine is just barely having its potential tapped. I suspect that upcoming versions of Catalina will continue to improve performance. Using the Intel Power Gadget I can see that the cores are rarely spiking to their full speed. Monitoring the graphics card it seems that the VRAM gets consumed and not readily released. My guess is a driver bug. I know others have reported seeing the same thing. I did a clean install as almost everything I have is on the cloud or easily installed clean. None of my apps have any issues with Catalina and I've had no issues with it whatsoever, either on my 7,1 or my 16" MBP.

Now a brief aside about the ProDisplay XDR. So far I love it. Just like the 7,1 the display is beautifully engineered. I got the nano version as I hate glare. The nano etching is amazing, the display just seems to suck in any reflections and just appears black. Color is excellent and the contrast is outstanding. No, it can't replace a $35,000 reference display, but I didn't expect it to--and a true reference display is massive overkill for my work. It is the only display of it's kind though, with excellent color, contrast and 6K resolution. For the image editing I am doing it's a fabulous display.

 

[thomast0001]

I've never had a problem with Apple's wireless keyboards booting into recovery or selecting boot drives with iMacs or the 2013 Mac Pro. Just wait for the boot chime and hold the correct keys. But with the 2019 Mac Pro, it doesn't work during restarts, and only works if I shut it down, then start it up and hold the keys.

At first I thought maybe the issue with restarting was timing when to press the keys since there's no longer a boot chime, so after many failed attempts I tried fully shutting it down and starting back up, since at least then you can decide when to hold the keys based on the Mac's LED turning on. That has worked every time. Not sure if this is something to do with my specific setup or all 2019 Mac Pros, though.

Have I got some good news for you! I just discovered how to reenable the boot chime for the 2019 Mac Pro! (This also works for the iMac Pro and MacBook Pro.) From the terminal, enter:

sudo nvram StartupMute=%00

Then reboot. Enjoy your shiny new startup chime!

 

[H. Flower]

Have I got some good news for you! I just discovered how to reenable the boot chime for the 2019 Mac Pro! (This also works for the iMac Pro and MacBook Pro.) From the terminal, enter:



Then reboot. Enjoy your shiny new startup chime!

That's awesome. And for posterity, what's the command to disable?

 

[thomast0001]

That's awesome. And for posterity, what's the command to disable?

To disable, do:

sudo nvram -d StartupMute

That just deletes the value. You might also be able to mute it by setting the value to something other than %00. I'm guessing it's a Boolean, where 0 means False and anything else means True (although I haven't tried every value -- just %50 to see if I could set the volume to half, but no).

 

[astrorider]

Have I got some good news for you! I just discovered how to reenable the boot chime for the 2019 Mac Pro! (This also works for the iMac Pro and MacBook Pro.) From the terminal, enter:



Then reboot. Enjoy your shiny new startup chime!

It worked! Quite a loud, throaty "bong!" sound it makes too. And what do you know, restarting and pressing the option key immediately after the chime showed the boot drive options, so my problem with not being able to use the startup keys during a restart with the wireless keyboard really was due to not pressing the keys at the right time. Thank you for the tip!

 

[thomast0001]

It worked! Quite a loud, throaty "bong!" sound it makes too. And what do you know, restarting and pressing the option key immediately after the chime showed the boot drive options, so my problem with not being able to use the startup keys during a restart with the wireless keyboard really was due to not pressing the keys at the right time. Thank you for the tip!

Indeed! That bong has some nice bass! Wow. You know what it reminds me of? Check it out:

Cyan Logo (1993 version from Myst)

and also:

Myst Intro

The 2019 solid "BONG" immediately reminded me of the Cyan Logo finale and also the 3rd note of the game intro. Man do I have great memories of that game! Too bad we can't change the startup bong one of those...

Now if we can just set the 2019 startup bong to about half volume...

 

[Coyote2006]

I was super worried I'd have buyers remorse. But am super glad I took the plunge. I got a 28core machine with base graphics and 256SSD and upgraded memory, got a PCI card to drive a Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB U.2 SSD (and don't even bother mounting the useless apple T2 SSD) and I yanked out the 580x and put in an AMD WX 9100 card to drive my 6 30" Cinema Displays.

Works like a champ. Very quiet. Quieter than my old 5,1. Everything on it runs... just crisp. I don't want to jinx it, but kind of surprised how uneventful the move over was (and I was running High Sierra before, so it was kind of a major upgrade on a number of counts).

Im even more happy I did it despite it being a giant ripoff on a performance level in that, if apple doesn't make any more Mac Pros (always a possibility, look at the iMac Pro), then this gets me by. If they do upgrade this regularly, which would be great, I will wait till they get to over 64 cores and get Thunderbolt/USB 4 going and PCIe5 or so. So either I have the last of the Mac Pros, or will be ripe for a meaningful upgrade in say 2 to 3 years if they do upgrade it regularly.

Again, surprised as I thought I was going to feel a lot of buyers remorse, but in retrospect, really happy I took the plunge. As always, YMMV.

Did you compare the MPX 580 with your GPU regarding loudness?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Did you compare the MPX 580 with your GPU regarding loudness?

Both are silent to the point I cannot hear any difference. Oddly, the 580x took 26 watts driving ZERO screens while the 9100 takes only 10watts driving 6 screens. Since the 9100 provides all apple boot screens, and I believe is faster than the 580, I saw no point on keeping the 580 in the machine and yanked it. My 9100 is plugged into slot 4 and my HighPoint in slot 5. So the 2 MX slots (1 and 3) as well as slot 2 are all completely open.

I haven't PUSHED both video cards so perhaps when they are pushed there would be difference, but I have yet to notice under my normal usage. So far my, the system seems pretty dead silent.
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It worked! Quite a loud, throaty "bong!" sound it makes too. And what do you know, restarting and pressing the option key immediately after the chime showed the boot drive options, so my problem with not being able to use the startup keys during a restart with the wireless keyboard really was due to not pressing the keys at the right time. Thank you for the tip!

Totally worked on my 16" MacBook Pro. Doesn't seem to work consistently well on the 2019 Mac Pro. I suspect it's because the NVRAM settings change things on the T2 drive, which I normally have unmounted since I boot off the PCI drive.

 

[tonywalker23]

My impression of our 16 core version with 384 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage, and the Vega II GPU is positive overall.

When it came, I didn't bother testing anything first, but opted to install all the new RAM before the first boot. It took only 10 minutes from beginning to end and the machine booted without issues. I'm waiting on four Evo Plus 1 TB drives to install in a Sonnet 4x4 card before finalizing the set up.

In the meantime, like many others, I've noticed how little of the CPU, GPU, and RAM are utilized by everyday apps. One surprising exception was Logos Bible Software, which ramped the CPU up to 500% while indexing. I was happy to see that utilization.

The machine is absolutely quiet.

One small hiccup I had was a black screen upon the first (and so far, only) restart. The monitor went black and powered off. It remained like this for a good 4-5 minutes and then the machine suddenly booted up. I checked the RAM status and all seemed good. I'll try again today to see if it repeats, but so far, while the computer is running, no issues.

I would love to see a screen recording of Logos speed on a Mac Pro. Passage guide, searching the whole library, etc

 

[Parzival]

Have the 16 core model.

A couple of things:

-Catalina is pretty stable, though the Finder is laggy and all the security dialogs are super annoying.

-With this generation of SSDs, you’d expect apps to launch quicker then on, say, a 2014 MBP, but they don’t.

-The bluetooth keyboard loses connection every now and then and requires a restart to fix.

-Booting process should be quicker then some old MacBook, but isn’t.

-Despite all the raving about how silent this machine is, it is not completely so. Sure, if you’re using it in an office, it would seem to be really silent, but not when placed in a very quiet place, like a studio. The blower on the left side is especially noticeable.

-The cooling is really good. But in all honesty, for every positive thought I have about this machine, there is the notion of “yeah, but it better be, its super expensive.”

Would give it a 7-7.5 out of 10.

 

[Coyote2006]

I've just received my 8core MP 7,1. This is just a piece of art. It's so quite and such a beauty ... wow

I'm currently updating Catalina and will then install all my SSDs. More RAM is on the way.

So far I am very happy with it

 

[Adult80HD]

Have the 16 core model.

A couple of things:

-Catalina is pretty stable, though the Finder is laggy and all the security dialogs are super annoying.

-With this generation of SSDs, you’d expect apps to launch quicker then on, say, a 2014 MBP, but they don’t.

-The bluetooth keyboard loses connection every now and then and requires a restart to fix.

-Booting process should be quicker then some old MacBook, but isn’t.

-Despite all the raving about how silent this machine is, it is not completely so. Sure, if you’re using it in an office, it would seem to be really silent, but not when placed in a very quiet place, like a studio. The blower on the left side is especially noticeable.

-The cooling is really good. But in all honesty, for every positive thought I have about this machine, there is the notion of “yeah, but it better be, its super expensive.”

Would give it a 7-7.5 out of 10.

Most of the security dialogues are one-time only, and they're really a good thing, so best to adapt and realize that after one-time permissions are granted, they go away. I haven't noticed any Finder lag; can you tell me what you are seeing?

I guess I don't have any expectation of apps launching any quicker--the performance gains in SSDs are not going to show up in things like app launches, but rather in sustained read-writes and high volumes of read-writes. Same with the booting process, not sure why one would necessarily expect it to be faster. On the contrary, given that it has the potential of having to initialize a lot more peripherals/PCIe cards, I'm not surprised if the boot up might not be super fast. I rarely reboot, so it's not much of an issue for me.

I don't have any issues with the keyboard losing connection, but it does seem like it can be slow to wake up from sleep when hitting the keyboard. For some reason clicking on the trackpad is faster to wake it up.

There's definitely a very faint sound from the machine, noticeable more if you're very close to it. As you pointed out in most office environments it won't be noticeable as the HVAC systems will drown it out--the sound is pretty similar IMO to the gentle blowing you hear in most commercial HVAC systems. That said, it's much quieter than my iMac or MBP when they are under load and the fans spin up. The MP doesn't get any louder under load at all, not in my use at least.

I agree on the "it ought be, it's expensive part." That thought crosses my mind every now and then, too. I'd probably be more generous and give it a nine out of ten, mainly because when comparing it to the professional HP workstations we have that cost the same, it's WAYYY better in build quality, accessibility, etc.