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nMP in the end it was not for me - I replaced it with

Off a slight tangent re your n54l - replace the fans with decent ones, noctua if you can the stock fans are rubbish. I kept my ex490 as it was deadly silent, dropped an q8400s low power quad inside and stuck a 4gb stick inside and it's sweet. Ran whs v1, 2011 and now server 2012 essentials!

I will keep my eye out for used z800's from now on, I passed on some only a few months ago but won't next time..
 
I hear they are all upgradeable.
But that's for the brave to deal with.
I want a unit that will work right out of the box.
And these are doing that according to the heavy iron DIT people out there.
 
Gav Mack said:
Off a slight tangent re your n54l - replace the fans with decent ones, noctua if you can the stock fans are rubbish. I kept my ex490 as it was deadly silent, dropped an q8400s low power quad inside and stuck a 4gb stick inside and it's sweet. Ran whs v1, 2011 and now server 2012 essentials!

I will keep my eye out for used z800's from now on, I passed on some only a few months ago but won't next time..
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Thanks for the tip on the N54L Fans will look into it, fan noise does not bother me much, my hearing is shot as I spent years as an Aircraft Engine Tester at Rolls Royce, so I have about as much low frequency hearing left as a Heavy Metal Drummer!!!!!! :D

The N54Ls are great little servers I picked 2 up a while ago when they were £80 after cashback!! Have one in the office and one at home and they are loaded with 4x4Tb, they provide work storage and a real time offsite back, for the money they are fantasic reliable bits of kit. (Stuck 8Gb in each and a 240Gb SSD Boot Drive)
 
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Stageshoot said:
Thanks for the tip on the N54L Fans will look into it, fan noise does not bother me much, my hearing is shot as I spent years as an Aircraft Engine Tester at Rolls Royce, so I have about as much low frequency hearing left as a Heavy Metal Drummer!!!!!! :D

The N54Ls are great little servers I picked 2 up a while ago when they were £80 after cashback!! Have one in the office and one at home and they are loaded with 4x4Tb, they provide work storage and a real time offsite back, for the money they are fantasic reliable bits of kit. (Stuck 8Gb in each and a 240Gb SSD Boot Drive)
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My hearing is shot thanks to over 15 years of raving including many all nighters at the ministry of sound with my head in the speakers! Have sold quite a few n54's for clients probably like you waiting for them to come up on hotukdeals lol. Great little servers just a bit too noisy for my liking at home. My ex490 is almost silent, edged only by a nMP and is very miserly energy wise too. Mine has a SSD for boot in drive 1, the rest are spinning disks and that's connected to another array in an ESATA box.
 
Very nice and good decision.

The nMP is not for everyone and it certainly is not for me as well. I've owned a previous generation Mac Pro before but I was eagerly waiting for the new update but they completely redesigned it with the nMP.

I'm not disappointed, well maybe a little because I do like the older Mac Pro design better due to the hdd sleds.

I have been looking at the nMP for a long time but just never caught my interest. I also have a PC that I've built a few months ago with the newest i7 4770k with a nvidia gtx 760 that does everything I want it to do and more.

I think this time around an upgrade to my current 2011 early 15" macbook pro is a better choice and I will skip the nMP for now.

I know I know, hackint0sh or bust with PC's but lately I've been pretty happy with Win 7. I've done the whole hackint0sh thing in the past with a Sony vaio TZ model and other compatible hardware. I've even wrote some kext edited drivers and posted on tonymacx86 once, lol. But I don't like hackint0sh's, I rather just stick with either Win 7 or just the legit OSX.

The only thing I love about the nMP is how small and efficient it is. Only reason I still kind of want one just to use as my main machine and have it sitting next to me on top of a desk whisper quiet. Also, I do miss OSX a bit.

Its starting to look like for desktop I've accustomed to PC's and mobile/laptops macs.
 
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To the original poster, can I ask what programs you were using that you felt had lackluster performance? They may not apply to what I do.
 
MajorGraff said:
No Thunderbolt? No deal.
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There is no day I ever wish my z820 or oMP had Thunderbolt. Been there, done that, no thanks. If HP ever figure out the Thunderbolt card they announced it would be nice for any of my clients that have TB drives, but it just couldn't matter less to me.
 
echoout said:
There is no day I ever wish my z820 or oMP had Thunderbolt. Been there, done that, no thanks. If HP ever figure out the Thunderbolt card they announced it would be nice for any of my clients that have TB drives, but it just couldn't matter less to me.
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You will
 
I'd be curious to know what your computing needs are that the nMP felt deficient for.

Also, no offense (or offence, since you're in the UK) intended, but that is one ugly box on the inside...I've been using Mac Pros for so long that I forgot what a tangled mess normal PC cases are like. I'm also not sure I could ever trust a hackintosh for professional work.
 
MajorGraff said:
The nMP wasn't good enough and you have no need for Thunderbolt? TB is the best interface I've worked with in 20 years. What on Earth do you need a workstation for? You have no idea what you're missing.
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I can't say I disagree with the guy's point of view. Thunderbolt is great on laptops, heck I use it more and more with my MBP. But on my Mac workstations? Can't say I've been in a situation where I feel like I needed it. My capture cards are PCI, my RAID is on a SAS and I have USB3.0 and eSATA for the occasional external.

Thunderbolt doesn't really offer much benefit on a tower that doesn't need to move as much as the removal if PCI slots hinders it.

The new MacPro was three steps forward and six steps back...
 
petsounds said:
I'd be curious to know what your computing needs are that the nMP felt deficient for.

Also, no offense (or offence, since you're in the UK) intended, but that is one ugly box on the inside...I've been using Mac Pros for so long that I forgot what a tangled mess normal PC cases are like. I'm also not sure I could ever trust a hackintosh for professional work.
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The reason it looks a bit of a mess inside is that I had to run across a molex lead to power the USB 3 card at the back, I now have an alternative solution which has removed that, and there was a red SATA lead running down as I did not have the SSDs in a sled (Did not have a 2.5 to 3.5 convertor for the sled to hand), now those flyleads are removed it is back to being neat and tidy inside.

As stated my main issue was a couple of programmes which will only run on Windows (And have problems via Parallels) so have to be bootcamp, and my machine like many others would not install windows via bootcamp. (Its not known why yet, it has affected a lot of the nMP owners and Apple have not got a solution). so on that basis alone the nMP was a no go.

With the Lacklustre Performance in OSX, I am not sure it just felt sluggish at times, As stuff was on external USB Boxes I dont know if it was response times there, but there was just a sluggish feel to things I was not happy with.

Graphically, I felt the D700s a let down, I know there are issues in Mac mode not fully using both cards,

Price a minor one but I felt it cost a lot more than it was worth to me performance wise (This would not have mattered if the above items had not been an issue) but comes into play when there are issues, and when I built the Z800 that does recat and perform the way I want it to for just over £1000 compared to £4000 for the nMP which was not performing.

Not saying never, will keep an eye on developments in the future with the 7.1 etc but at the mo its WIN8 Big Box for me. (It fits my work needs) will not suit everyone. and the fact it also runs OSX nicely is a bonus although not something I will use in work environment but as a born tinkerer and with some bits on OSX I do love its a bonus...
 
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JesterJJZ said:
I can't say I disagree with the guy's point of view. Thunderbolt is great on laptops, heck I use it more and more with my MBP. But on my Mac workstations? Can't say I've been in a situation where I feel like I needed it. My capture cards are PCI, my RAID is on a SAS and I have USB3.0 and eSATA for the occasional external.

Thunderbolt doesn't really offer much benefit on a tower that doesn't need to move as much as the removal if PCI slots hinders it.

The new MacPro was three steps forward and six steps back...
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Ahh yes, but in Apple world there's no such thing as eSATA, PCI, or USB3*, making Thunderbolt a necessity for everything from ethernet** to RAID.


*Until very recently
**On the MacBook Pro, not the Mac Pro
 
Just out on a tangent here.

If it is possible to run OSX in a virtual (if I recall you can server and then virtuals within via the typical software) would this run on a hackentosh?

Assuming one could run OSX virtual, if one built a higher end 8 core or better machine and got a solid result of a hackentosh, how does the virtuals respond to upgrades? Just curious as I find (for me) little value in a hackentosh that has to be cared for with each OS upgrade.
 
MajorGraff said:
The nMP wasn't good enough and you have no need for Thunderbolt? TB is the best interface I've worked with in 20 years. What on Earth do you need a workstation for? You have no idea what you're missing.
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Questioning why I need a workstation is pretty condescending. Not sure where that came from.

My z820 has 2 E5-2687w CPUs, onboard 2TB SSD RAID-0 and 8TB RAID-5 from an ATTO hardware controller, 64GB of ECC RAM, 2 GTX Titans, ATTO 10GbE NIC (connected to 48TB RAID-10), SSD OS drive, onboard PCI-e 960GB RAID-0 all rackmounted and running cool and quiet.

Along with my oMP, why would I need Thunderbolt? I ran a Thunderbolt rig for a year and did fine, but to me it's just a compromise that Apple shoehorned in. Not ready for primetime, although it'll improve over time. And taking away everyday functionality to replace with new connectivity to (barely existent) next-gen hardware isn't helpful to me on February 1, 2014.

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather be working on a Mac whenever possible, the nMP just isn't for me.
 
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Just spent a lazy Sunday playing with the HP Z800 in OSX Mode

Must say very impressed nothing crashes, working as stable as any PC I have used,

And here are the Geekbench Scores, Very Very Happy with this for a £879 machine.

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benchmark.jpg
 
This thread helps to confirm two things that I have been saying for awhile;

1. First the 2013 Mac Pro is a terrific computer but for a limited number of uses. There is a lot of flexibility and technology left out but for the intended users that is not only not a problem but actually an asset.

2. Apple's product line is riddled with holes like Swiss Cheese. Apple is leaving a tremendous amount of money on the table by not producing a more powerful, user configurable mini (a midi?) and a mini-tower with PCIe slots, space for a couple of hard drives, space for at least a thinline ODD, four accessible RAM slots and choice of top i7 processors.

Then again how much of a market share does Mac have to grab before they get into Microsoft-like trouble?
 
I think this is a great thread about to to each his own and every person should use what works best for them. While I wouldn't do what the OP is doing I can fully respect his needs and wishes. There is no one computer that is best for everything.
 
The Z800 looks like a portable heater. Am I allowed to say that or are we only allowed to be negative about the nMP? :)
 
superdx said:
Quote me in the original post where he says he installed OSX.
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I never said it was mentioned in the original post did I? You will find it a few posts below that and then in some posts after that. All it takes is a little effort reading.

Stageshoot said:
I have never used a Hackintosh before but I just followed a step by step guide and installed it straight to Maverick 10.9.1 it worked first time no hassles no heartache.
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