Someone on the iMac subforum said they tried out D3 on the iMac and it was beautiful. I was thinking about the same thing last week, nMP or iMac but I've decided to jump on the iMac ship.
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nMP Quad-Core with D700s
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Someone on the iMac subforum said they tried out D3 on the iMac and it was beautiful. I was thinking about the same thing last week, nMP or iMac but I've decided to jump on the iMac ship.
Your "iMac" is a hackintosh
Retina iMac is 14,4 not the 14,2 and its board ID is totally different.
Not to mention "0 MHz" RAM.
Basically they're the same card in terms of gaming performance and VRAM doesn't make much difference for most tasks
- In OS X the M295x and D700 will GAME the same. (iMac = nMP)
- In Windows, crossfire will dramatically increase frame-rates in most games over a single card. (nMP >> iMac)
- The nMP cannot run a 5K display at 24 bit color (iMac > nMP), but will run 4K just fine
- In OS X, any app that offloads to GPU, especially FCPX, will be much faster with 2 cards (nMP >> iMac)
- in Windows, certain pro apps like Maya and Autocad will be infinitely better on the nMP due to the firePro -- but FirePro offers no other real advantages (except for ECC which the Dx00's don't have so it's moot).
As far as 4K or 5K gaming with the M295X. The Think of the D700 AND the M295X has basically a Desktop 280X/7970. Here are some 4K benchies. 30FPS may be playable most of the time:
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From reading the specs of the m295x and the d700, the m295x does seem to have advantages and seems more geared for gaming. Not to say that the d700 can't be used to game. From what I've read of the nMP, the video card can't be upgraded but the harddrive/memory can be? The cheapest refurbished nMP on the Apple store with d700 cars is $5k. Configuring with the cheapest option to include the d700 and an education discount is around $4600 and that doesn't include monitor, mouse, keyboard. Now if someone has those things, the comparison is less of an issue. But still not being able to upgrade the video card, which is usually your limiting factors in a couple years for games, doesn't make the nMP win especially when you can just sell the iMac in a couple years and get an upgrade that way. They would be more equals on non-upgradeability issue. If I'm wrong and the d700 card can be replaced, then it seems ordering a nMP with a d300 card, then upgrading would be someone's best option if they really want a mac pro and want to game.
I would personally go with the nMP. Reason being is the dual D700 are better then the iMac's options. The Mac Pro is also more upgrade friendly.
Also, the LG 34UM95 mentioned earlier is not actually 4k, it has a resolution of 3440x1440 which is WQHD. 4k is 3840x2160 in consumer products currently. I've been having issues with the LG with my nMP as well and can't really recommend it due to this.
Also, the LG 34UM95 mentioned earlier is not actually 4k, it has a resolution of 3440x1440 which is WQHD. 4k is 3840x2160 in consumer products currently. I've been having issues with the LG with my nMP as well and can't really recommend it due to this.
In Windows the D700's have ECC support, and 10-bit colour with the latest AMD Drivers.
Sadly no support for it in OS X yet it seems.
I forgot about 10bit and didn't know about ECC.
If I did that kind of work (windows pro app work), the nMP is a steal Vs a dual W9000 rig ... though last time I checked (admittedly about 6 months ago) they basically had no official support from a lot of those programs (probably changed since then), and tech support/warranty is laughable by comparison.
It sounds like OP does most of his productivity in OS X, I was just mentioning those FirePro advantages for the sake of completeness. For most people (and even most MP buyers), this doesn't really add a lot of value.
Quite true. Unless the OP is going to be using OpenCL heavy workloads in OS X , the second GPU is very much wasted.
Another advantage for the iMac is QuickSync if he does use h.264 quite a bit.
I read on anandtech that it will likely have similar performance to the Desktop R9 285X (I'd assume: slightly less) - which is actually only 3-5% faster than the 280X which matches up very closely to the nMP's D700 (though the D700 is about 10-20% underlocked).
Different chip lines, for sure, but similar performance.
As far as "geared for gaming" - if that's a reference to the D700 being "firepro", I thought we put that one to rest a long time ago when we saw across-the-board identical ( +/- 2 FPS, not even exaggerating) performance between the W9000 and the 7970 Ghz Edition in nearly every gaming benchmark.
If the reports are accurate, the M285x gaming performance will be very close to the D700 when not in crossfire.
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