Hi Guys,
After a great deal of pondering, consternation and concern, I decided (thanks to still needing Prores and FCPX) that I couldn't yet leave the Mac platform for the increasingly more appealing world of PCs.
I currently have a maxed-out late 2012 iMac, but it just can't keep up with the video post-production work I'm doing (primarily colour grading), and a recent nightmare project on the iMac cost me so much time, I simply could not afford to carry-on as things were.
I’ve never been a fan of the Trashcan's layout (adding endless PCIe and HDD enclosures and covering my desk in extra cables holds little appeal) and rendering issues with the nMP's D700 cards in Davinci Resolve made it a non-starter for me anyway. So instead I've been pushed down the path of investing $9,000(!) of my hard-earned into an 8-year-old cMP (4,1 flashed to 5,1).
Frankly I find this whole situation rather ludicrous. But thanks to still needing Prores and FCPX, it seemed the best course left to me.
The config of this system is:
- 12-core 3.46Ghz
- 64GB RAM
- Flashed 12GB Titan X (Maxwell)
- 240GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD (Boot Drive, in optical bay)
- 4x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs (in an internal RAID 5 via Softraid)
- 2x 1.92TB Samsung Enterprise SSDs in RAID 0 on a Sonnet Tempo Pro Plus Card (scratch drive)
- Blackmagic Decklink Mini Monitor 4k I/O Card
- Sonnet Allegro Pro 4-port USB3 Card
- Asus PA329Q 4k Monitor
I’ve never gone quite so all-out with a machine before, but it seemed the only way to make an 8-year-old computer as future-proof as possible.
Now I sourced the base machine from a gent in the UK who refurbishes cMPs for a living:
- 12-core 3.46Ghz
- 64GB RAM
- Flashed 12GB Titan X (Maxwell)
- 240GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD (Boot Drive, in optical bay)
- Sonnet Allegro Pro 4-port USB3 Card
And added the other parts as I got them. However, from the get go, I’ve had serious instabilities with the system. The computer would randomly shut off without warning (and often not even under load), and as I added the other components, this instability appeared to grow worse, along with boot times, which grew out to 45 seconds before the Apple chime would sound - after which the machine would boot very rapidly (10 seconds or so) from the SSD, but the looooong wait before the booting would actual commence became infuriating pretty quickly. Shut down times also grew very long.
Now my first thought was that this might be something to do with the Titan X getting enough power (as the setup from the shop was just taking power from the two mini 6-pin ports on the motherboard). I did some reading on this and bought a few adapters and cables so that I could combine the two mini 6-pins into a single 8-pin connector, and I unplugged the DVD drive in the optical bay and stole its power to feed the 6-pin port on the Titan. All up, this setup should provide 279w to the GPU, which should be enough to keep it running even under full load… but the shutdowns persisted without interruption.
Some of the time, on restart, I got no system reports at all; and the rest of the time, it appears to have been kernel panics that caused the machine to sh*t itself and switch off.
At this stage I threw up my hands and sent the machine back to the UK for a replacement (which will hopefully make its way back down to me soonish), but I was wondering what people’s experiences have been with pushing the cMP so far, with such powerful components? Are instabilities common when the architecture is maxed out? Is it simply more than the base hardware was ever designed to deal with?
If I can get the system running stably, I’m sure I’ll be quite happy with the performance (which is still extremely powerful in spite of the system’s age). But if I can’t get that stability, then it’s no good to me at all. The whole point of investing so much into this machine was to get away from the instabilities and crashes when pushing the iMac so much further than it wants to go.
I’d really appreciate hearing people’s experiences with maxing out the cMPs, and whether I should be worried? Or whether, properly setup, the system can be as bulletproof as my old cMPs 1,1 was?
Cheers,
Mark
Sorry, waffling. The card - I bought a Titan X for £440 because I didn't want to spend £1000 on a Flashed one (with a dodgy bit of stolen software from MacVidCards, or pay huge import duty from USA) My research (bit like you it sounds) told me external power and the right drivers would do it. Titan X 12gb Maxwell is working right now in my tower. With one small issue - see my thread if you like. Anyway, I know what you mean about the price, but I've had a lot of fun building mine - it's quite rewarding. Good luck to you, whatever path you decide