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Grumply

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 24, 2017
285
194
Melbourne, Australia
Hi everyone,

I’m trying to suss out a sensible Mac Pro 7,1 hardware build for Davinci Resolve (since it’s basically where I spend all of my post time these days).

I was initially going to opt for the 16-core, since it seemed like the best price/performance balance. But having scoured through CPU benchmarks (particularly the ones posted up by the team at Puget Systems), it seems like the performance advantage it offers in Resolve (over the 12-core Xeon) rarely break single-digit percentages in speed advances.

So now I’m leaning towards the 12-core instead, and using the $1600 AUD I’ll save on the CPU upgrade, to help fund a pair of Radeon VII GPUs (as it seems like having the second GPU is going to improve playback in Resolve, more than the extra 4 cores can).

Does this seem like a sensible approach? It’s surprisingly difficult to find much consensus online as to the benefits of higher core counts.

So the build I’m looking at is:

- 12-core Xeon-W CPU
- 1TB of Apple SSD (for boot drive + applications)
- 2x Radeon VII 16GB GPUs
- Radeon Pro 580X 8GB (is there any value in keeping this in the box alongside the 2x Radeon VIIs?)
- 32GB RAM (which I’ll upgrade to 96GB via 3rd party)
- Sonnet 4x USB3.1 Card
- Blackmagic Decklink Mini Monitor 4k
- 8TB of NVME SSD via the Sonnet or Highpoint 4x NVME cards (are there any other alternatives?)


How does this sound to people? If the Barefeats benchmarks are anything to go by, I gather it should smoke my maxed out 5,1 Mac Pro.

The most important thing for me is real-time playback in the Colour page of Davinci (so that I can accurately assess secondary keys and power windows), render times are a distance second place.

So I’d love to hear any suggestions people might have - particularly for cost-effective NVME (or equivalent) storage. I’ve been sussing out NF1 and U.2 SSDs (for their higher capacities). But nothing is leaping out at me as offering any significant differences in bang-for-buck. I do want the 3000MB/s NVME speeds at a minimum.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated (my brains a little frazzled from all the hardware research after years of not being able to consider it!)

Cheers,

Mark
 
Hi Mark,

I currently use Premiere, but am getting ready to jump over to Resolve.

My Mac Pro arrived yesterday, and is specd very similar to what you’re considering. Like you, I read through a lot of the Puget tests when I was trying to figure out what combination to go with.

Mine:
16 Core
32 GB (replacing with 192 GB)
580X (and I added in 2x VIIs)
2TB SSD

In my initial tests, the VII have performed extremely well (though there is a bug with the fans kicking to 100% if the computer goes into sleep)

My reason for going with the 16 over the 12 was simply to give it a longer shelf life (I’m hoping to get 6-8 years out of it), and with the hopes that multi core CPU utilization will continue to improve.

After running a few benchmarks on raw compute power, it seems there would be almost no difference between 12 and 16 currently though when it comes to photo/video active tasks (no real world scenario seems to even come close to using 100% of the CPU... everything seems put a majority of the workload on the GPUs).

I ended up removing my 580X yesterday as an unscientific test... it seemed like it was actually slowing things down a bit in Capture One 20 (like it was trying to distribute evenly between all 3 cards, rather than bias toward the much faster VIIs). I’m going to add it back in and experiment more though.

The 2TB SSD from Apple performs nicely. I was getting ~2900 MB/sec on read and write. I have seen benchmarks showing the Sonnet 4 NVME card more than doubling that speed in Raid 0 though... so I’m tempted to add one.
 
Unlike Premiere Resolve is very good at harnessing GPU’s in general and also good at using multiple GPU’s.

judging off of benchmarks the 16 core is not a bad value for the money, and performance scaled pretty well for the extra cores so that price is justified overall BUT with Resolve most things you will do will be using the graphics cards so the extra cores won’t be helping that much.

the one area they will help is if you are decoding or encoding video using the CPU and if you are pushing it enough to max out a 12 core.

As time goes on less tasks will be CPU dependent and even more going to the graphics.

let me ask you this, what codecs are you editing with, transcoding do (if you are) and renedering out to?

many are hardware accelerated but not all.

(posting quickly from a smartphone so plz forgive mistakes)
 
I read that owing to Blackmagic’s cozy relationship with Apple, DaVinci might be optimized to use the Afterburner card. Can’t remember where I read it but worth looking into. Color isn’t my main game, but I might grab the card if the price ever drops a bit.
 
Keep in mind the afterburner card only decodes ProRes and ProRes RAW codecs, and doesn’t encode at all so if you don’t use ProRes then it won’t do anything.
 
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My reason for going with the 16 over the 12 was simply to give it a longer shelf life (I’m hoping to get 6-8 years out of it), and with the hopes that multi core CPU utilization will continue to improve.

After running a few benchmarks on raw compute power, it seems there would be almost no difference between 12 and 16 currently though when it comes to photo/video active tasks (no real world scenario seems to even come close to using 100% of the CPU... everything seems put a majority of the workload on the GPUs).

Yeah, that's basically the reason I think I'll go with the 12-core for now. The cost saving almost covers the two Radeon VIIs in full, and in a few years, if the multi-core utilisation has improved significantly, I'll jump up to one of the big boy 24/28 core options (when it hopefully offers a performance increase worthy of the cost).

The 16-core seems like a good, safe bet for the immediate future though.

Unlike Premiere Resolve is very good at harnessing GPU’s in general and also good at using multiple GPU’s.

judging off of benchmarks the 16 core is not a bad value for the money, and performance scaled pretty well for the extra cores so that price is justified overall BUT with Resolve most things you will do will be using the graphics cards so the extra cores won’t be helping that much.

the one area they will help is if you are decoding or encoding video using the CPU and if you are pushing it enough to max out a 12 core.

As time goes on less tasks will be CPU dependent and even more going to the graphics.

let me ask you this, what codecs are you editing with, transcoding do (if you are) and renedering out to?

many are hardware accelerated but not all.

(posting quickly from a smartphone so plz forgive mistakes)

Hey Max,

Just want to say a big thank you for the videos you do 🙏 I've watched a whole bunch of them in the last two weeks, and they've been an incredible help in getting me up to speed on all of this new tech (I've been out of the loop for a good few years now). Really appreciate it.

Codec-wise, I'd say the order of priority for me is: Prores (generally 2k 4444 or 4k 422HQ), followed by 4k 16-bit Sonyraw, followed by 2.8k and 3.4k Arriraw, and soon probably a bit more 4k/6k Canon Raw Lite.

I don't do much editing these days, but when I do, it's either with Prores, or camera-generated h264-based Proxies. Grading is always with the Raw/Prores Log files.
 
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