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
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