My nMP Review (vs my old 4,1 Mac Pro)

[mrsavage1]

After running both MPs for most of the weekend, I finally got all my files transferred over, and the oMP is out of the way. That gave me a chance to get my workspace back to normal. Where the oMP sat on the floor, the nMP is now sitting on the right end of the desk for now. If (when) I get a 4K display, I'll probably have room between the monitors to put it there.

Image

Holy ***** thats a fantastic setup you've got. Mac Pro's roasting over a warm fire next christmas

 

[flat five]

Congrats on the new machine, clearly an upgrade from your old one.

right.. a true upgrade.. quite a few people are going to be coming from older mac pros and it's a lot nicer for us to see comparisons like this than to a well outfitted 5,1.

here’s Darth and his trusty Stormtrooper at the ready.

do you have anything you can add about the 801.11ac wifi in combination with the airport?

my non-concrete plan all along has been to get a 3TB airport and use it for my storage.. i'd really like to split it to 500GB/2.5TB and use the smaller partition as my time capsule but i'm not even sure if that's possible.. or if it's possible to simply use it as a single partitioned drive (not backup)?

i'm not sure if there's a software test for the combo out there but basically, if it feels similar to a 7200rpm hd through fw800 then that would do the trick for me..
so, how's it feel?
thanks

oh..also, if you happen to have a laptop with the 802.11ac in there, can you try moving some stuff between it and the nmp via airdrop?

 

[Nugget]

my non-concrete plan all along has been to get a 3TB airport and use it for my storage.. i'd really like to split it to 500GB/2.5TB and use the smaller partition as my time capsule but i'm not even sure if that's possible

Yeah, that's possible with the Airport. I've got one set up at home with a drive sliced into two partitions, one for general file storage and one as a Time Machine target for my girlfriend's MacBook Pro. She has complained that when time machine is doing its magic that it feels like it is saturating the wireless, but I didn't probe for any details and it's not something I've experienced.

 

[flat five]

Yeah, that's possible with the Airport. I've got one set up at home with a drive sliced into two partitions, one for general file storage and one as a Time Machine target for my girlfriend's MacBook Pro.

great. that's good to know. thanks

She has complained that when time machine is doing its magic that it feels like it is saturating the wireless, but I didn't probe for any details and it's not something I've experienced.

yeah, i could live with that if it occurs.. as long as other computers don't get kicked off the network during timemachining (or similar style problems), i'd be ok.

 

[motegi]

Just curious, what's the thing between the monitors and keyboard?

An Apogee Quartet: http://apogeedigital.com/products/quartet.php

I'll be bringing my Lacie 8TB raid over to USB3 from Firewire 800, and picking up a thunderbolt drive of some sort as a replacement for all my internal storage.

Ha, me too! Lacie TBolt SSD to be exact.

 

[Dark Goob]

22FPS on the Heaven 4 extreme benchmark? That frankly... sucks. You sure you did this right? Were you running it at 4k resolution or something?

 

[VirtualRain]

Just curious, what's the thing between the monitors and keyboard?

Although it looks like an Apogee Quartet, it's a Lexicon IO22 which is a lot cheaper than the Apogee. It's my USB audio interface. I love the form factor, aesthetics, price, and the sound quality, but every major OS X release creates a waiting game for updated drivers which has been frustrating. Lexicon support is not the greatest and this product is low priority for them it seems.

do you have anything you can add about the 801.11ac wifi in combination with the airport?

my non-concrete plan all along has been to get a 3TB airport and use it for my storage.. i'd really like to split it to 500GB/2.5TB and use the smaller partition as my time capsule but i'm not even sure if that's possible.. or if it's possible to simply use it as a single partitioned drive (not backup)?

i'm not sure if there's a software test for the combo out there but basically, if it feels similar to a 7200rpm hd through fw800 then that would do the trick for me..
so, how's it feel?
thanks

oh..also, if you happen to have a laptop with the 802.11ac in there, can you try moving some stuff between it and the nmp via airdrop?

I run my nMP on a wired GigE connection to the TC as we have a lot of other WiFi devices in the house all competing for spectrum... And, the nMP is currently the only AC device I have. So I don't think I can help you out much with transfers over AC but let me know if there's something of value I can do... I'm happy to try.

As for using a TC for storage, it really depends how responsive you need it to be... The TC spins down the disk when it's not needed so it can add a significant delay when you go to access it for something and it needs to spin up. However, once it's going, it's responsive and quick. I'd say it's much better than having to connect an external drive every time you want to use it, but not as convenient as a local drive or even a NAS where you can control this behaviour.

And I'm almost certain there's no way to partition the TC drive... Although having a single partition doesn't prevent you from using it for backups (or not) and general storage. Time Machine stores your backups in an image that looks like one file so it's easy to work around or ignore if you want to setup some kind of folder structure... No problem there.

As for Time Machine consuming a lot of network bandwidth, that's not been my experience... TM is fairly slow, and I even think Apple assigns some QoS like parameters to its traffic so it can't completely kill your bandwidth, but I might be off on that as it's been a few years since I studied what it was doing, and it might have changed.

 

[motegi]

Although it looks like an Apogee Quartet, it's a Lexicon IO22 which is a lot cheaper than the Apogee. It's my USB audio interface.

Ah my bad.

 

[VirtualRain]

22FPS on the Heaven 4 extreme benchmark? That frankly... sucks. You sure you did this right? Were you running it at 4k resolution or something?

That's the same I've seen in another thread. Pretty sure it's accurate. Keep in mind, it's only utilizing one of the GPUs in that test. BTW, what are you comparing that to in concluding it sucks?

 

[flat five]

I run my nMP on a wired GigE connection to the TC as we have a lot of other a WiFi devices in the house. And, the nMP is currently the only AC device I have.

As for using a TC for storage, it really depends how responsive you need it to be... The TC spins down the disk when it's not needed so it can add a significant delay when you go to access it for something and it needs to spin up. However, once it's going, it's responsive and quick. I'd say it's much better than having to connect an external drive every time you want to use it, but not as convenient as a local drive or even a NAS where you can control this behaviour.

yeah, i don't need it to be that responsive.. my working files are generally small enough to keep on the main drive (my current working drive which contains all projects is 400GB with 140 to spare).. those files also go to the cloud as well as another hard copy on a laptop..

i just need local storage (mp specific) for texture/hdri/backplate collections etc. and if it takes one second to bring one over then that's ok.. (it would already be spinning since i'm browsing the collections at that point)

anyway.. going too far offtopic here.. srry

And I'm almost certain there's no way to partition the TC drive... Although having a single partition doesn't prevent you from using it for backups (or not) and general storage. Time Machine stores your backups in an image that looks like one file so it's easy to work around or ignore if you want to setup some kind of folder structure... No problem there.

ha.. .. that's how my time machine on my laptop is setup (second HD inside which timemachines and i manually have files on there as well.. with the backupdb in the mix).. so partition_able or not, it doesn't matter to me.. chalk this one down as a brainfart.. #

As for Time a Machine consuming a lot of network bandwidth, that's not been my experience... TM is fairly slow, and I even think Apple assigns some QoS like parameters to its traffic so it can't completely kill your bandwidth, but I might be off on that as it's been a few years since I studied what it was doing, and it might have changed.

cool. thanks for the info and thanks for the review.

 

[analog guy]

right.. a true upgrade.. quite a few people are going to be coming from older mac pros and it's a lot nicer for us to see comparisons like this than to a well outfitted 5,1.



do you have anything you can add about the 801.11ac wifi in combination with the airport?

my non-concrete plan all along has been to get a 3TB airport and use it for my storage.. i'd really like to split it to 500GB/2.5TB and use the smaller partition as my time capsule but i'm not even sure if that's possible.. or if it's possible to simply use it as a single partitioned drive (not backup)?

i'm not sure if there's a software test for the combo out there but basically, if it feels similar to a 7200rpm hd through fw800 then that would do the trick for me..
so, how's it feel?
thanks

oh..also, if you happen to have a laptop with the 802.11ac in there, can you try moving some stuff between it and the nmp via airdrop?

although not the nMP, i can offer a bit of anecdotal evidence:

i recently had in my possession a 2012 MBA, 2013 MBA (802.11ac), a new TC (ac) and one a few generations older.

i did some testing and noticed significantly faster throughput with the newer MBA and newer TC. web surfing, file transfers, etc., are all appreciably faster.

i ran a blackmagic disk test a moment ago and got 42MB/s read & write (!!!! not a typo!!!!) from a wired connection, and ~20 from a wireless one with only one device on the network at that time.

makes me think i need to get something slight faster going for TM backups (USB3?).

 

[wheelhot]

Hmm, I check your unigine heaven 4 result, any chance you could re run the test with similar settings as the image below?

 

[Nugget]

And I'm almost certain there's no way to partition the TC drive... Although having a single partition doesn't prevent you from using it for backups (or not) and general storage. Time Machine stores your backups in an image that looks like one file so it's easy to work around or ignore if you want to setup some kind of folder structure... No problem there.

Actually, it is a problem because Time Machine will happily (by design) completely fill up whatever volume you place it on, so once that happens you can't put any more other files on the partition. There's no way to limit Time Machine so that it leaves free space for other use on the drive. But, it's not an issue if you're using an Airport, because you can just partition the drive before you plug it in. Might be an issue, as you speculate, if there's no way to partition the drive in a Time Capsule.

 

[VirtualRain]

Hmm, I check your unigine heaven 4 result, any chance you could re run the test with similar settings as the image below?

Image

I'll see what I can do tomorrow evening. There were a couple other threads here comparing Heaven benchmarks on the D300 and D500 and mine were consistent with those (which were nearly identical)... They were done with the extreme preset I used. However, I'll still try these settings for a broader comparison.

Actually, it is a problem because Time Machine will happily (by design) completely fill up whatever volume you place it on, so once that happens you can't put any more other files on the partition. There's no way to limit Time Machine so that it leaves free space for other use on the drive. But, it's not an issue if you're using an Airport, because you can just partition the drive before you plug it in. Might be an issue, as you speculate, if there's no way to partition the drive in a Time Capsule.

Yeah, but I've never really had a problem with TM consuming all space on the TC drive, but I guess it could absolutely happen... How quickly depending on how much you're backing up and how much and how frequently files are changing.

 

[wheelhot]

It's crazy you're having so much trouble getting someone to run that Specview benchmark for you... but I'm afraid I don't have Windows (I banished it from my world years ago).

I wish I could, but I doubt my 3D CAD software will ever have a Mac version.

I find it interesting that there's an ongoing debate whether the FirePro supplied is an actual FirePro or not, when all they need to do is run a specviewperf benchmark test and the result will give their answer as the biggest difference between a FirePro and Radeon GPU is the driver, there is some hardware spec related differences and probably the board components as well, but the biggest difference will be always be the driver.

 

[cal6n]

22FPS on the Heaven 4 extreme benchmark? That frankly... sucks. You sure you did this right? Were you running it at 4k resolution or something?

That's the same I've seen in another thread. Pretty sure it's accurate. Keep in mind, it's only utilizing one of the GPUs in that test. BTW, what are you comparing that to in concluding it sucks?

I'll just jump in here.

These are using the Heaven "extreme" preset on a Mac Pro 5,1, 3.33 hex core with a flashed GTX 680.

First is in Mavericks, which includes tessellation:

And here's under Mountain Lion, without tessellation:

Moving on to LuxMark, we have the CPU only score:

The GPU only score:

And finally, the score using both:

 

[m4v3r1ck]

Thanks for sharing!

 

[paulrbeers]

I'll just jump in here.

These are using the Heaven "extreme" preset on a Mac Pro 5,1, 3.33 hex core with a flashed GTX 680.

First is in Mavericks, which includes tessellation:

Image

And here's under Mountain Lion, without tessellation:

Image

Moving on to LuxMark, we have the CPU only score:

Image

The GPU only score:

Image

And finally, the score using both:

Image

Consumer vs workstation GPU. Any workstation GPU review will generally show that in gaming the workstation GPU will be crushed. Further OpenGL is stronger on Nvidia than AMD. Id love to see some kind of OpenCL benchmark comparing the two. I guarantee the FirePro cards would crush the 680.

Different horses for different courses!

 

[slughead]

Consumer vs workstation GPU. Any workstation GPU review will generally show that in gaming the workstation GPU will be crushed. Further OpenGL is stronger on Nvidia than AMD. Id love to see some kind of OpenCL benchmark comparing the two. I guarantee the FirePro cards would crush the 680.

Different horses for different courses!

I don't know why people keep saying these things.

The W9000 performs almost identically to the 7970GE in terms of performance in gaming. That's because they are almost identical in terms of chipset (Tahiti), clock, stream processors, etc.

Workstation GPU are consumer GPU plus a few extra features and professional application/driver support.

 

[dec.]

Thanks a lot for the extensive review and infos, while the machine itself would be overkill for me*, I just love reading this stuff, especially when it's well written like this.

(*Although... do you think it's possible to mod the case so that it releases some smoke and a "valve pressure release sound" when being opened?)

 

[resotek]

VR, thank you for taking the time to write this review and doing the follow ups!

 

[N19h7m4r3]

After running both MPs for most of the weekend, I finally got all my files transferred over, and the oMP is out of the way. That gave me a chance to get my workspace back to normal. Where the oMP sat on the floor, the nMP is now sitting on the right end of the desk for now. If (when) I get a 4K display, I'll probably have room between the monitors to put it there.

You have the setup I want. It looks fantastic, and comfortable.
I hope Apple release some Matte anti-glare monitors again.

 

[FredT2]

Id love to see some kind of OpenCL benchmark comparing the two.

Wasn't that done with the Luxmark benchmark? 538/682/1253 for the oMP and GTX 680 vs 774/2508/3269 for the nMP and D500, or am I missing something?

 

[cal6n]

Consumer vs workstation GPU. Any workstation GPU review will generally show that in gaming the workstation GPU will be crushed. Further OpenGL is stronger on Nvidia than AMD. Id love to see some kind of OpenCL benchmark comparing the two. I guarantee the FirePro cards would crush the 680.

Different horses for different courses!

No need to get so defensive.

1. I posted the GTX 680 Heaven scores, using the same settings as OP, as it's a more modern GPU than the miserable GT 120, and hence a little more representative of what the new machine is up against in the real world.
2. The LuxMark scores, again using the same settings as OP, are from an OpenCL benchmark and do show the nMP's pair of GPUs having a clear advantage over the nMP's single card. It's 2 v 1 though, so "crushing" would be a bit of overstatement.

It's no surprise that the nMP is more powerful than the old machines but what this does show is that, with thoughtful upgrades, the 2009-on Mac Pros can still be eminently usable workhorses and that the performance gains of the new one aren't as large as some folks are trumpeting!

 

[Enrico]

I use Aperture and RAWs for my photography hobby and I'm looking to do pretty much your same upgrade.
Do you think the D500 was worth it, versus the base D300? Also, any suggestion on 12GB Ram (that I currently have on a MP 5,1 6-core) versus 16/32GB?