MP 7,1 LTT: ECC is dumb; 'buy base model nMP if you want a status symbol but don't care about performance'

[Michael Scrip]

I own the z4.

I am just saying you cant compare the products because they are different. A closer product is the z8 but obviously the cpus are wrong so we need to wait and see.

But you specifically mentioned expansion.

So I was wondering what you can't add to the Z4 because of its lack of expandability?

It looks like it has pretty much the same expansion options as any other standard tower PC workstation.

Lots of slots, ports and bays!

 

[filterdecay]

But you specifically mentioned expansion.

So I was wondering what you can't add to the Z4 because of its lack of expandability?

It looks like it has pretty much the same expansion options as any other standard tower PC workstation.

Lots of slots, ports and bays!

Its a great computer that has close to enough expansion for me. however some software I use is exclusively osx and the pc version is different enough I dont want to use it. I also dont like the wasted space at the top of the gui in windows 10 and my software. Also I cant use an encrypted osx drive on windows even with software to read the format.

Now. I kept the computer and I use it as my daily driver gaming pc and whatever machine because Im a nerd like that. My issues with it have nothing to do with its expansion or capabilities.

So what you are mad about is apple didnt make a z4 style computer and instead made a z8 style computer with a bad price tag. I agree. I was hoping for a z4 form factor and capabilities machine but thats not what they made. They made a machine with larger capabilities then the z4 needed or not. For me, I must buy it. If I didnt HAVE to buy it for work I would not buy it. If you dont need it then dont buy it.

I tried to now think about a macmini but by the time I get the mac mini near the expansion and what not im $2000 away from the base macpro. Its worth it to me to spend 2k more plus the upgrades to go full macpro for the next 8-10 years or whatever. I work in audio. Cpu crunching is a thing of the past.
[doublepost=1560469138][/doublepost]also if you are asking what can you do with the macpro that you cant do with the z4 well you cant have a hdx6 with a z4. I have a hdx2 and thats enough for me but you cant do it. You also dont get thunderbolt out of the box with the z4. You need a $200 expansion card and that is only 1 thunderbolt bus and must be placed in a specific slot.
[doublepost=1560469302][/doublepost]oh also the z4 power supply max is 1000watts.

 

[Michael Scrip]

So what you are mad about is apple didnt make a z4 style computer

Whoa whoa whoa.... I'm not mad about anything.

You said the Z4 doesn't have the expandability of the new Mac Pro.

So I simply said that the Z4 still has plenty of expandability with 8 RAM slots, 5 PCIe slots, and many options for various internal storage devices.

You make it sound like the Z4 is some gimped machine with hardly any expansion. But it's a fairly standard mid-tower with plenty of expansion.

That's all I was saying.

I'm not mad at Apple or you...

 

[SRLMJ23]

I don't know if this applies to LinusTechTips, but in my experience, gamer types tend to know less than nothing about macOS. Thus their thoughts on Macs are surface level and not illuminating to people who have actual miles on the clock using varied OSes.

This is very true with him, from what I know. He uses Windows as his go too OS. The only time I see him use macOS is if he is testing something out, or say reviewing/trashing a new Mac that has been released. I guarantee you that I have way more mileage on macOS than he does, and you probably do as well. Obviously, most of the people on this forum have WAY more time on macOS than he probably has on Windows.

It is super hard for me to watch his videos because I think he is annoying as all hell, and 99.5% of the time he brings up Apple it is just to bash Apple as a company or there new products (MacBook Pros) or in this case the new Mac Pro.

Kid rarely has anything good to say about Apple or its products. He is super biased for Windows and a lot of the companies not named after a fruit.

 

[filterdecay]

Whoa whoa whoa.... I'm not mad about anything.

You said the Z4 doesn't have the expandability of the new Mac Pro.

So I simply said that the Z4 still has plenty of expandability with 8 RAM slots, 5 PCIe slots, and many options for various internal storage devices.

You make it sound like the Z4 is some gimped machine with hardly any expansion. But it's a fairly standard mid-tower with plenty of expansion.

That's all I was saying.

I'm not mad at Apple or you...

I never said it was a gimped machine. You are inferring things. I said it doesnt have the expansion of the macpro and that is true.
[doublepost=1560469893][/doublepost]

This is very true with him, from what I know. He uses Windows as his go too OS. The only time I see him use macOS is if he is testing something out, or say reviewing/trashing a new Mac that has been released. I guarantee you that I have way more mileage on macOS than he does, and you probably do as well. Obviously, most of the people on this forum have WAY more time on macOS than he probably has on Windows.

It is super hard for me to watch his videos because I think he is annoying as all hell, and 99.5% of the time he brings up Apple it is just to bash Apple as a company or there new products (MacBook Pros) or in this case the new Mac Pro.

Kid rarely has anything good to say about Apple or its products. He is super biased for Windows and a lot of the companies not named after a fruit.

but his videos highlighting the thermal throttling are good. Like as a apple power user you should be glad that people are doing reporting like that.

 

[Michael Scrip]

I said it doesnt have the expansion of the macpro and that is true.

Any my point was... the Z4 still has enough expansion like any other PC tower workstation.

If there's anything we've learned from PC towers... they are very expandable.

That's all I was saying.

The new Mac Pro might win the "expandability award" but there's still PLENTY of expansion for PC towers like the Z4 and others.

 

[SRLMJ23]

I never said it was a gimped machine. You are inferring things. I said it doesnt have the expansion of the macpro and that is true.
[doublepost=1560469893][/doublepost]

but his videos highlighting the thermal throttling are good. Like as a apple power user you should be glad that people are doing reporting like that.

When it comes to objective things like that, I have zero issue. However, you know just as well as I do that he is not always objective with his "reporting" of Apple and its products. In my experience with him, he is more subjective in his criticism of Apple as a company and with their products.

Also, there are plenty of tech sites that I feel are very objective that I can read anytime I want, and for the most part know they are reporting straight up facts without the bias against Apple.

I also have a brain, and can figure quite a bit of things out about Apple products and a lot of times how to fix them.

 

[curmudgeonette]

Starting bottom to top

Slot 1 - x16 (x8 GPU/x8 Thunderbolt 3 when an MPX module is installed, or x16 GPU and x8 Thunderbolt 3 with a PLX switch/splitter/voodoo magic)
Slot 2 - x16 (x8 when Slot 1 is filled with something non-MPX, x0/Disabled when an MPX module is in Slot 1)
Slot 3 - x16 x8 GPU/x8 Thunderbolt 3 when an MPX module is installed, or x16 GPU and x8 Thunderbolt 3 with a PLX switch/splitter/voodoo magic)
Slot 4 - x16 (x8 when Slot 1 is filled with something non-MPX x0/Disabled when an MPX module is in Slot 3)
Slot 5 - x16 (Afterburner card must be installed in this slot)
Slot 6 - x8
Slot 7 - x8
Total - x64 lanes of PCIe 3.0

C621 PCH - x20 lanes of PCIe 3.0
-------------------------------------------------------
Slot 8 - x4 (TB3/USB 3 I/O card)
2-10GbE ports - x2 (I honestly don't know how many lanes each 10GbE port takes, so I defer to another's expertise on this.)
256, 1TB, 2TB or 4TB of Flash Storage - x4
2-TB3 port on top of Mac Pro case - x4 lanes

Several details:

* Slots 1 and 3 really have two parts: 1a plus 1b, and 3a plus 3b

* The extension slots (1b and 3b) are implied to have x8 PCIe to run Thunderbolt.

* MPX modules are a single PCB. When installed, the companion double wide slot (i.e. slot 2 or 4) has nothing connected to it. Could this mean that slots 1b and 2 (and 3b and 4) share PCIe lanes?

* MPX bay 1 has a x8 PCIe slot. I believe that bay 1 is the lower bay, and thus assume that slot 2 is the x8 slot. (In the other bay, slot 4 is x16.)

Could you reprognosticate the PCIe configuration?

 

[edgerider]

linus is quite smart and factual about his reviews and most of the time he is right.
about ecc the only thing i can say is since I am working with a cMP 5.1 the machine never crashed on workload.
I sometimes had some lightroom export that would take several days, but it never crashed. on the ither hand, macbook or mac mini will slow down to a point where if you leave it on for several hour at full throttle you are almost sure that machine will crash.
duno if its is ecc related or not.

one other thing : with raid 0 in apple raid, i never had an issue with the cMP while on the mini it was almost unusable because it would fail the raid randomly.

I guess if you are alone working on a machine where all is inside with fairly straight forward hardware, and hit it with normal workload, no ecc is fine.

but if like mine your machine is maxed out all the way and you hit it with really massive data to process, the ECC memory make sense...

but in some case newer machine can go faster : it is faster to export a prores 444 on the macpro and to use my macbook to convert to h264 that it is to export straight h264 from the macpro...

that is why i have big hopes in the new apple « afterburner card » because i don’t think the xeon cpu have all the internal « dedicated » h264/265/mjpeg/etc decoder/encoder.

so if all the heavy lifting is done by the after burner and the gpus, a 10 core configuration might be plenty enough for most of the tasks if it is just about running the system and the hardware.

on my cMP the main performance boost was going from sata ssd to 4 pcie ssd in raid 0 in conjunction of going from a gtx660ti to a mcv flashed gtx780 6gb.

once i had this i could run the machine at almost 100% all the time... before that, i rarely saw 100% usage on cpu.

I have no doubt that a 10 core 7.1 with an afterburner card and a vega 2 gpu will out perform a toped up cMP 12x3,46.

this is all I need.

 

[amedias]

The place the entire comparison argument falls down is that if you're choosing your hardware based on the hardware alone you'd never buy the Mac Pro, as there are more capable systems for less money with better support from other vendors.

The only time you'll be considering the Mac Pro is if your workflow requires macOS, or you are so deeply wedded to it that you won't consider migrating from it. At that point all comparisons with other vendors are moot as there is no alternative in the market other than hackintosh and all the caveats that come with that, the only comparison you can do at that point is between different models in Apples range.

For running macOS Apple only offer a fixed number of options and so you have to decide which option fits you best even if it's not ideal, that often means either accepting a spec compromise or paying more for potential you might not use.

The difference with PC hardware when you are OS agnostic is that you can buy a system which fits you exact needs from one of many vendors, you don't have to pay for stuff you don't need, and you don't have to make compromises.

That is the crux of the issue...

 

[slughead]

And I imagine that as usual they will be extremely capable and very good value. I know this point has been made before but it's worth making again... with HP/Dell/Lenovo you can guarantee rolling updates on a regular schedule to get access to new tech. Once upon a time Apple did this, then they stopped, if they're going to do it again that will be great, but they have to earn that trust back.

Re HP/dell: It isn't just what they say, they've actually been doing it for 20 years. Apple going from the old cheesegrater to the trashcan of all things is a pretty big red flag for those who want to stay on the platform after buying their software licenses that are OS specific.

Honestly I've been out of the Mac OS game for so long I don't know of any workload short of FCP that's better on Mac OS.
[doublepost=1560516954][/doublepost]

Congrats to Linus for building a popular YouTube channel but calling him an influential voice in the workstation market is laughable. The few times he ventures into the Red Cinema ecosystem he gets quickly out of his depth as well.

Is that really what I wrote? did I call him "an influential voice in the workstation market"

Once again: like it or not he runs a company that edits thousands of hours of video in 8K every year using some of the highest-end processors (as in literally the processors used in the nMP, just last gen) for a number of tasks, he's also got a staff of particularly knowledgeable folks. He's got more qualifications to talk about this type of hardware, at least in that realm, than 99% of people on here. That doesn't make him right, but he's pretty darn qualified and I'd trust his opinion over most random forum posters on the internet, some of which were telling me silly things about the trashcan 5 years ago.

Getting back to the ECC thing: I like that in general he's stirred up the ECC vs other RAM debate: Which use-cases does it actually matter in? Where's the data? He never said ECC is worse in any way, just trying to get some answers over the state of DDR4 vs ECC -- a good question that nobody seems to have answered in over 9 years. Also as a reminder, the only reason he's brought it up is that's INTEL'S arbitrary but at least discreet distinction between "WERKSTASHUN" and "PC" processors. AMD -- arguably a better product at the moment for almost every price point -- has ECC for all processors. Linus is right: The whole "workstation" moniker is dead. Current usage to justify insane prices is just Intel propaganda. Not so? Where's the line? How many PCIe lanes? Ryzen 2700x ($330) vs 8 core Xeon ($700-2000 depending on the MacRumors post) both with ECC, why is the xeon a workstation and the 2700x just a PC? GO!

 

[beaker7]

Re HP/dell: It isn't just what they say, they've actually been doing it for 20 years. Apple going from the old cheesegrater to the trashcan of all things is a pretty big red flag for those who want to stay on the platform after buying their software licenses that are OS specific.

Honestly I've been out of the Mac OS game for so long I don't know of any workload short of FCP that's better on Mac OS.
[doublepost=1560516954][/doublepost]


Is that really what I wrote? did I call him "an influential voice in the workstation market"

Once again: like it or not he runs a company that edits thousands of hours of video in 8K every year using some of the highest-end processors (as in literally the processors used in the nMP, just last gen) for a number of tasks, he's also got a staff of particularly knowledgeable folks. He's got more qualifications to talk about this type of hardware, at least in that realm, than 99% of people on here. That doesn't make him right, but he's pretty darn qualified and I'd trust his opinion over most random forum posters on the internet, some of which were telling me silly things about the trashcan 5 years ago.

Getting back to the ECC thing: I like that in general he's stirred up the ECC vs other RAM debate: Which use-cases does it actually matter in? Where's the data? He never said ECC is worse in any way, just trying to get some answers over the state of DDR4 vs ECC -- a good question that nobody seems to have answered in over 9 years. Also as a reminder, the only reason he's brought it up is that's INTEL'S arbitrary but at least discreet distinction between "WERKSTASHUN" and "PC" processors. AMD -- arguably a better product at the moment for almost every price point -- has ECC for all processors. Linus is right: The whole "workstation" moniker is dead. Current usage to justify insane prices is just Intel propaganda. Not so? Where's the line? How many PCIe lanes? Ryzen 2700x ($330) vs 8 core Xeon ($700-2000 depending on the MacRumors post) both with ECC, why is the xeon a workstation and the 2700x just a PC? GO!

Technically what you said was

"For those who don't know, LTT is one of the most influential tech reporting organizations in the world. They have 8.6 million subscribers on youtube."

But the context was him discussing a workstation. So a reasonable observer would conclude that you implied he is an influential voice in the workstation market, which he is not. Nobody buying workstations at the enterprise or even mid levels is watching Linus to make decisions.

The fact that he and his organization shoot thousands of hours of 8K footage on Red cameras also doesn't make him an expert or respected in the Red community in any way. It makes him a wealthy youtuber that shoots on expensive toys and uses 1/10th of their potential.

Maybe I'm a weirdo because I sit in both of these camps, buying workstations at enterprise and also shooting on Arri and Red systems daily for the last couple decades.

If a rich douchebag has 6 Ferraris in his garage, that doesnt make him respected or influential in the racing community. It makes him a rich douchebag with 6 Ferraris, nothing more.

 

[DoofenshmirtzEI]

DDR4 vs. ECC is a nonsensical comparison. They are orthogonal. You can have ECC DDR4 and non-ECC DDR4. One does not preclude the other.

AMD going to have all of its processors support ECC is the right way to go. Intel doesn't want to do it because they know it would cannibalize their Xeon market.

The point of a workstation is that it works. Always. A workstation and a gaming rig overclocked almost to the point of instability are opposite ends of the spectrum. What is a workstation? How much money is lost for every minute it is down? The higher that figure, the more "WERKSTASHUN" it is.

 

[jscipione]

You can compare the Z4 directly to the MP7,1 if the Z4 meets your needs, or your expected needs over the couple of years life of the system.

The reality is that I need is to run macOS therefore the Z4 does not meet my need and the Mac Pro does.

 

[greenmeanie]

I had a DELL server MB replaced in 4 hours lets see Apple do that.

AppleCare do have an Enterprise level service with onsite warranty so no point comparing the consumer service (of which HP are considerably worse than Apple).

AASPs have very strict SLAs which require repairs to be completed within a few days and they order the parts directly from Apple, so if you’re waiting a few weeks there’s definitely something wrong. The purpose of AASPs is so there’s no need for third party repairs with hardware that Apple can’t control.

Don’t know about Snazzy, I’ll have to watch the video.

[doublepost=1560529172][/doublepost]Never mind most of his built crap breaks lol.

The dude thinks you can arrange a demo where you "flip a bit" on ECC and non-ECC memory and show how ECC recovers and non-ECC memory doesn't. I'm not at all surprised Intel brushed him off.

 

[beaker7]

The dude thinks you can arrange a demo where you "flip a bit" on ECC and non-ECC memory and show how ECC recovers and non-ECC memory doesn't. I'm not at all surprised Intel brushed him off.

I recall some sort of a video he did when Xeon-SP first came out where he was testing the "overclockability" of the Asus C621 Sage board and was using the worst possible passive heatsinks and using a 20 second cinebench benchmark. I don't recall all the details as I couldn't stand to watch the entire thing.

Another where he was testing the Red Rocket-X in a version of Premiere that didn't fully support it, using footage that the Rocket-X only partially supports.

Its good for entertainment in that train wreck sort of way. I feel sorry for anyone using to to inform decisions. But i suppose they deserve it.

 

[filterdecay]

I recall some sort of a video he did when Xeon-SP first came out where he was testing the "overclockability" of the Asus C621 Sage board and was using the worst possible passive heatsinks and using a 20 second cinebench benchmark. I don't recall all the details as I couldn't stand to watch the entire thing.

Another where he was testing the Red Rocket-X in a version of Premiere that didn't fully support it, using footage that the Rocket-X only partially supports.

Its good for entertainment in that train wreck sort of way. I feel sorry for anyone using to to inform decisions. But i suppose they deserve it.

He does those train wrecks on purpose

 

[velocityg4]

EXTREMELY interesting commentary from linus regarding Mac Pro on his WAN show

For those who don't know, LTT is one of the most influential tech reporting organizations in the world. They have 8.6 million subscribers on youtube.

Link to timecode 9:17

Some highlights
- starts with a correction from his previous video on the nMP: looks like same mainboard for all new mac pros
- 8 core config should not exist, just buy an iMac or imac pro -it's probably faster even with the iMac throttling
- it probably doesn't matter that the memory bandwidth (6 channel) is crippled by only having 4 sticks on the low end because there isn't enough compute power anyway
- ECC Vs DDR4 -- ECC may not even matter anymore
- "Workstation" is a stupid marketing term that has no meaning anymore
- With the base model Apple is basically saying "buy this if you're the kind of ego, image-is-everything moron that wants to have a Mac Pro as a status symbol but doesn't care at all about what's under the hood"
- buying the base-model and then upgrading later is not economical at all because nobody will buy your 8 core on e-bay because it's crap considering it's only compatible with extremely expensive mobos
- All that said, probably a smart move to have the 6 grand as an option from a marketing standpoint, as only "nerds" like linus will figure out what a rip-off it is.


If you haven't seen it already, this is the original response video

It's important to note Linus is not actually over all negative about the nMP -- especially because of the ability to do 128GB GPU memory. He sees that as a very unique and and potentially cash-saving feature as apparently all competing options are enterprise-level crazy configs. He's basically just poo-pooing most other use-cases for this product. As a side note, he's also extremely excited about the screen and even defends apple a bit on the stand.

Here is the video, advance to 9:17 timecode

[doublepost=1560193732][/doublepost]The thing I found most interesting was the ECC stuff. Apparently he asked Intel to give him a workload to demonstrate the difference between ECC and DDR4 and they literally could not come up with one.

ECC vs DDR4: Perhaps I missed it in their whole diatribe about ECC. That's the issue of memory density. You aren't going to hit 1.5TB RAM without ECC memory. Registered ECC DDR4 modules go up to 128GB. Unbuffered non-ECC go up to 16GB. Yes, I'm aware Samsung just released a 32GB module but hardly anything supports it and it would have been too late to make it into Apple's design. You'd end up with a Mac Pro limited to 192GB RAM (possibly 384GB) rather than 1.5TB. Is it overkill for 8-cores? Sure it is. If you need a 28-core and are working with 8K RAW video. 192GB may seem a little lite.

It would also have been great if Apple did tiers of Mac Pro like Dell does with their Precision series or HP does with their Z-series. Rather than a one size fits all platform. That was never going to happen.

8-Core config should not exist: Okay, I can't really fault them here. Perhaps should not exist at that price point. All I can think is this was intended for shops who want to do their own upgrades or just want to load it up with aftermarket GPU's and RAM for a rendering station but desire macOS.

Hopefully, the Mac Pro does well. It needs to add customers not just cannibalize iMac Pro sales. If it accomplishes this. It may convince management to create prosumer model to go alongside the regular 5K iMac.

 

[slughead]

DDR4 vs. ECC is a nonsensical comparison. They are orthogonal. You can have ECC DDR4 and non-ECC DDR4. One does not preclude the other.

AMD going to have all of its processors support ECC is the right way to go. Intel doesn't want to do it because they know it would cannibalize their Xeon market.

The point of a workstation is that it works. Always. A workstation and a gaming rig overclocked almost to the point of instability are opposite ends of the spectrum. What is a workstation? How much money is lost for every minute it is down? The higher that figure, the more "WERKSTASHUN" it is.

Yes obviously I meant DDR4 non ECC vs DDR4 ECC, my mistake for not being clear. The reason I wrote it that way (which was wrong) was because all the actual data is coming from DDR3 studies.

ECC is almost certainly more stable than non-ECC. With DDR 4 we have no idea how much more stable or if it even makes an actual difference for most use-cases.

ECC is the only objective characteristic of what intel currently designates as "workstation." I think you're right that it's why they don't bother to compete with ryzen by enabling ECC on their "consumer" CPUs.

Certainly your straw-man "overclocked" gaming rig vs a non-overclocked xeon is a big difference in stability. Though with the iMac Pro "workstation" horrible cooling I'm not sure that's always a rule. Not to mention a few years from now with all the dust bunnies you can't remove without voiding the warranty... though Applecare without enterprise level support is crap anyway so perhaps it makes no difference.

Straw men aside, you have zero evidence to support that Xeons and especially this Mac Pro is any more stable than, for instance an i7 or i9, short of ECC. This was Linus' whole point when intel spouted the same garbage: 'so wait intel, if your workstation moniker means more stable, are you saying the i7/i9 is less stable.' no of course not, and there's no data to show that.

Your arguments really feed even more into this looking like dogmatic and arbitrary classifications. Once again, show me some data showing that the ryzen 2700x is not a 'workstation' while an 8 core xeon is, even granting them both ECC. It's a bogus term that is has no objective definition--which was half the point Linus was making.

 

[Derived]

Another one of these? Holy hell. Who gives a **** what Linus thinks...he can do everything he needs on an i7 RGB gamebox, and like many of the rest of you, seems to be judging it against that price point. Useless, silly, zero information learned.

You guys still haven't got this one out of your system yet, it seems

 

[pointvicente]

I know this is an old discussion but has anyone switched over to a z4, z6, z8 workstation from a Mac Pro? Also, has anyone been able to successfully get open core and Mac OS installed on one of these HP workstations?

 

[mikas]

I've got two Z4s. First I played with an idea of a hackintosh for one of these. Googled a lot, and found out some succesfull conversions. Not many, and you would need to downgrade the bios for a hackintosh to work in a Z4. It would not work with up-to-date bios. So eventually I didn't bother. I am trying to get used to windows, and with win11 I think I'm gonna be fine eventually. Not just yet it seems, but eventually I think it all will be ok for me.

I reckon this is not the right place to discuss hackintoshes, but if you find more info on this, please post again here with some links, thank you.

I've upgraded these to top end iMac Pro levels allready, 14 and 18 cores, 256 and 128 GB of RAM, two internal NVMes and RTX A4000 and RX6900XT. I think my Radeon version of a Z4 should be a hackable one with a downgraded bios, but obviously the nVidia one would not.