Just got in my order!

[wesk702]

Woo hoo!
Anyway, I ordered the base config but upgraded to a hex core and 1TB SSD, leaving me with the D300's for graphics. Are the 300's a mistake or a baseline of d500's completely necessary. Primarily for music production with logic and ableton and family videos.

 

[MH01]

I don't actually believe anyone knows the answer as they have not been in be wild for long enough.

I would recommend you use it, it he D300 does not meet your needs, return it. That's the awesome part of the Apple customer service.

 

[calaverasgrande]

Woo hoo!
Anyway, I ordered the base config but upgraded to a hex core and 1TB SSD, leaving me with the D300's for graphics. Are the 300's a mistake or a baseline of d500's completely necessary. Primarily for music production with logic and ableton and family videos.

I keep saying this..
Modern computers passed the point of being more than adequate for audio production years ago.
When I first got into audio production it was very hard to record more than one track while playing back anything. A lot of that was disk bound back in the day of 20gb hard drives.
When ram started to drop in prices and 4gb became common most of these problems went away. We would still run into issues when piling on the plug ins, but DSP cards fixed that for us.
These days I only use DSP cards for unique plug ins.
I can record a full band with all my inputs maxed, while playing back a full band on all outputs. (yes I do this, double tracking sounds cool!)
In terms of softsynths, these are often better served by having tons of ram than huge CPU/GPU.

Basically audio is a thin data stream compared to HD video or 4k video.
Even with a ton of processing it still isn;t very taxing on modern computers.
For years my DAW computer was a first gen Intel Mac Mini with 2GB ram and a 2ghz core2duo CPU (an upgrade from the stock 1.6ghz core SOLO).
I went to a 2010 MBP a couple years back. Never an issue in Logic in terms of processing power on either.

 

[wesk702]

I keep saying this..
Modern computers passed the point of being more than adequate for audio production years ago.
When I first got into audio production it was very hard to record more than one track while playing back anything. A lot of that was disk bound back in the day of 20gb hard drives.
When ram started to drop in prices and 4gb became common most of these problems went away. We would still run into issues when piling on the plug ins, but DSP cards fixed that for us.
These days I only use DSP cards for unique plug ins.
I can record a full band with all my inputs maxed, while playing back a full band on all outputs. (yes I do this, double tracking sounds cool!)
In terms of softsynths, these are often better served by having tons of ram than huge CPU/GPU.

Basically audio is a thin data stream compared to HD video or 4k video.
Even with a ton of processing it still isn;t very taxing on modern computers.
For years my DAW computer was a first gen Intel Mac Mini with 2GB ram and a 2ghz core2duo CPU (an upgrade from the stock 1.6ghz core SOLO).
I went to a 2010 MBP a couple years back. Never an issue in Logic in terms of processing power on either.

Word, any news on Logic rumors about being able to harness the gpu's?

 

[calaverasgrande]

Word, any news on Logic rumors about being able to harness the gpu's?

I wish I knew. I used to beta test all kinds of DAW software, but mycurrent career has taken me away from audio stuff for the last few years.
I still mess around in Logic but hardly professionally.
Actually I would point out that most pro musicians I know are the farthest thing from bleeding edge when it comes to computers.
Many are still on G5 or early Intel Mac Pros.
Often they get a particular DAW running smoothly then weld the box shut. No updates, new plugins or internet.
It also seems that more and more people are "moving backwards" in regards to computer audio. Using the machine like a tape deck that can rewind and fast forward instantly and doing all the mixing and processing with actual boxes. This may be what is behind the recent popularity of modular synths and 500 series boxes?

 

[td2243]

Word, any news on Logic rumors about being able to harness the gpu's?

Undoubtedly, Apple will do the same with Logic as they did with FCPX. They want their programs to run better than competitors on their machines. I'd guess a significant update will come around sooner than later.

 

[QuakeProd]

From numerous research and plenty of comparisons from nMP threads, I can say you will have absolutely no worries.
Logic is not much of a hog at all, plus with a Hex you'd probably never see anything coming close to heavy usage.
I havent played much with Abelton, but it seems to consume about as much power as Logic, which is pretty minimal.

Videos? That d300 should be just fine. I could see if you plan on doing 4K editing, or long movies with tons of special effects lol.

I was making music on a C2D 2.93 MBP with 8GB RAM, and it was no hesitation...other than loading some sounds, which were heavy. Even the heaviest was like 4 seconds to load. On there the CPU would get up to about 35% with many sounds & multiple tracks playing. But keep in mind thats C2D. YOU have a Hex capable of turbo boost.

 

[wesk702]

From numerous research and plenty of comparisons from nMP threads, I can say you will have absolutely no worries.
Logic is not much of a hog at all, plus with a Hex you'd probably never see anything coming close to heavy usage.
I havent played much with Abelton, but it seems to consume about as much power as Logic, which is pretty minimal.

Videos? That d300 should be just fine. I could see if you plan on doing 4K editing, or long movies with tons of special effects lol.

I was making music on a C2D 2.93 MBP with 8GB RAM, and it was no hesitation...other than loading some sounds, which were heavy. Even the heaviest was like 4 seconds to load. On there the CPU would get up to about 35% with many sounds & multiple tracks playing. But keep in mind thats C2D. YOU have a Hex capable of turbo boost.

Truth! I just got back from the Apple store and got to play with the quad base nMP and WOW! It's got an insane amount of speed and torque. If the base was this fast I can't even imagine how much of a beast my hex is gonna be!

After seeing and playing with it in the store, I've instantly lost all doubts for my needs. Even with heavy audio production, this thing just flies. I remember, just doing some multi and compression could take the proc points up a bit, but I was just stacking inconceivable amounts of vsts and dynamics til I got bored.

 

[davidb367]

The six is a rendering beast!

I just got my stock six core today.

The rendering speeds are insane. LuxRender using OpenCL completed a render in 10 minutes to 500 s/P. My old upgraded 1,1 would have taken hours.

A 4000x1300 render (CPU based) in Poser took 20 minutes. The 1,1 would have taken hours. I used 8 of the 12 hyperthreads.

I am very impressed.

 

[wheelhot]

Davidb, good to hear that, any chance you got windows installed?