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It's good to be back to the Mac Pro

T

teeck2000

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 20, 2009
155
26
I sold my Mac Pro 3,1 in 2010 and decided to go the hackintosh route. Now in my experience the hackintosh is great if you are going to be using the computer for general computing, but for more serious work there was always an issue here and there.

My first build was rock solid but there was always at least one issue with each motherboard that I changed to or upgraded. I was using my machine for doing visual fx work, music production and some light gaming. Firewire latency problems for audio interfaces and buffer settings, blackmagic capture card issues, power management issues and performance issues. I could get everything to almost work but never 100%. Each change broke something else, and not even the system updates cause even on a real mac you don't just update the system for a work computer without research and compatibility issues.

I sold my hack and got a 5,1 model with a W3690 and ohh man it's so smooth and everything works. The amount of time and money I spent getting everything to (almost) work and hardware upgrades was more than I would of spent if I had just gotten a real MacPro back then.

Just wanted to share my experience as a power user going from a real mac to hack and then back. I will say that the hack is really great but for serious work with a lot of third party hardware and specific needs it's not recommended, there is just too much crap to get and it's never 100%. Works great for a light user or even a heaver user but for the pro, it just doesn't cut it.
 
I feel you for sure. I have a custom built hack with an i5, and even though that thing runs with VERY FEW issues, there are issues nonetheless. I use a 3,1 as my main machine, and just having everything work perfectly out of the box is great. My next machine will for sure be a hack, as I basically need my PCIe cards and internal storage, plus I love the tower form factor, but I absolutely understand where you're coming from. Plus, the E5 series of Xeons is yet to have full power management on Hacks, so your 5,1 is has more horsepower than is even possible on a Hackintosh, with the i7-4770K overclocked being the highest power chip you can use with sleep and speedstep. Hoping the next E3 series Xeon comes in a six core, so I can use that when I finally retire my 3,1.
-N
 
Definitely.

I had the 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 from when it was first available.

Replaced it with a Late 2012 Mac Mini - again from when it was first available.

The Mini was OK -- in retrospect I probably should have gotten the 256GB SSD instead of the ~1.1TB Fusion drive -- but I was always annoyed how loud it got when pushed.

I've had my Late 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 (6-core, 512GB, 32GB, D500's) for about 2wks now and I am really enjoying it.

If I had it to do over again, I'd probably opt for the 4-core, 1TB storage, and buy OWC RAM. I just don't know which video card I'd pick.
--
 
teeck2000 said:
My first build was rock solid but there was always at least one issue with each motherboard that I changed to or upgraded. I was using my machine for doing visual fx work, music production and some light gaming. Firewire latency problems for audio interfaces and buffer settings, blackmagic capture card issues, power management issues and performance issues. I could get everything to almost work but never 100%. Each change broke something else, and not even the system updates cause even on a real mac you don't just update the system for a work computer without research and compatibility issues.
Click to expand...

You call of those issues rock solid system, that's laughable!!!
 
I should clarify...It was rock solid, everything worked perfect 100%. I had decided to build a lower cost i3 system to "test the waters". At this point I was not doing any work at home and was using it mainly for regular use and Starcraft II since the CPU was a huge bottleneck in the 3,1 vs. the newer architecture Overclocked i3 for SCII.

After a year or so I decided to upgrade to an i7 system to get a bit more work done. When I swapped out the i3 for the i7 the motherboard would not boot, at first I thought it was a bad CPU but the motherboard just didn't want to work with the i7 but still worked fine with the i3. So I swapped motherboards and built more of an i7 workstation with third party cards and a firewire audio interface but never got 100% ever again.

There was always some small annoying issue like not being able to set my buffer playback to 32ms in Pro Tools without the CPU overloading and making my interface's low buffer latency feature useless. This had something to do with power management and speed-step which is a pain in the ass to figure out.
 
michael_aos said:
Definitely.

I had the 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 from when it was first available.

Replaced it with a Late 2012 Mac Mini - again from when it was first available.

The Mini was OK -- in retrospect I probably should have gotten the 256GB SSD instead of the ~1.1TB Fusion drive -- but I was always annoyed how loud it got when pushed.

I've had my Late 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 (6-core, 512GB, 32GB, D500's) for about 2wks now and I am really enjoying it.

If I had it to do over again, I'd probably opt for the 4-core, 1TB storage, and buy OWC RAM. I just don't know which video card I'd pick.
--
Click to expand...
Curious to know why you'd have opted for the 4 core. Is it just because you'd have saved money? I'm about to jump from a 1,1 to a nMP and have been weighing up the options. I'm thinking of going with the stock 4 core-upgraded to 6 with 1TB storage and 32 GB. I don't need powerful graphics as I do music production mostly. I was going to get only 12GB and upgrade myself with 3rd party ram but this voids the Apple warranty so I wouldn't want to do it until it has run out anyway.
Wondering if the difference in performance between 4 and 6 cores is significant for Logic with lots of plug-ins?
 
There are a bunch of interesting documents regarding the nMP, including one about changing the solid state drive.
 
cbm said:
I don't think that this is true. It never has been before. Apple even has a document on how to do it: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6054?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Click to expand...

That's odd because I was using the online chat on the Apple store site a few days ago. I wanted to know if I could get a mp with 2x8Gb leaving the other two slots empty so I could put my own ram in it. They said it would void warranty. They also said that I had to buy the mp with 4x4gb if I wanted 16gb because all 4 slots had to be filled if buying online.
Maybe I'll go in to a store and ask again.
 
I also had a Mac Pro 3,1 and got rid of it to build a hack, as mentioned the hack had issues, the most annoying was in Mavericks when iMessage and Facetime stopped working. The hack was otherwise stable, no crashing or rebooting, although in Mavericks it did begin to suffer from the odd freezing problem from time to time. I finally got tired of the issues and went to a 2012 Mac mini core i5 8GB, this was a step down from the core i7 16GB hack I had been using but I thought I could get by, I was wrong. Two days ago I traded the mini and some other gear in for a Mac Pro 5,1 2.8 quad core with 24GB of RAM and a GT120, I took the GTX 670 I had been using in the hack and put it in the 5,1 to support my three monitors and its great! So glad to be back with a Mac Pro!
 
ashman70 said:
I also had a Mac Pro 3,1 and got rid of it to build a hack, as mentioned the hack had issues, the most annoying was in Mavericks when iMessage and Facetime stopped working. The hack was otherwise stable, no crashing or rebooting, although in Mavericks it did begin to suffer from the odd freezing problem from time to time. I finally got tired of the issues and went to a 2012 Mac mini core i5 8GB, this was a step down from the core i7 16GB hack I had been using but I thought I could get by, I was wrong. Two days ago I traded the mini and some other gear in for a Mac Pro 5,1 2.8 quad core with 24GB of RAM and a GT120, I took the GTX 670 I had been using in the hack and put it in the 5,1 to support my three monitors and its great! So glad to be back with a Mac Pro!
Click to expand...

Drop in a W3680 or 3690 and you'll be even happier!
 
Is your nMP truly silent?

michael_aos said:
Definitely.

I had the 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 from when it was first available.

Replaced it with a Late 2012 Mac Mini - again from when it was first available.

The Mini was OK -- in retrospect I probably should have gotten the 256GB SSD instead of the ~1.1TB Fusion drive -- but I was always annoyed how loud it got when pushed.

I've had my Late 2013 Mac Pro 6,1 (6-core, 512GB, 32GB, D500's) for about 2wks now and I am really enjoying it.

If I had it to do over again, I'd probably opt for the 4-core, 1TB storage, and buy OWC RAM. I just don't know which video card I'd pick.
--
Click to expand...

...............................

May I ask you if in your opinion your new MacPro is truly silent.
Some people complained about unpleasant noises in new MacPros.
Thank you in advance for your answer!
 
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