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MP 7,1 Mac Pro 7,1 - hit or Miss?

Is the Mac Pro 7,1 a hit or a miss?

  • Yes

    Votes: 47 46.1%

  • No

    Votes: 24 23.5%

  • Not sure

    Votes: 31 30.4%
  • Total voters
    102
Hit for me.
Went for 12 Cores, 32 GB Ram, Radeon W5700x, 1TB

I am an industrial designer and do heavy 3D modeling work and illustration.

Upgraded RAM to 128GB, Some mirrored internal 16GB Spinning drives for backup, 2TB M2 For windows along with NVDIA card, looking to upgrade the processor to 28C sometime in the near future as it keeps getting cheaper and also Im waiting for the BIG NAVI support.

The price was steep but the machine delivered and payed itself within its first months.


IMG_1277 copy.jpg
 
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LOL, the poll at the top of this post makes zero sense. You're asking if it's a hit OR a miss, and your answers are "yes" and "no."

Does answering "yes" mean "yes, it's a hit" or "yes, it's a miss"?

*facepalm*
 
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blackquartz said:
Hit for me.
Went for 12 Cores, 32 GB Ram, Radeon W5700x, 1TB

I am an industrial designer and do heavy 3D modeling work and illustration.

Upgraded RAM to 128GB, Some mirrored internal 16GB Spinning drives for backup, 2TB M2 For windows along with NVDIA card, looking to upgrade the processor to 28C sometime in the near future as it keeps getting cheaper and also Im waiting for the BIG NAVI support.

The price was steep but the machine delivered and payed itself within its first months.


View attachment 1739317
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I love it. Do you just run the machine without a cover?
 
ZombiePhysicist said:
I love it. Do you just run the machine without a cover?
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Actually its possible but not really recommended!! heres how:

Screen Shot 2021-03-05 at 16.11.55.png
Screen Shot 2021-03-05 at 16.11.58.png


Running the Mac Pro without the top housing breaks the whole thermal design, But when installing new hardware components I do it just to test stuff, its really practical just so you don't have to disconnect everything again and again
 
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innovaTutor said:
I guess RTX 3090 is a GPU not made by AMD ;-) but else no idea what you are talking about.
please elaborate.
Click to expand...

Octane is a GPU renderer for a number of 3D packages, eg. 3DS MAX, blender, Cinema4D, Rhino, Maya, Houdini, etc.
It scales almost linearly with raw compute performance, CUDA / Metal optimization differences notwithstanding.

These are the list prices, GPUs, and benchmark scores (all prices in CAD, without tax) for what works in OSX. OctaneBench is a fairly reliable indicator of real world render times.

https://render.otoy.com/octanebench...le_by=linear&filter=&singleGPU=1&showRTXOff=0
$2,399.00* - 1x RTX 3090 - 655

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=75411
$7,000.00 - Radeon Pro Vega II Duo - 446 - 2.9x the price for 68% of the performance
$3,500.00 - Radeon Pro Vega II - 223 - 1.5x the price for 36% of the performance
$1,250.00 - 5700 XT - 184 - 0.5x the price for 28% of the performance

It doesn't make sense to go with AMD / Mac Pro GPUs for Octane. It's not possible to compare the existing 6XXX series of AMD cards because Octane won't work with them at all off the Mac platform and Apple hasn't released drivers.

In CPU rendering the MP also struggles: the 28C Xeon scores 9,940 in Cinebench and the 3970X TR scores 16,988.**
The 28C Xeon is an $8,750.00 upgrade from Apple or ~$3,750 on eBay. The 3970X TR is ~$2,600.00 retail with a warranty.

As a necessary caveat: computers are more than just their benchmark numbers, and there are things you can do with an MP you simply cannot on some generic PC. But if your workflow is OS agnostic and this is what you want to do with the box under your desk, you can't ignore them either.

* I lucked out and scored retail MSRP when I bought mine. The GPU market is really f'd up right now.
** This site has different numbers, since there are variables like RAM speed, etc., but the relative performance is very similar.
 
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blackadde said:
In CPU rendering the MP also struggles: the 28C Xeon scores 9,940 in Cinebench and the 3970X TR scores 16,988.**
The 28C Xeon is an $8,750.00 upgrade from Apple or ~$3,750 on eBay. The 3970X TR is ~$2,600.00 retail with a warranty.
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Well, I don't don't do entire render projects in my machine, I use cloud base rendering services which are faster than any single processor that is available today.

Also I have a PC build with a 3090 that I use for gaming, I specify this because I've always thought that is funny that people asume Mac Pro users are somehow unaware that there are newer thread ripper processors and new shiny nvidia cards. It's not that I don't know that these compones exists, is just that my work is too important to rely on a pc box or a hackintosh.
 
You wrote that like I was talking to you, but I actually quoted someone else. 😭

Some people render on the cloud. Some people buy 64C CPUs and do it locally. Some people send it to the studio VFX farm. Some people use their GPU(s). Horses for courses, friend.
 
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blackadde said:
You wrote that like I was talking to you, but I actually quoted someone else. 😭

Some people render on the cloud. Some people buy 64C CPUs and do it locally. Some people send it to the studio VFX farm. Some people use their GPU(s). Horses for courses, friend.
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Im sorry didnt mean to make it sound in a personal way.

A quick question, the prices you mention in your post are a bit off, what currency are you refeering to ?
 
Those prices are "... in CAD, without tax".

Apple's USD / CAD rate on parts is surprisingly fair: $5600 USD -> $7000 CAD for the Vega II Duo doesn't have any conversion markup.
 
aaronhead14 said:
LOL, the poll at the top of this post makes zero sense. You're asking if it's a hit OR a miss, and your answers are "yes" and "no."

Does answering "yes" mean "yes, it's a hit" or "yes, it's a miss"?

*facepalm*
Click to expand...
I clarified the question in a later post.
 
From Apple's standpoint, no idea.

In my case, I would have to say it leans toward a "miss". I have purchased about 15 new Macs over the past 30 years and never experienced the chronic issues that I have with this unit that I purchased in July 2020 (and they replaced completely in November 2020).

It crashes and restarts during or waking from sleep all the time. Also in the beginning it crashed constantly right after launching certain Adobe apps (but that has improved somewhat). I have had lots of crashes the past few months in Quicktime Player and Safari as well. I don't recall really any crashes in my previous Macs.

I finally quit calling Apple as it appears they have no clue (or won't address it). I finally gave up and have learned to live with it and just make excuses to my clients when it happens in front of them! My guess is the issues surround the implementation of the w5700x GPU since there are several people I have seen that reported the same issues and the problems vanished as soon as they gave up and spent $3000 or more on a Vega II Pro. I am not going to dump another $3,000 to fix a defective Apple-supported rollout (if that is the problem).

I will say, if I were Apple, I would have sent me a Vega II Pro on consignment for a month just to see if that was the cause. They said they could not do that, but they could send me an entirely new machine with the same original specs (which they did) as they eventually determined it was the logic board (which it was not).
 
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The_Interloper said:
I'm sure it's a hit for those who've bought it. But I do wonder how many pros had already jumped ship before it was announced. A huge amount must have also been waiting (and waiting...and waiting) for it only to be shocked at the starting price.
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That was me. I jumped ship & I haven't looked back. If Timmy had told us in 2017 what they were actually cooking up, I could have jumped 3 years earlier.

OTOH, I am now a typical Apple user - I have an iphone, an ipad, and I do all of my real work on an inexpensive windows box that massively outperforms Apple's desktop line.
 
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I don't have any experience with it, but I will say that the cMP has been such an incredible value and remained relevant and usable to this current day.... with apple's move to ARM, it really gives me doubt on how long the 7.1 will be useful.

I would love an iMac Pro, but then I'm at $3-4000, so for now I will limp along my cMP until something better comes along, or 7.1s get cheap enough to own for a prosumer.
 
choreo said:
I will say, if I were Apple, I would have sent me a Vega II Pro on consignment for a month just to see if that was the cause. They said they could not do that, but they could send me an entirely new machine with the same original specs (which they did) as they eventually determined it was the logic board (which it was not).
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Why didn't you pick up a 3rdparty Radeon Vii to confirm? They cost like 700 or so for new ones last year (probably clearance sales). Of course now they will be priced like unobtainium.
 
choreo said:
From Apple's standpoint, no idea.

In my case, I would have to say it leans toward a "miss". I have purchased about 15 new Macs over the past 30 years and never experienced the chronic issues that I have with this unit that I purchased in July 2020 (and they replaced completely in November 2020).

It crashes and restarts during or waking from sleep all the time. Also in the beginning it crashed constantly right after launching certain Adobe apps (but that has improved somewhat). I have had lots of crashes the past few months in Quicktime Player and Safari as well. I don't recall really any crashes in my previous Macs.

I finally quit calling Apple as it appears they have no clue (or won't address it). I finally gave up and have learned to live with it and just make excuses to my clients when it happens in front of them! My guess is the issues surround the implementation of the w5700x GPU since there are several people I have seen that reported the same issues and the problems vanished as soon as they gave up and spent $3000 or more on a Vega II Pro. I am not going to dump another $3,000 to fix a defective Apple-supported rollout (if that is the problem).

I will say, if I were Apple, I would have sent me a Vega II Pro on consignment for a month just to see if that was the cause. They said they could not do that, but they could send me an entirely new machine with the same original specs (which they did) as they eventually determined it was the logic board (which it was not).
Click to expand...

Your case has always intrigued me. We had some of the same sleep issues which I wrote off as being early in the game. But mine were all resolved. The machine goes to sleep great even though it has 2 PCIe cards that are totally NOT apple cards (High Point 7120 with a 15TB Micron 9300 U.2 NVMe drive, and an AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 video card).

From trying to read in between the lines, it seems to be something particular about the 5700 card and/or your particular software mix. I'm guessing you tried using other video cards by now, so maybe it's just a weird combo of software.

I'm going to come out and say it, the 7,1 is even more stable than my 5,1. It's just way less flakey particularly since 11.2 has been out. Of course I'm just a sample size of MeMyself&I.

Did apple offer you a refund? At this point, I would have thought you suffered enough and I would have tried to return it.
 
I bought a 16 core machine back in December 2019 to replace my aging 12 core 2009 4,1 to 5,1 conversion that was incapable of doing most of the current development I was doing (I had been getting by with a laptop for Mojave development that was a pale comparison). In the sense I had to soon do all development work at home it was perfect timing! So huge "hit" in the short term, even if entirely accidental.

Long term, however, remains to be seen. If Mr. Kuo's rumors about the machine and its successor are correct, then it will have been a wise choice as it will almost certainly be supported for years to come by Apple. Big Navi support is absolutely required long-term for the platform, and **if** there's another Intel version in the wings as he alluded to it probably means Big Navi support is coming. As long as it can support development on the current version of Mac OS/iOS it will do all I need. If it lasts me a decade as a workable machine it will have been a big "hit". I doubt it will, but 7 years is certainly possible.
 
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ssgbryan said:
The 7,1 will be supported just like the PowerMacs were supported after Apple went Intel.
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I think that's the most likely outcome, but Apple's been playing their hand close to the chest lately. Nobody knows how the AS architecture will scale to workstation-class performance yet and Apple may well be forced to produce / meaningfully support the Intel MP for a while to come still.

When the PowerPC -> x86 arch change happened the roadmap was much clearer. Intel already had CPUs lined up for every use case and Apple could design products knowing their performance envelope well in advance.
 
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I am looking at selling mine. Too much machine for what I use it for. If you are interested PM and we can chat.
 
I initially defended the 7,1 when it was announced, mostly based on unrealized potential that Apple was touting for Metal support. As time as passed, its become clear to me that:

1) It's simply another stopgap machine, just like the iMac Pro, to keep people distracted while Apple finalized its transition to Apple Silicon.
2) It has extremely limited use-cases for true "Pros." Let's be honest...it's a FCP/Logic machine. Seems that Apple leaned heavily into high-profile YouTube creators as their target market. Or Apple enthusiasts with deep pockets who don't use the machines for any Pro work at all.
3) Price to performance value is absolute garbage.

Also, why did they bother making this thing upgradable at all. They might as well have just made another iMac Pro, because the Apple Silicon version of this is going to make it totally obsolete. It arguably already is.
 
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