Skip d500?

[mrsavage1]

After seeing a lot of the arguments and fact sheets being put up here, it seems that the only real options are the d300 and d700, unless you are doing floating point calculations on the gpus.

The d300 and d500 seem to preform very similarly, some here are even saying the d300 is better at gaming than the d500.

So do you guys think we should skip the d500 when we config the nmp?

i guess the only way we will be able to tell is if benchmarks come out for it, which should be soon.

 

[Cubemmal]

No I don't think so. If you want a hex core the D500 upgrade is a nice package IMO. I plan on playing some games too, so ordered the D700 bundle on top of that, but before the new the CTO D700 upgrade price was content with the D500.

 

[mrsavage1]

No I don't think so. If you want a hex core the D500 upgrade is a nice package IMO. I plan on playing some games too, so ordered the D700 bundle on top of that, but before the new the CTO D700 upgrade price was content with the D500.

You can get the quad with the d700. When you spec the base to the higher end model its the same price

 

[Cubemmal]

You can get the quad with the d700. When you spec the base to the higher end model its the same price

Yes I know, my point is that I think the hex is a nice package at $4k, and the D500 is a good part of that. If you have another $600 you can go for the D700 on top of that like I did.

 

[mrsavage1]

but you could also spec the base with a hex and get the d700s sans the extra 4gb stick which you could get a 16 gb single stick for crucial for 1.5 the amount of that 4 gb stick

 

[Cubemmal]

but you could also spec the base with a hex and get the d700s sans the extra 4gb stick which you could get a 16 gb single stick for crucial for 1.5 the amount of that 4 gb stick

Sure, whatever you want.

 

[goMac]

The D500 has more bandwidth and stream processors. It's definetly an upgrade over the D300.

For perspective, I believe the 5770 and 5870 share the same sort of relationship. Similar clock but the 5870 has double the stream processors, and it definetly a worthy upgrade.

 

[Quash]

The D500 has more bandwidth and stream processors. It's definetly an upgrade over the D300.

For perspective, I believe the 5770 and 5870 share the same sort of relationship. Similar clock but the 5870 has double the stream processors, and it definetly a worthy upgrade.

This is not true the 5770 and 5870 were the same cores, the 5870 only had twice as many.

The D300 and the D500 have different kind of cores so you can't just count cores and say the one is better than the other. The D500 cores excel at other tasks than the D300. The D500 does have a lot more memory bandwidth.
So unless you have benchmarks to prove it i wouldn't say one is better than the other. The upgrade from D300 to D500 may well be in the single digits for a lot of tasks.

 

[netkas]

After seeing a lot of the arguments and fact sheets being put up here, it seems that the only real options are the d300 and d700, unless you are doing floating point calculations on the gpus.

The d300 and d500 seem to preform very similarly, some here are even saying the d300 is better at gaming than the d500.

So do you guys think we should skip the d500 when we config the nmp?

i guess the only way we will be able to tell is if benchmarks come out for it, which should be soon.

well, it's known that for gaming, 7870 (aka d300) is close to 7950, and D500 is 6/8 of 7970 (D700), while 7950 is 7/8.

D500 has 96 texture units, running at 650 mhz, 96x650 - 62400
D300 has 80 texture units, running at 800 mhz, 80x600 - 64000

now who is faster?

same story about shaders, they are 2.5 % faster on D300

 

[chfilm]

I got the same impression from the other thread that the d500 seems to be a questionable update especially if you plan to game a bit as well. Also I wonder if I only use premiere and after effects basically, afx will make almost no use of the gpu, while premiere will utile the double gpus when rendering..hmmm

 

[tomvos]

After seeing a lot of the arguments and fact sheets being put up here, it seems that the only real options are the d300 and d700, unless you are doing floating point calculations on the gpus.

The d300 and d500 seem to preform very similarly, some here are even saying the d300 is better at gaming than the d500.

So do you guys think we should skip the d500 when we config the nmp?

i guess the only way we will be able to tell is if benchmarks come out for it, which should be soon.

I think the following passage from the store section of the Mac Pro should be considered (you have to expand the details of the GPU options)

Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB GDDR5
Configure your Mac Pro with dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs for additional graphics memory bandwidth and processing power. Equipped with 3GB of VRAM each on a 384-bit-wide memory bus providing 240GB/s of bandwidth, each FirePro D500 GPU has 1526 stream processors delivering up to 2.2 teraflops of processing power each. The FirePro D500 supports fast double-precision computations, executing at one-quarter the performance of single-precision floating point rather than the 1/16 performance seen in the D300 and most consumer GPUs.​

So under certain scenarios the D500 will perform better than the D300. But unless we see some independent benchmarks, it's difficult to tell if DP FP calculations are crucial to an applications or if DP FP is negligible to your usual applications.

 

[ZnU]

So under certain scenarios the D500 will perform better than the D300. But unless we see some independent benchmarks, it's difficult to tell if DP FP calculations are crucial to an applications or if DP FP is negligible to your usual applications.

Few content creation apps use double precision floating point. Image data can be represented to an extremely high degree of accuracy in 32 bits per channel, and small rounding errors aren't generally important in "if it looks right it is right" applications.

 

[goMac]

This is not true the 5770 and 5870 were the same cores, the 5870 only had twice as many.

The cores on the D500 should be more efficient which makes the relationship more offset towards the D500.

 

[calaverasgrande]

the bump from D500 to D700 is such a small amount compared to going from 6 to 8 cores or even going to a 1TB SSD.
TO me at least it was a gimmie.
I ended up with
6 core-D700-16gb-512gb.

I know I'll only save a couple hundred tops buying my own ram but I had to budget somewhere, and the video cards look to be one item you cannot upgrade later. I'm certainly hoping bigger faster SSDs come out so I have an excuse to open 'er up. Also hoping that we see 32gb dimms in the future so we can load up 128gb ram.

 

[wildmac]

Again, the question.. what are you running?

Since I'm going to do real work on my rig as well as WoW, I'd rather upgrade the SSD to 512 rather than the D700 upgrade which I likely won't fully utilize at all.