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Mac Pro 2012 12 Core - How much energy does it use compared to a normal quad core machine?

S

SSD-GUY

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 20, 2012
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Hi all

I'm in the final few stages of purchasing a 12 Core Mac Pro 2012 5,1 model.

I currently have a Ivy bridge 3770K Hackintosh with a 750W corsair psu.

Compared to my Hackintosh, how much more energy will the Mac Pro 12 core model use? Any idea in terms of monthly energy costs if I use my Mac around 8 hours a day?

Thanks
 
SSD-GUY said:
Hi all

I'm in the final few stages of purchasing a 12 Core Mac Pro 2012 5,1 model.

I currently have a Ivy bridge 3770K Hackintosh with a 750W corsair psu.

Compared to my Hackintosh, how much more energy will the Mac Pro 12 core model use? Any idea in terms of monthly energy costs if I use my Mac around 8 hours a day?

Thanks
Click to expand...

No one can really answer all those questions, because no one knows what you pay per KWh for electricity.

BUT, I do have a WATT meter that I use to determine how much electricity my equipment uses so I can compute my costs per hour.

I found my 6 core MP 4,1 with a couple HDD's, a SM951 in a PCI-e slot and a nVidia graphics card draws about 200w when idle.

In comparison, my new Skylake Dell with Core i7, a couple HDD's and a Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD draws about 25W idle. It's amazing how efficient the newer computers are. Where I live, electricity runs about 43 cents per KWh. So, roughly, every 5 hours of Mac use (not counting monitor and peripherals, or high CPU use that can DOUBLE the wattage used), it would cost me roughly 50 cents. So figure roughly a dollar a day, or $30/month if I used it every day.

Get yourself a KILL-A-WATT or similar meter. Cheap and really helps you determine how much electricity your equipment uses and allow you to accurately calculate costs.
 
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My 12 core 5,1 idles at around 180W, uses about 200-230W when surfing the internet. and goes all the way up to 400W under full load on both CPUs. Even when sleeping, it's sucking down 10.1W.

After seeing these figures on my Kill-A-Watt, I have altered my usage drastically. In the past, I never shut off my Mac Pro and just used to put it to sleep. Now, I leave it off and use my little hackintosh for surfing and simple stuff and only turn on the Mac Pro when I need the horsepower.

My little hackintosh idles at 45-50W and only uses 89W under full load (2W when sleeping). Granted, it's only a lowly Q9550S, but it's plenty for surfing.
 
pastrychef said:
My 12 core 5,1 idles at around 180W, uses about 200-230W when surfing the internet. and goes all the way up to 400W under full load on both CPUs. Even when sleeping, it's sucking down 10.1W.

After seeing these figures on my Kill-A-Watt, I have altered my usage drastically. In the past, I never shut off my Mac Pro and just used to put it to sleep. Now, I leave it off and use my little hackintosh for surfing and simple stuff and only turn on the Mac Pro when I need the horsepower.

My little hackintosh idles at 45-50W and only uses 89W under full load (2W when sleeping). Granted, it's only a lowly Q9550S, but it's plenty for surfing.
Click to expand...

Thanks. Can I ask how easy it was to flash the GTX 980 for your Mac Pro?
 
pastrychef said:
Mine isn't flashed. There's no freely available EFI firmware for the GTX 980. If you want boot screens for it, you will have to pay for it.
Click to expand...

When I do get my Mac Pro 12 core 2012 later this summer, I'm thinking of getting the GTX 960 or 970. How easy are those to flash?
 
The most recent Nvidia video card with freely available EFI firmware is the GTX 680. Any card newer than that and you will have to pay for the service unless you can produce your own firmware.
 
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dmylrea said:
I found my 6 core MP 4,1 with a couple HDD's, a SM951 in a PCI-e slot and a nVidia graphics card draws about 200w when idle.

In comparison, my new Skylake Dell with Core i7, a couple HDD's and a Samsung 950 PRO NVMe SSD draws about 25W idle. It's amazing how efficient the newer computers are.
Click to expand...

pastrychef said:
My 12 core 5,1 idles at around 180W, uses about 200-230W when surfing the internet. and goes all the way up to 400W under full load on both CPUs. Even when sleeping, it's sucking down 10.1W.

After seeing these figures on my Kill-A-Watt, I have altered my usage drastically. In the past, I never shut off my Mac Pro and just used to put it to sleep. Now, I leave it off and use my little hackintosh for surfing and simple stuff and only turn on the Mac Pro when I need the horsepower.

My little hackintosh idles at 45-50W and only uses 89W under full load (2W when sleeping). Granted, it's only a lowly Q9550S, but it's plenty for surfing.
Click to expand...

I'm planning to use my MacMini 2012 4 core with eGPU GTX '1050' for simple stuff, and using my Mac Pro 6 core with MVC GTX 1080 only for gaming, video editing etc. Both Macs connected to the same 5K DP 1.4 display (obviously not from Apple).

At the moment experimenting with a tiny eGPU with GTX 750 Ti: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/building-external-gpus-on-mac-egpu.1893792/page-5#post-22940819
 
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Synchro3 said:
I'm planing to use my MacMini 2012 4 core with eGPU GTX '1050' for simple stuff, and using my Mac Pro 6 core with MVC GTX 1080 only for gaming, video editing etc. Both Macs connected to the same 5K DP 1.4 display (obviously not from Apple).

At the moment experimenting with a tiny eGPU with GTX 750 Ti: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/building-external-gpus-on-mac-egpu.1893792/page-5#post-22940819
Click to expand...
Confused about your post in this thread. It seemingly has no information related to this thread. Just wanted everyone to know you have a 1080 and a 1050? o_O
 
No, sorry for my English, wanted to say that i'm preferring a Mac Mini 2012 with eGPU for simple stuff like Internet etc. over a Mac Pro because of lower energy consumption.

And I'm only planning to buy and use a possible future energy-saving GTX 1050 as eGPU with that Mac Mini because it might have DP 1.4.
 
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I'm going in the opposite direction... I will be building a hackintosh within the next few months. I feel the Intel Skylake systems strike a great balance between power and power efficiency.

The new GTX 1080 seems to be a fantastic card. Hopefully, my budget will allow me to purchase one. It will be great to no longer have to worry about boot screens and to not have the GPU's performance handicapped by my old Mac Pro's CPUs.
 
I am not excluding going Hackintosh in the long term, too. At least if I would buy a PC I would ensure taking Hackintosh compatible parts. But at the moment I can live with Mac Mini with eGPU, and of course cMP 4,1.
 
pastrychef said:
I'm going in the opposite direction... I will be building a hackintosh within the next few months. I feel the Intel Skylake systems strike a great balance between power and power efficiency.

The new GTX 1080 seems to be a fantastic card. Hopefully, my budget will allow me to purchase one. It will be great to no longer have to worry about boot screens and to not have the GPU's performance handicapped by my old Mac Pro's CPUs.
Click to expand...

Why not get the 3.33ghz 6 core CPUS x2? Surely they are more powerful than a comparable skylake i7?

Also, have you built/maintained a mackintosh before? Please don't take this the wrong way, but many things do break at the slightest of updates (for instance, 10.11.2 broke audio for me, I had to do a long tedious workaround to make sure sound worked after sleep). Sleep is also another issue, and even getting simple things like iMessage working requires some serious work.
 
I do have 3.33GHz x2 in my 5,1 right now. But I want something more power efficient. I think that an i7 will give me close to double the single core performance and at about the same multi core performance of an 8 core 4,1/5,1 (maybe more if I mess with overclocking). But the key is that it would run much cooler and suck down much less power.

My experience with hackintoshes is limited. But I've been doing a ton of reading and it seems support for Skylake is very good now. I'm confident that with the current tools in the hackintosh community, I will have minimal problems.

On my current hackintosh, I got everything working with very, very little effort. Everything works including sleep and audio. I even have audio over HDMI working perfectly and can run VMware Fusion off of my native Windows 10 install (I guess it can be considered Bootcamp drive).

When I upgraded from 10.11.4 to 10.11.5, I just upgraded from the App Store, rebooted, and continued using my machine. I know that it's recommended t do combo updates and wait for reports of compatibility issues, but I wanted to see what could go wrong if I didn't follow the conventional wisdom and everything just worked. Heck, I read about people on real Macs who have more issues than I did with OS X updates.

I think if I do enough homework and purchase parts with the most compatible components, it should be fairly easy to maintain. I think that I could save a considerable amount from the energy bill savings. I also wouldn't have to run my A/C as high during the summers since an i7 won't generate nearly as much heat as a pair of X5680s.
 
pastrychef said:
I do have 3.33GHz x2 in my 5,1 right now. But I want something more power efficient. I think that an i7 will give me close to double the single core performance and at about the same multi core performance of an 8 core 4,1/5,1 (maybe more if I mess with overclocking). But the key is that it would run much cooler and suck down much less power.

My experience with hackintoshes is limited. But I've been doing a ton of reading and it seems support for Skylake is very good now. I'm confident that with the current tools in the hackintosh community, I will have minimal problems.

On my current hackintosh, I got everything working with very, very little effort. Everything works including sleep and audio. I even have audio over HDMI working perfectly and can run VMware Fusion off of my native Windows 10 install (I guess it can be considered Bootcamp drive).

When I upgraded from 10.11.4 to 10.11.5, I just upgraded from the App Store, rebooted, and continued using my machine. I know that it's recommended t do combo updates and wait for reports of compatibility issues, but I wanted to see what could go wrong if I didn't follow the conventional wisdom and everything just worked. Heck, I read about people on real Macs who have more issues than I did with OS X updates.

I think if I do enough homework and purchase parts with the most compatible components, it should be fairly easy to maintain. I think that I could save a considerable amount from the energy bill savings. I also wouldn't have to run my A/C as high during the summers since an i7 won't generate nearly as much heat as a pair of X5680s.
Click to expand...

Can I ask roughly how much your 12 core 3.33 costs and how much you think a skylake i7 quad core will cost? I ask as if the energy savings really are sufficient, I may just go down the Hackintosh route again in a years time when Uni will be over, or maybe even buy a trash can mac pro if I can get a good deal. I've just had enough of worrying what will break when things update.

I've also found some really cheap MacBook Pro 15s. I've seen on Geekbench that they are comparable in CPU terms to the Mac Pro 2012, however GPU wise, is the AMD GPU in the rMBP 15 on par/better/worse than my GTX 760?
 
I don't remember what the 5,1 cost me. But I had a 3,1 to sell to offset the costs.

I think that I can build a Skylake hackintosh for about $1000 with the following specs:

1. i7 6700K
2. Z170 mATX motherboard
3. 32GB RAM
4. 750W power supply
5. A decent mATX case

As I posted earlier in this thread, the dual X5680s use about 200-230W with just some internet surfing. I expect an i7 will use at most half of that. Under full load, the X5680s use 400W and I expect an i7 to use half or less than half of that.

Also, if you intend on getting EFI firmware for a new video card, it costs $180+shipping (so about $200). $200 is 20% the cost of my Skylake build or 33% the cost of a GTX 1080. And the old CPUs of the old Mac Pros will bottleneck the newer high end video cards.

I don't know what support was like for Ivy Bridge hackintoshes, but if you check tonymacx86.com, you can see how Unibeast has helped simplify hackintoshing for Skylake. I've seen lots of Skylake geekbench results of 5000+ single core and 20000+ multi core performance which I find amazing.

This is just my opinion, but I am not a fan of AMD GPUs. I've seen too many of them fail due to the insane amount of heat they produce. That being said, be careful of 2011 MacBook Pros. Those seemed to have lots of reliability issues.
 
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I have my UPS plugged into a Killowatt. As a point of comparison, my Haswell hackintosh (specs below) - plus display, plus powered speakers - uses around 130W when doing light surfing.
 
scott.n said:
I have my UPS plugged into a Killowatt. As a point of comparison, my Haswell hackintosh (specs below) - plus display, plus powered speakers - uses around 130W when doing light surfing.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I notice you have a 4K display. Can I ask, when you play 4K video, do you get a service in a activity monitor called vtdecoderxpcservice?
 
scott.n said:
I have my UPS plugged into a Killowatt. As a point of comparison, my Haswell hackintosh (specs below) - plus display, plus powered speakers - uses around 130W when doing light surfing.
Click to expand...

Thanks for confirming. 130W minus display and speakers should put it around 50% or less of that my 5,1 draws.
 
SSD-GUY said:
Thanks. I notice you have a 4K display. Can I ask, when you play 4K video, do you get a service in a activity monitor called vtdecoderxpcservice?
Click to expand...
I don't think I've ever played 4K video except for the rare YouTube video.
 
scott.n said:
I have my UPS plugged into a Killowatt. As a point of comparison, my Haswell hackintosh (specs below) - plus display, plus powered speakers - uses around 130W when doing light surfing.
Click to expand...

My UPS has a WATT meter built in, and my Dell Skylake i7, 2 HDD's, 1 SSD, 4K monitor (Dell P2715Q) uses 65W when surfing. Sometimes a few watts more or less, depending on what is on the LCD (blacks tend to use less and bright whites more). I just moved my home server (SBS 2011) over to a Dell Optiplex 7040 to replace an aging Dell Studio XPS tower I was using, and it's steady at 26W!! It's amazing how little power these things use now!

Those that claim that Hackintoshes are easy to setup and maintain are delusional. :) I've done a few (notebooks) and it's a complete PAIN IN THE ARSE to get everything working, and once you do get ALMOST everything, you're afraid to do updates because something will break! I suppose those with nothing but time on their hands don't mind, but I wound up buying a Macbook Pro because maintaining my Dell Inspiron 7548 Hackintosh was too much trouble. Sure, you save money, but the time and frustration (to me) isn't worth it.
 
Laptops are totally different thing since you have to change WiFi/BT adapter in 99% of the case, hardware is closed and often incompatible. They really are PITA in some cases.

If you're Hackintoshing™ with plain desktop configuration (aka mainly without fancy motherboards), properly patched DSDT and few Clover injections instead of too many kexts, you're good to go until Apple changes some big things in OS X or moves away from Intel.
Heck, my old Dell Optiplex Core2Duo (Q6600, GT220) with DSDT, two Clover patches and three kexts is running 10.7 to 10.11 like a champ. Never had a reboot on wake from sleep like i have with my cMP1,1 every other day due to ATIFramebuffer/Controller panic.
 
dmylrea said:
My UPS has a WATT meter built in, and my Dell Skylake i7, 2 HDD's, 1 SSD, 4K monitor (Dell P2715Q) uses 65W when surfing. Sometimes a few watts more or less, depending on what is on the LCD (blacks tend to use less and bright whites more). I just moved my home server (SBS 2011) over to a Dell Optiplex 7040 to replace an aging Dell Studio XPS tower I was using, and it's steady at 26W!! It's amazing how little power these things use now!

Those that claim that Hackintoshes are easy to setup and maintain are delusional. :) I've done a few (notebooks) and it's a complete PAIN IN THE ARSE to get everything working, and once you do get ALMOST everything, you're afraid to do updates because something will break! I suppose those with nothing but time on their hands don't mind, but I wound up buying a Macbook Pro because maintaining my Dell Inspiron 7548 Hackintosh was too much trouble. Sure, you save money, but the time and frustration (to me) isn't worth it.
Click to expand...

Wow. 65W is awesome. I am very much looking forward to building my Skylake hackintosh and being able to reap the benefits of modern architectures. As much as I loved my 5,1, it's running on 7 year old technology and it's showing its age.

Yes, I have a little Mac mini that runs 24/7 serving a few services and it usually uses less than 20W.

As owbp stated and from all that I've read, it really doesn't seem as daunting to maintain a hackintosh nowadays. I had my current hackintosh up and running OS X in less than an hour and has been running solid. Never had a kernel panic or anything.
 
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