Thanks again for your wisdom
Now when you say long distance and dont place onto any three busses, what the heck is my option on a new Mac Pro?
There is a difference between what Apple labels the TB bus and pragmatically real bus. A DisplayPort device directly hooked to Mac Pro's Thunderbolt port is pragmatically not on the Thunderbolt bus. It is in legacy "pass thru" mode. That signal is not being encoded into TB data traffic and transported on a TB network("bus").
Long distances comes not directly connecting the Display to the Mac Pro. Either connecting them to a "downstream" TB device and plugged in there. Either can extend a few meters with normal TB copper cable or much father with TB fiber but both put video traffic onto the TB newtork/bus.
Were using two Apple Cinema 30"s with a Gefen Dual-Link DVI Switcher at about 10 foot extension using DVI.
a mDP DVI dongle to 10 foot DVI cable is still pragmatically a direct connection to the Mac Pro. There is no TB network involved in that chain. As long as follow the wire(s) back to the Mac Pro and don't cross any TB devices then it isn't a TB network.
So you dont suggest putting both on one bus but split and share with other peripherals.
That would be extremely dubious. Each of the three TB controllers is connected to two physical ports. If you connect two devices in legacy DisplayPort mode to those to ports, then pragmatically what you have down is flushed the PCIe connection of that controller down the drain.
With twice a many devices that need PCIe data transport than DisplayPort/Video data transport that is even more short sided. Fit the higher number devices with enough bandwidth and then use the left over ports for the smaller number of legacy data transport.
can you be specific as to what is safe out of the listed options I have below:
Sonnet Echo Express III Rack - RED ROCKET PCI Card
Sonnet Echo Express III Rack - Digidesign HDX PCI Card
Black Magic UltraStudio 4K
GRAID Studio 8TB
If primarily using the RED ROCKET card to read from bulk storage and transcode back to the same bulk storage then I would separate those two onto independent buses. Those are two good candidates for the legacy DP/DVI video traffic. Since RED Rocket is really looking for at x8 PCIe link it should be on the TB bus by itself. So one legacy monitor on that other port.
If Blackmagic UltraStudio is being used equally for capture and display ( often have bidirectional traffic) then placement is a bit more of judgement call. If not used concurrently with the ROCKET card much then maybe able to share. If it is then pragmatically don't have much of a choice as have three higher bandwidth,bidirectional players and three TB buses.
