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Is the base model nMP worthwhile?

goMac said:
The nMP has a 4 core Sandy Bridge. The Retina Macbook Pro has 4 core core Haswell, which is a generation newer.
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The fact that it has a newer consumer chipset does not mean it is "faster", considering the fastest MacBooks will not match the clock of the base nMP model for starters. Your answer is thus still ridiculous.

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noke said:
My situation is pretty much the same as the one from the OP.
I also feel that the mac mini is not a choice because I recently play games on my computer and the intel graphics are just not very good.
Also I already got two 1920x1200 displays, so I dont want to spend money on the imac display.

This brings me exactly to the same problem, where I also think that overshooting a problem is better then undershooting it. So I will probably go for the entry-level nMP.

I also dont like mobile-CPUs. Its just not the same as having a full-TDP CPU in a desktop computer. Mobile GPUs are even worse compared to their desktop-parts.

Also I really enjoy the silence and temperatures of the nMP. I read many reviews saying their iMacs go very hot when under pressure for hours. I think the mac mini will also get very hot when playing some hours on it.

I cant make use of the multicores, so a 4core with strong single-core performance is perfect for me.
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The entry level nMP is just fine. I have the basic nMP model expanded with 64 gigs of ram, and 2 TB of external SSD storage. I also own a 2012 quad core Mac Mini and a late 2013 rMBp, and there's no comparison. It's silent and fast.

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poematik13 said:
No its not. the i7 CPUs in the iMac/mbp/etc use quicksync which actually makes rendering of certain video codecs wayyy faster than the nMP's xeon processors, which dont have that tech in them.
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Saying it is faster in general is not the same as saying it is faster under specific circumstances when rendering certain video codecs. That would be a very hasty generalization.
 
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Ok, fair enough.

But for a lot of people the quick sync is quite a huge deciding factor, as mostly all web-bound video content (especially youtube) is destined to be h.264; and chances are as a content creator looking at the iMac vs nMP, that feature is a deal breaker
 
4core is a waste of money. But if I wasn't paying for it and received it as a gift I'd welcome it with open arms. Free stuff is rad.
 
I had a top-of-the-line iMac11,3 and I pushed it hard with video rendering, software development, and gaming. After just over three years the video card started glitching due to heat damage, and in short order it became unusable. Replacing it would have cost as much as a new machine. I hear the new ones have better thermal management, but I'm not buying an all-in-one computer again with the expectation that it is going to last for the long haul.

I replaced it with a base model nMP.

That said, I've been using MBPs for work since the MacBookPro3,1 came out in 2007. I usually get three years out of them before I have to replace them with higher-performing models. Within that time frame any hardware problems (and I've had a few) get fixed under AppleCare.
 
jclmavg said:
The fact that it has a newer consumer chipset does not mean it is "faster", considering the fastest MacBooks will not match the clock of the base nMP model for starters. Your answer is thus still ridiculous.
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Fortunately there are benchmarks for that sort of thing, which show the Mac Pro basically even with last year's MBP.

jclmavg said:
The entry level nMP is just fine. I have the basic nMP model expanded with 64 gigs of ram, and 2 TB of external SSD storage. I also own a 2012 quad core Mac Mini and a late 2013 rMBp, and there's no comparison. It's silent and fast.
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Pretty much the RAM is the only thing thing that you can't do with a MBP. An iMac would still do very well against that config.

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/294060
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/98650

The iMac has a better CPU, better GPU, and costs less. The 4 core Mac Pro only really makes sense in niche cases.
 
Benchmarks will only show how it performs over a very very short amount of time. You'll see little to no difference between the various cpus in that case but things change drastically when you do longer runs. In very small devices like the MacBooks the cpu heats up very quickly and will hit the max of their thermal envelope very quickly. And that's the problem because once it hits that max the cpu is going to take measures in order to save itself from burning: it'll throttle back in speed. The longer you do computations, the slower those machines will become. Desktops have a very very high max which takes a lot of effort to reach. They simply run cooler and because of that don't throttle back which leads to a more consistent and high performance.

If you're going to run (lengthy) simulations with software like Mathematica, Matlab and so on you're better off with a desktop than with a notebook due to the aforementioned behaviour. I doubt you'll see a big difference with software from say Adobe or VMware though. If you are in a warm climate it might also be wise to go desktop.
 
let's be realistic here, the reason you're buying a nMP has to be MORE than just power. If it's just power, you're clearly wasting your money. nMP uses parts that are thoroughly tested with driver support for work applications. Benchmarks will rarely test these use cases. The base model will probably not outperform the highest level iMac in most situations. Heck, even if it does, ti's probably seconds better. But do you care about reliability? do you care to run the nMP 24/7? Don't buy a base mac pro for power only.
 
FrozenDarkness said:
let's be realistic here, the reason you're buying a nMP has to be MORE than just power. If it's just power, you're clearly wasting your money. nMP uses parts that are thoroughly tested with driver support for work applications. Benchmarks will rarely test these use cases. The base model will probably not outperform the highest level iMac in most situations. Heck, even if it does, ti's probably seconds better. But do you care about reliability? do you care to run the nMP 24/7? Don't buy a base mac pro for power only.
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Unless you've got a workload that can take advantage of the dual GPUs. The base model nMP with D300s scores four to five times higher on LuxMark than a maxed out iMac.
 
koban4max said:
never buy any baseline product..
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Not so sure - the base quad with the d700 option with 3rd party ram upgrade and a xeon e5 8 core bought off eBay is a hell of a saving buying the 6 core d700 and upgrading that. Some anonymous person did the CPU upgrade and advised them to keep the parts and ring them to swap them back in if they had to call AppleCare - allegedly ;)
 
Gav Mack said:
Not so sure - the base quad with the d700 option with 3rd party ram upgrade and a xeon e5 8 core bought off eBay is a hell of a saving buying the 6 core d700 and upgrading that. Some anonymous person did the CPU upgrade and advised them to keep the parts and ring them to swap them back in if they had to call AppleCare - allegedly ;)
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i don't like ebay.
 
I bought a base nMP a few months ago, and I'm super happy with it.
The only reason (coming from a fairly recent i7 iMac) was I wanted a retina display. The only options for this (at least at that time) were MBP or nMP.
MBP with external display works, but the fan tends to be pretty loud when the graphics card is busy.

So, now I have a base nMP, put 64GB of RAM in it (not really needed, but not much more expensive than a 32GB upgrade), run a UP3214Q and a 34UM95 display, 2 Promise Pegasus's.
It is always quiet (can't hear any noise - the Promise's are in another room).

Maybe I am a niche customer with my retina requirement, but it was certainly worth it. And I would not have benefitted from the 6 cores for another 1000 bucks.

Peter
 
goMac said:
...The Mac Pro has an advantage with it's sheer number of cores... but if you take that away, it's not the best choice....The base Mac Pro only makes sense in very specific situations (such as if you're a heavy FCPX user and you really don't want your OpenCL and OpenGL fighting over the same bandwidth....generally, it's really not a great deal compared to other Macs.
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The problem is FCP X is currently very CPU-bound for most common operations. Many common editing operations cause red "render bars" on the storyline. FCP is very good at background rendering, but you end up looking at those render bars a lot. Most of these are not disk bound or GPU bound, rather a pool of worker threads is exploiting all available CPU cores. The more cores the better.

For anyone doing this type of work, an 8 or 12-core nMP is a real benefit. Of course it doesn't have QuickSync export for H.264, but you only export infrequently.

However as already stated, I don't see the value of a 4-core nMP for FCP X. Rather a max'd out iMac with a Thunderbolt RAID array, then jump to an 8-core nMP. But that is a big jump. Apple really needs a more effective base nMP to span this gap.
 
I bought my 4-core Mac Pro for myself in May and then got a new 2.6GHz MBP in July at work. I ran NovaBench on both and found Mac Pro is faster by a noticeable margin.

Unless you run applications that can use all 6 or 8 cores, the 4-core Mac Pro actually has a faster clock. I run Matlab on a regular basis. For my type of math work (discrete time simulation), a single core is just as fast.

I conclude that 4-core Mac Pro is the sweet spot for my type of work (Engineering Ph.D. Scientist). YMMV...
 
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