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New Mac Pro, One Year Later
- Thread starter mrxak
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Apart from lifting the cylindrical casing off the MP6,1 12 months ago to upgrade the RAM to 64GB we've never needed any reason to lift it off since. This aspect is appealing for us as before using our MP5,1s there was always the tinkering being needed to replace/rearrange disks, cables on its back and PCIe cards to meet work requirements. Hauling out almost 60 lbs from inside the desk locker was quite a challenge and had to be done to avoid disturbing cable arrangements etc.
We just added a new MP6,1 6-core to our office setup and upgraded its memory to 64GB so its cylindrical casing will no doubt never be lifted off again.
These MP6,1 systems are wonderfully quiet and a joy to work with.
At this point I expect the only upgrades we will make over the next year or two will be to slowly replace the aging MP5,1s with the newer MP6,1s as they get released, change out some of the LaCie drives as well as the older power hungry Apple ACD displays.
Our new MP6,1 6-core has but one external drive attached; a LaCie Porsche P9233 USB3 4TB model. This is providing 160 MBytes/sec read/write for large sequential file accesses. It's partitioned into 3 pieces. One holds a nightly made clone of the Mac OS X SSD resident boot volume (300GB), one for Time Machine backups (2TB) and one for local Scratch space (1.7TB). All Project data is hauled in over Thunderbolt connection from our other MP6,1 12-core in the office.
With such a lot of RAM available for the kernel RAM-based file cache, data can be fetched from RAM at 7 to 8 GBytes/sec. This is some 8 times faster than reading data from the internal 1TB SSD, 23 times faster than reading from the LaCie RAID-0 Thunderbolt 1 drives and some 50 times faster than from the LaCie Porsche P9233 4TB USB3 drive.
We just added a new MP6,1 6-core to our office setup and upgraded its memory to 64GB so its cylindrical casing will no doubt never be lifted off again.
These MP6,1 systems are wonderfully quiet and a joy to work with.
At this point I expect the only upgrades we will make over the next year or two will be to slowly replace the aging MP5,1s with the newer MP6,1s as they get released, change out some of the LaCie drives as well as the older power hungry Apple ACD displays.
Our new MP6,1 6-core has but one external drive attached; a LaCie Porsche P9233 USB3 4TB model. This is providing 160 MBytes/sec read/write for large sequential file accesses. It's partitioned into 3 pieces. One holds a nightly made clone of the Mac OS X SSD resident boot volume (300GB), one for Time Machine backups (2TB) and one for local Scratch space (1.7TB). All Project data is hauled in over Thunderbolt connection from our other MP6,1 12-core in the office.
With such a lot of RAM available for the kernel RAM-based file cache, data can be fetched from RAM at 7 to 8 GBytes/sec. This is some 8 times faster than reading data from the internal 1TB SSD, 23 times faster than reading from the LaCie RAID-0 Thunderbolt 1 drives and some 50 times faster than from the LaCie Porsche P9233 4TB USB3 drive.
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Got my nMP in January, with the D700s. Am still loving it. Processing pictures in PhotoShop and Lightroom is smooth as butter and it even made Aperture's performance bearable most of the time.
With the SSD, Bootcamp became a realistic option to me (rebooting is so fast, switching between OS X and Windows is less of a pain) and I've spent some more time playing Windows games (also enabled by having to spend less time on waiting on the Mac while editing photos). I've been quite happy with the gaming performance. It may not make sense to get one just for that but it's a nice bonus. I've primarily been playing games like Skyrim and the Assassin's Creed series, as well as a little bit of Crysis just to see what it's capable of.
On the Mac OS X gaming side, even when leveraging just a single CPU, Metro: Last Light performed well. And Football Manager plays smoothly as well.
Only issue I have is Wi-Fi not always working after waking up from sleep since Yosemite.
With the SSD, Bootcamp became a realistic option to me (rebooting is so fast, switching between OS X and Windows is less of a pain) and I've spent some more time playing Windows games (also enabled by having to spend less time on waiting on the Mac while editing photos). I've been quite happy with the gaming performance. It may not make sense to get one just for that but it's a nice bonus. I've primarily been playing games like Skyrim and the Assassin's Creed series, as well as a little bit of Crysis just to see what it's capable of.
On the Mac OS X gaming side, even when leveraging just a single CPU, Metro: Last Light performed well. And Football Manager plays smoothly as well.
Only issue I have is Wi-Fi not always working after waking up from sleep since Yosemite.
Data from RAM?
I apologize if the question seems silly to you.
May I ask how does one get the data from the RAM, as you say.
Is there a procedure to follow to reach that or simply having 64 GB RAM makes that data is not taken from the inner HD or at least some of it comes to the user from the RAM, maybe the last used (?). I have not enough knowledge to know what you mean and how to obtain it.
Thank you in advance for your clarification and have a very good New Year!
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I apologize if the question seems silly to you.
May I ask how does one get the data from the RAM, as you say.
Is there a procedure to follow to reach that or simply having 64 GB RAM makes that data is not taken from the inner HD or at least some of it comes to the user from the RAM, maybe the last used (?). I have not enough knowledge to know what you mean and how to obtain it.
Thank you in advance for your clarification and have a very good New Year!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I apologize if the question seems silly to you.
May I ask how does one get the data from the RAM, as you say.
Is there a procedure to follow to reach that or simply having 64 GB RAM makes that data is not taken from the inner HD or at least some of it comes to the user from the RAM, maybe the last used (?). I have not enough knowledge to know what you mean and how to obtain it.
Thank you in advance for your clarification and have a very good New Year!
When you read data/files from an SSD, a disk, download a file from the internet, transfer a file from another Mac or from a NAS server the data will pass into the kernel's RAM-based file cache. From there it gets transferred/moved to the Application's memory arena. This last part/phase is what I'm referring to. The RAM-based data can be moved/copied to the application's buffers at memory speeds (in the MP6,1 case it's around 7 to 8 GBytes/sec). In some cases, the data isn't moved at all and the Application is simply provided a RAM address pointer or a series of RAM address pointers to where the data resides so that the Application can read up the data when it wants.
Now for data that is frequently accessed it's highly likely it will already be in the kernel's RAM-based file cache. So access to this data will be at the 7-8 GBytes/sec.
The Kernel's RAM-base file cache is dynamic and grows and shrinks as Application memory/RAM requirements come and go. The more RAM you have the larger the kernel RAM-based file cache is likely to be... thus it can hold a lot more frequently used data vs. a Mac will less RAM.
If you observe Activity Monitor's Memory tab display you will see that when the system has been running for a while all the system's physical RAM/memory is being used and a large chunk of it is likely to be the "File Cache". This "File Cache" is in fact the kernel's RAM-based file cache.
For example, I have 64GB of RAM and after awhile performing a fair amount of file activity the "File Cache" becomes quite large and can be as high as 40 to 50 GB in size. The "File Cache" is holding my most recent data being read and/or written by the system and by my Applications. Periodically (in simple terms) the kernel will in the background write out data that's destined for an SSD or a disk (a specific file system). This data is considered 'dirty' meaning it must be written to disk before the space it occupies in the "File Cache" can be released and reused. If no demands exist for the space the data stays in the "File Cache" and is no longer categorized as being 'dirty'. Now whenever this data is again wanted by the system and/or Applications it's quickly accessible and transferred to where it's being requested. This data can be moved in this manner at memory copy speeds which is 7 to 8 GBytes/sec.
There's a lot more detail surrounding how the "File Cache" is handled by the kernel. Suffice to say, this brief description should help you understand how data is obtained from RAM. This aspect is handled entirely by the MAC OS X system and there's little to nothing for the user to do. The user can obviously help/aid the system do more of this data movement at high-speed by installing as much RAM as possible. The goal here is to minimize the need for reading/writing data to/from disk repeatedly which as I mentioned can be 50 times slower than using RAM.
MacPro systems can have as much as 128GB RAM vs. a laptop's max RAM of 16GB. Thus the MacPro can have as much as 8 times more RAM than for a laptop. This is good for the kernel RAM-based file cache benefits.
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I got my mac pro 6.1 on April back in 2014 (note: I did not own any mac pros prior to this). At first I bought it just to test it out. My configurations were 6 cores, 256gb, d700s. When it arrived, I took it out from the box was blown by the form factor. I took the cover off and was astonished by how well it was engineered. Plugged in the power cable and powered it on, there was literally no fan noise - dead silent (I was sold). My external hard disk made more noise than the mac pro itself. I produce music and edit video on this. For music, there was enough horsepower but for video, I needed a little more performance and space so I upgraded the 6 core to a 12 core and SSD to 1TB myself. (bought from eBay). Overall, I have to say I am one happy owner except for one thing, kinda bugs me that there are no true working 4K displays for the nMP.
Thank you for the explanation
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I thank you very much for your clear and comprehensive explanation.
As somebody else mentioned, the important facts that you mention regarding maximising RAM are not known or not taken into consideration by many users.
Again thank you very much for your useful post and good explanation
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I thank you very much for your clear and comprehensive explanation.
As somebody else mentioned, the important facts that you mention regarding maximising RAM are not known or not taken into consideration by many users.
Again thank you very much for your useful post and good explanation