If anyone has a solution to getting windows 8 or 7 on the iMac pro, I could use some help. I have a week before I have to dish out 200 for a new copy of 10 because the upgrade path ends.
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iMac Pro - First Hands On Thread
- Thread starter bplein
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Mine arrived last night (10 core/64Gb/Vega64/1TB).
I installed Canon's DPP 4 and processed a few 1Dx2 photos (20MP).
With the app fullscreen and making global adjustments such as color/brightness I can see all the threads light up in activity monitor.
In that scenario the Intel Power Gadget shows utilization bouncing around 50% and clock speeds bouncing between 4.0 to 4.1. I haven't seen anything over 4.2 in the Power Gadget yet. Not at all scientific, but I hadn't seen anyone mention DPP yet.
Nick
I installed Canon's DPP 4 and processed a few 1Dx2 photos (20MP).
With the app fullscreen and making global adjustments such as color/brightness I can see all the threads light up in activity monitor.
In that scenario the Intel Power Gadget shows utilization bouncing around 50% and clock speeds bouncing between 4.0 to 4.1. I haven't seen anything over 4.2 in the Power Gadget yet. Not at all scientific, but I hadn't seen anyone mention DPP yet.
Nick
Close, but not entirely correct. mikeboss is correct in saying the display has to be removed and then the RAM can be installed. When performed by Apple or an Apple authorized repair facility, if anything is damaged, it will be covered by the warranty. However, opening it up, taking the display off, and installing the RAM yourself does not void the warranty. You're simply installing the RAM at your own risk and if you damage something in the process of doing so, Apple does not have to honor the warranty. If something breaks down the road and you are still under warranty, you are still covered.
Received mine today: 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 16GB VEGA, 10-core.
I just tried to import a 4K file and transcode it to Proxy Media - not needed on the iMac Pro, but I was interested in how it would perform vs my MacBook Pro, which would often take 2-3 hours.
The iMac Pro smoked the file in about 10 minutes.
What's crazier? Well, I don't even need to transcode the 4K files anymore - they just play! 4K just imported, no problem - plays back in Better Quality, Original Media with no problems (H264 codec too).
Incredible!!!!!!!! I get that I'm coming from a 2011 MacBook Pro, so I'm finally joining the real world, but this is insane!!!
I have to go away for another job tomorrow, but when I'm back properly in the new year, I'm going to do some bench marks to see performance differences... either way, life is going to be vastly different in 2018!!!!
I just tried to import a 4K file and transcode it to Proxy Media - not needed on the iMac Pro, but I was interested in how it would perform vs my MacBook Pro, which would often take 2-3 hours.
The iMac Pro smoked the file in about 10 minutes.
What's crazier? Well, I don't even need to transcode the 4K files anymore - they just play! 4K just imported, no problem - plays back in Better Quality, Original Media with no problems (H264 codec too).
Incredible!!!!!!!! I get that I'm coming from a 2011 MacBook Pro, so I'm finally joining the real world, but this is insane!!!
I have to go away for another job tomorrow, but when I'm back properly in the new year, I'm going to do some bench marks to see performance differences... either way, life is going to be vastly different in 2018!!!!
Anybody hands on with Pro Tools yet? Avid claims to have optimized 12.8.3 for the iMac Pro, and I'm really pumped to get my hands on it. After years of random GUI issues and display lag on the 5k iMacs, it's going to be great to have a machine that can keep up.
If I understand right, you want to freely upgrade a Windows 8 serial to a Windows 10 one? I did this too (long time ago; I didn't know the upgrade path was still there). I'm 75% sure I did it through a Parallels machine and that it didn't lock the Windows 10 serial to the machine ID. In any case, I ended up with a serial that was accepted fine on a Mac Pro about a year ago.
However, if you don't want to chance having the serial locked to a specific Parallels instance, you could follow the following procedure but substituting Windows 8 instead of 10:
https://9to5mac.com/2017/08/31/how-windows-10-mac-boot-camp-external-drive-video/
That will get you a vanilla install of Windows on an external NTFS drive, that may be capable of booting an iMac Pro. (I simply don't know how dependent Mac hardware, when pretending to be a PC, is on having a modern flavor of Windows.)
You'll have no Boot Camp drivers at that stage, and Apple's new iMac Pro ones may not even install on Windows 8, but assuming you can get internet on it, you can then run the Windows 8 -> 10 upgrade.
PS: just in case you haven't already done it, boot the iMac Pro into recovery mode using command-R, run the Secure Boot Utility (it's in the menu bar, not the normal list with Disk Utility), and choose both No Security and Allow booting from external drive.
Otherwise the default state of the iMac Pro is to not allow booting from an external drive, whether Mac or Windows.
I managed to get it half working so far...I got windows 8 installed by adjusting the bootcamp assistant to accept windows 8. I also had to do a full reinstall of OSX as the partition becomes corrupt when deleting a windows partition to revert. There is no bootcamp rollback, but that's not an issue for me. I'll end up having to keep the activation on parallels as I use that the most, but use it unactivated on bootcamp for the few times I actually need the max power & compatibility.
It was a massive pain to get this working, to say the least. I guess I'll have to eventually buy a retail windows 10 pro license if I ever want to move the registration back & forth. Microsoft allows two movements then locks the free upgrade key.
Windows 8 is severely crippled...no network drivers capable at all. I had to install via bootcamp, activate via parallels, upgrade to 10 via parallels, & the activation should hold.
RuffDraft, I am so stoked for you right now! I've been following your situation since we all started gathering here around the iMac Pro. I knew this machine was going to blow your mind and make your work life sooo much easier! I'm genuinely happy for you. Have fun on your upcoming assignment and Happy New Year!
The air behind it gets hotter and cooler, depending on what you're doing, but it's always perfectly silent.
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For everyone who has their hands on iMac Pro, well, first off, congrats. I envy you
But I'm still holding off on purchasing one. Mostly because it's way overpowered for my needs (app developer, game dev, but not AAA+ titles, so...), and lastly, I'm waiting for some decent reviews.
Could anyone just post on how the fans work? On iMac 27, 2017 with an i7 CPU, fans are quite annoying. At least to me. Can you hear them on iMac Pro during some normal stuff like browsing, music, and some simple apps? And how about under full load?
You can't even hear them under full load.
Thanks Bryan! We've become a little family (iMac Pro fans / buyers). It's such an amazing machine... I can't really fathom how much this will change my life from using my 2011 MacBook Pro. It's weird being able to watch 4K files instantly, rather than waiting for them to be transcoded to Proxy Media and then watching them in Low-Res before exporting to 1080p (using 4K to crop different angles).
Now, I could almost certainly deliver 4K films and it'll be 1/12 the trouble!
I worked out the improvement before, and it's roughly a 15-22.5X improvement over my old setup without running exact tests; I'm also able to use Thunderbolt 2 speeds over Thunderbolt 1, which surely has an impact on transcoding too! The strangest impact of all is that it has an unlimited impact when I can edit without any rendering... 24 hours for some of my projects to transcode to Proxy Media on my MacBook Pro vs instantaneous editing on the iMac Pro... that's potentially 1/3 to 1/4 of the project done on the iMac Pro vs being ready to start on the MacBook Pro!
In other related news, I have to praise Apple for their 17" MacBook Pro from Early 2011... sure, it's had a GPU fault that was recognised by Apple, so when mine inevitably fell to the same fault, Apple replaced the motherboard and GPU for free. It's since lasted a further 3 years, and is still able to do a job - admittedly a painfully-slow one, but nevertheless, I've made my living from it this year and the year prior... I had to add a 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM, but that cost me around £300... when you consider, all-in, that machine has cost less than my RAID cost... it's a bargain over seven years! Total cost around £2,700 - £385 a year... cost of a PS4 or something...! In the past seven years, I travelled to two continents and made travel films... purchased a cheap RAID and Final Cut Pro X along with Larry Jordan's training... then did a number of online courses on CreativeLive and now I own my own business making videos... if I hadn't bought a Mac, I highly doubt I would have taken a similar interest and worked towards this goal... I bought that 17" MacBook Pro as a treat for finishing my post-grad and starting a teaching career... now I no longer teach, and my life revolves around that same MacBook Pro... turned iMac Pro... a massive improvement on my work to life balance and prospects for the future... all because I bought a machine to be creative... for fun!
Going back to costs per year, this iMac Pro will likely cost me just under £1K a year by the time I retire it, but that's less than the cost of one project per year and I hope to do between 30-35 projects a year... when you consider that the RAID and iMac Pro accumulatively will cost one project per year, I'm ready to make a profit following the first wedding (admittedly, there are other expenses in my business - 3 4K cameras, each lasting roughly three years each (upgrade one per year), but if the business takes 20% and I take 80%, that's not a bad trade off considering most department stores work on about a 66% mark up!
Makes sense to my young business mind at least - I may be wrong, but I'm on a journey!
Thanks for the well wishes - really excited for this one on Friday - really, really nice venue and lovely couple!
Christmas wishes and iMac Pro joys being sent your way, along with a happy new year!
All the best!
Not an iMac Pro user/buyer here, but couldn't help stopping in and saying ...
I've been checking out this thread (and similar ones). Love the enthusiasm here
This looks like a $#!t-hot product ! Congrats to y'all. Enjoy it ! And don't listen to 'em haters telling you you wasted your money.
BTW - I would love to see an unboxing video. Has anyone done one ?
I've been checking out this thread (and similar ones). Love the enthusiasm here
This looks like a $#!t-hot product ! Congrats to y'all. Enjoy it ! And don't listen to 'em haters telling you you wasted your money.
BTW - I would love to see an unboxing video. Has anyone done one ?
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I think that multi-core apps have some catching up to do.
I've been testing the 10-core iMP on Agisoft Photoscan (makes 3D models from photos), and the results for CPU processing are interesting. It smokes my iMac, MBP, and a home-built PC by 3-4x on some operations, but lags badly behind on other ops. Such that its total time-to-process is longer than ALL of the other computers (using the CPU only).
I think this is because the program isn't optimized for more than 4 cores. Photoscan feeds chunks of data to all of the processors at the same time, which then all crunch their chunks together at once. Looking at a CPU monitor, it's common for all but 1 or 2 of the processors to finish their chunks immediately, but then have to wait on the 1 or 2 cores that take an extra second or two on their chunks. If the program were to dedicate one core to feeding the others as-they-finish, instead of all-together, I think the iMP in CPU mode would be finishing its photogrammetry calculations faster than a dual GTX1080ti setup in GPU mode. Right now it takes about twice as long.
As for GPU testing... I can't. The program crashes when I tell it to use the Vega64. Although an RX580 in an eGPU enclosure works fine (but is only 5% faster than the CPU alone).
The only game I've played is World of Tanks, which runs the game about 71% faster than a GTX1080ti does in MacOS. But the game crashes out after a few minutes. Obviously we'll have to wait for AMD to clean up their drivers.
You are such a class act RuffDraft! I really enjoy the story of how you arrived at where you're at today. Fun to read, fun to imagine the possibilities that lie ahead, and fun to discuss. I have a feeling your business will continue to grow and you'll do really well...all while having fun too. (That is what its all about, right?)
Of course we'll continue to stay in touch here and especially as we learn more about the iMac Pro, but if our paths ever cross in real life, the beverages of choice will be on me.
Cheers,
Bryan
I don't think anything but Win10 will work on this thing. If you need/want Win7 for something other than gaming, run it in a virtual machine using Parallels or VMWare. It will run plenty fast with all the extra cores.
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Yeah... I'm not sure the MacOS drivers are really up to par yet either. I'm getting significantly better MacOS GPU performance than I did on a hackintosh with a GTX1080ti, but I'm getting a lot of game/app crashes too.
OK, time to move this out of the order thread.
View attachment 743482
I'm not going to show you an unboxing. If you are thinking of buying this, don't watch any unboxing videos, enjoy the quality packaging for the first time yourself (grin).
Ships with 10.13.2.
Basic "throughput plumbing test". Not a real benchmark but capable of telling us what idealized sequential throughput these are capable of:
View attachment 743481
Next, Geekbench CPU and GPU
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/5708336
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/compute/1629884
By the way, the GPU section completes in about 26 seconds. The app warns you it will take 2-5 minutes (grin).
[doublepost=1514080734][/doublepost]I'll continue to post first impressions here. Everyone else with one, feel free to jump in, I'm not claiming this thread exclusively for me
[doublepost=1514080833][/doublepost]Next impression: My iMac (late 2012 3.4GHz i7) is moving Lightroom original files to an external drive. It's much louder right now than the silent iMac Pro. But I haven't pushed the Pro at all yet. More to come later after I try a few games and import Lightroom and have it rebuild all the previews and look for faces.
Render some 3D objects!!!! You’ll be very happy
!!!!!!
Lots of BT RF going on around that machine... maybe turn a few of them OFF and see what’s up!
You might see that the issue goes away... also, try re- pairing all your devices together in the same vicinity so the radio signals can get a tighter sync!
If this thing is for double the money not a least twice as fast as my old trusty non maxed out 5K iMac (4 core i7 with only a 4GB Radeon 575 GPU) it seems too slow or too expensive or both....
View attachment 743530
The Cinebench CPU Test is only faster for multi-core jobs. Single-core is faster with the 5k....
View attachment 743531
IMP smashed this score easily... look @ the score of the 12 core at the top he he...
Just an FYI -
I logged the Intel Power Gadget to a text file for a few hours and came back and I have several entries at 4.5 Ghz. I have no idea what workload(s) were processing during that time, but it's the first evidence I've seen of 4.5 Ghz on the 10-core.
Nick
I logged the Intel Power Gadget to a text file for a few hours and came back and I have several entries at 4.5 Ghz. I have no idea what workload(s) were processing during that time, but it's the first evidence I've seen of 4.5 Ghz on the 10-core.
Nick
Experiencing Bluetooth issues as well — I first noticed keyboard lag, as others have mentioned, and then today there's been some hiss-crackle while streaming music to my AirPods.
are you able to run the yes command 20 times while running intel power gadget to see the clock speeds? That would be a much better post.10 core, 64GB Ram, 2TB SSD
Alrighty, time to start testing 10Gbit!
First, a test with iperf3 (iperf is a simple throughput test that is good for testing your infrastructure: Are your network connections solid and giving you the expected throughput).
Godzilla is my iMac Pro. UB1 is a small VM living on a ESXi host that has 10Gbit connectivity through a Ubiquity US-16-XG switch. I had some compatibility issues, couldn't make a link, until I freed up a port next to the one I'm running on. Don't get me started, the copper ports on this switch are funky and don't work with a lot of gear. But I was able to figure out a stable combination of settings and get connected.
Looking good! If I can't get good NFS performance, it's not the hardware. I'll do that testing later today.
First, a test with iperf3 (iperf is a simple throughput test that is good for testing your infrastructure: Are your network connections solid and giving you the expected throughput).
Godzilla is my iMac Pro. UB1 is a small VM living on a ESXi host that has 10Gbit connectivity through a Ubiquity US-16-XG switch. I had some compatibility issues, couldn't make a link, until I freed up a port next to the one I'm running on. Don't get me started, the copper ports on this switch are funky and don't work with a lot of gear. But I was able to figure out a stable combination of settings and get connected.
Code:
godzilla:~ bill$ iperf3 -c ub1
Connecting to host ub1, port 5201
[ 7] local 172.17.3.248 port 49644 connected to 172.17.3.191 port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 7] 0.00-1.00 sec 1.08 GBytes 9.27 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 1.00-2.00 sec 1.03 GBytes 8.81 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 2.00-3.00 sec 1.05 GBytes 8.98 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 3.00-4.00 sec 1.08 GBytes 9.26 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 4.00-5.00 sec 1022 MBytes 8.57 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 5.00-6.00 sec 1.03 GBytes 8.84 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 6.00-7.00 sec 1.04 GBytes 8.92 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 7.00-8.00 sec 1.00 GBytes 8.62 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 8.00-9.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.16 Gbits/sec
[ 7] 9.00-10.00 sec 1.02 GBytes 8.80 Gbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 7] 0.00-10.00 sec 10.4 GBytes 8.92 Gbits/sec sender
[ 7] 0.00-10.00 sec 10.4 GBytes 8.92 Gbits/sec receiverLooking good! If I can't get good NFS performance, it's not the hardware. I'll do that testing later today.
Here's what I'm seeing (10 core, 64GB, Vega 64, 1TB) when running the yes command 20 times.
Power: Package 134.71W, IA 0, DRAM 17.94W
Frequency: Bounces for quite a while between 3.28Ghz -3.54. Flatlined at 3.28 for a moment, but back to bouncing. It is trying hard to keep at 3.5
Temp: Leveled off at ~92-93 C
What's interesting to me is that the 10core seems to be getting more total power than others are seeing.
In fact, when I initially ramp up the Yes commands it looks like power goes up over 150W. Would be curious what the 8 cores are seeing in terms of initial power ramp.
Nick
If you could, I'd love to see a screenshot. Also, from what you're showing, the Geekbench results don't match the actual performance for the single thread. The 8 core hangs around 3.9, & you just told me the 10 core is hanging around 3.5, which doesn't match the geek bench results. This falls in my theory that geek bench just isn't testing long enough to prove the worth. For that matter, 3.5 vs 3.9 is revers of what the performance is & still not what I expected. Thanks for posting them!
Running iperf from my MP6,1 to my 2016 15" rMBP13,3 using a Thunderbolt Bridge I get this data... My MP6,1 is named "Zeus-Mac-Pro" and my MBP13,3 is at 169.254.205.69
Thus the Thunderbolt Bridge is as good as your 10GbE which does not surprise me at all.
Zeus-Mac-Pro:~ bxs$ /Applications/Utilities/Performance\ Utilities/iperf3 -c 169.254.205.69
Connecting to host 169.254.205.69, port 5201
[ 4] local 169.254.108.71 port 60103 connected to 169.254.205.69 port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.00-1.00 sec 1.06 GBytes 9.10 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 1.00-2.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.17 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 2.00-3.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.20 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 3.00-4.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.16 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 4.00-5.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.20 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 5.00-6.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.17 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 6.00-7.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.20 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 7.00-8.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.19 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 8.00-9.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.19 Gbits/sec
[ 4] 9.00-10.00 sec 1.07 GBytes 9.17 Gbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 10.7 GBytes 9.18 Gbits/sec sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 10.7 GBytes 9.18 Gbits/sec receiver
iperf Done.
Zeus-Mac-Pro:~ bxs$