I have a couple of old Mac Pros and a display I'm going to trade on a new Mac Pro. (2006 Quad Core 2.4 Xeon, and a 2009 8 core 2.26 Nehalem). I'm looking to buy a 12 core base model plus a USB3 PCIe card for music production on Logic Pro. Good idea?
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New 12 Core Mac Pro help..
- Thread starter ivangough
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He mentioned audio with usb3 cards. On the mac pro, I haven't seen any fully stable usb3 cards. If they can leverage the driver stack from Apple, you'll most likely see better results. Remember these cards ship on slim margins. The ssd is nice, but it provides half the benefit you see on a laptop that is frequently opened, shut, and moved around. It is a nice feature, but hardly crucial in leveraging an 8 core against a 12 core. Large amounts of ram can often cover you for things that write a lot of scratch data.
Regarding the gpu, does Logic Pro make heavy use of OpenCL? I've never heard of this, which is why I was asking. I was just trying to look at this in the context of Logic Pro use as the primary computing requirement.
You may have some track management issues with the 2.26GHz clock and how Logic deals with plugs but it also spreads the engine to all cores so maybe not.
Here is a link of true logic "line in the sand" performance.
http://www.gearspace.com/board/music-computers/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest.html
Also look over this to aid in decision:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3161
Here is a link of true logic "line in the sand" performance.
http://www.gearspace.com/board/music-computers/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest.html
Also look over this to aid in decision:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3161
re usb 3.0
instead of USB 3.0, have you considered putting in an esata card? You can get transfer rates unto 6gbs with the firmtex esata card.
instead of USB 3.0, have you considered putting in an esata card? You can get transfer rates unto 6gbs with the firmtex esata card.
Aren't hot swappable eSATA cards quite a bit more expensive than USB 3.0 cards? On top of that, the choice of USB 3.0 peripherals is at least order of magnitude greater (read, they are less expensive). Given the above, the speed advantage (small as it is) offered by eSATA doesn't seem worth it.
I would think about getting the 3.33 6 core machine. If you are primarily working with audio tracks and effects plugins, you will likely not run the 6 core into the ditch unless you have crazy plug counts.
If you are primarily working with VI's (soundtrack composer for instance), you could achieve the same or better performance for less money using VSPro and slaves (either Mac or Windows) potentially.
I have quite a bit of experience with this (I run Logic, VEPro, Kontakt, Omnisphere and UAD on a 3.33 6-core with a Mac Mini server slave), so if you could be more specific about exactly what you are doing and what tools you use, we could help you better.
If you are primarily working with VI's (soundtrack composer for instance), you could achieve the same or better performance for less money using VSPro and slaves (either Mac or Windows) potentially.
I have quite a bit of experience with this (I run Logic, VEPro, Kontakt, Omnisphere and UAD on a 3.33 6-core with a Mac Mini server slave), so if you could be more specific about exactly what you are doing and what tools you use, we could help you better.
Logic will scale tracks across cores moderately well, however it does not scale plugins on a single track across cores. So if you have 100 tracks, each with one or two plugins, the cores will help. If you have 20 tracks with a stack of effects and a CPU-intensive VI on each track, the results will not be what you expect.
The problem is that there is a very large difference in what a single core can handle between a 3.33 hex and a 2.4 12-core. If you get into something that Logic doesn't distribute well across cores, you will be in trouble.
How is the core distribution on your current 2009 8-core? If your workflow is resulting in fairly even loading of all 8/16 cores (hyperthreading), then going to the 12 core would give you an improvement.
If you are using any amount of East West Play libraries, you are far better off using a Windows slave via VEPro for that stuff - Play has terrible memory management under OS X.
You might even consider getting VEPro and using your 2006 as a slave for your 2009.