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So What Do You Use Your Pro For?

I don't have a Mac pro yet. Waiting for the refresh. I currently have a 1st gen i7 hackintosh. I do alot of movie ripping and converting. I run pro tools in a home studio. My computer right now has 4 internal hard drives and 1 external. 2 optical drives. (dvdr and bdr) I need alot of space for audio files and video files. Plus the added CPU power of the Mac pro will def help with video encodes and protools.
 
- Web Design (Photoshop)
- Web Development (Espresso, Transmit)
- Multiple VMs (Parallels running Win XP (x2) and Win7)
- Audio Engineering / Music Production (Ableton LIVE 7/8 with many plugins)
- some games now and then

Current system is:
2009 Mac Pro
2 x 2.93Ghz 4 Core Nehalem XEONs
16GB RAM from OWC
OWC Mercury Pro 3G 240GB SSD Boot Drive
2 x OCZ Vertex 120GB SSDs in a 240GB RAID 0 config
2TB WD Black Drive for media
Radeon HD 4870 512MB GPU
nVidia GeForce 120 512MB GPU
2 x 24" Apple LED Cinema Displays

- I also obviously run many web browsers, iTunes, email, messages, calendar, Illustrator, Appe Store, Font Case, Skype and other apps all at the same time and this Mac never misses a beat. In all honesty I don't think I will upgrade this when new ones come out unless they are very compelling. This machine is the most amazing Mac I have ever owned, and does everything I throw at it without blinking an eye. The only slowdowns I notice are when I have really long web documents open in Espresso and scrolling is laggy, or in Photoshop after a few hours use it starts to lag a bit in certain things. Restarting photoshop seems to fix the issues... so it could be a bug.

Scott
 
scottrichardson said:
or in Photoshop after a few hours use it starts to lag a bit in certain things. Restarting photoshop seems to fix the issues... so it could be a bug.

Scott
Click to expand...

Have you checked photo shop's memory usage. With "only" 16 GB, if you're using photoshop a lot and/or leaving it open for a long time, it start soaking up the memory.
 
All of the above!!

Pretty well what every body here uses it for.
Just deployed a new batch (half-dozen) into workflow.
Love the fact that our old systems (2010) can easily be mixed with the new ones. As in parts ;)
Took whatever was working great off the old and put in the new :)
 
I'm one of those people that has more power than they need but don't want to be limited by the iMac.

I'm a web developer and designer, so the applications that I run aren't particularly taxing. But I do enjoy my gaming time, so being able to quickly bootcamp into Windows 7 to play some Battlefield 3 is pretty damn awesome.

I also love the expandability and little upgrades that I can accomplish. Just ordered myself the AMD 6870 (upgrade from my 5770), have all four HD bays full, and want to add USB 3.0 in the near future.
 
FluJunkie said:
So - users of the Mac Pro...what do you use your Mac Pro for? What parts of the box are essential for what you do?
Click to expand...

At Work
I'm a network architect and use my Mac Pro here for a few things:
  • Lots of Omnigraffle
  • MS Office crud (PPT, Excel, etc)
  • Parallels with Win7 in a VM
  • Lots of iTerm windows open
  • Adium for IMs

The RAM (16G) is handy, specially when I'm forced to fire up the Win VM. Our corporation is heavily Windows-bias, so every once in a while I get an internal website link that no browser on OS X can render properly, or I get some kookie Visio diagram that Omnigraffle coughs on.

Also, I have a pair of mirrored drives inside that I use for storage of stuff that's important to my job. The OS and applications all sit on the OEM drive, and the mirrored drives hold everything else. That way when I upgrade to a new Mac Pro (as I did recently here at work) I can just move the disks over, and voila: all good.

Further, I have a pair of Dell 24" LCDs that I can easily drive from the Pro. Given all the windows I have open, that's invaluable.

At Home
  • Premiere Pro
  • Photoshop

Those are the heavies. The Pro allows me to pop in an nVidia Quadro card for extra GPU-based processing in Premiere. I also have 48G of RAM, part of which I carve off into a RAM drive for scratch space, for the aforementioned apps. Further, the Pro gives me the space to add a Blu-Ray drive, and lots of internal disks for various things. I have an SSD in the second optical drive bay where the OS and apps sit. A pair of 300G 10K RPM drives striped for more scratch space as well as the OS' paging space. Another pair of 1TB drives mirrored together for storage.

And again: 2 Dell 24" LCDs.

jas
 
gabicava83 said:
Fusion is rubbish in regards to functionality like workstation. The bandwidth simulations and networking functionality are superb on workstation.
Click to expand...

No kidding there. If I had to use those functionalities in my line of work, I wouldn't be very happy with Fusion at all.

Internal storage may not be as important functionally (hell, with SAS and Fibre Channel storage, it's not even that important now, tbh), but I still prefer it. Tidier that way. :eek:
 
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I'm the design and marketing department so I use my MP for everything from lightweight press releases to gargantuan video files and tradeshow art. I needed this machine to have the capacity to run multiple processor intensive apps simultaneously and also manipulate files that can exceed a gigabyte.

To accomplish this, I have three internal terabyte HDs in a RAID-0 array and a SSD boot/apps drive. I also have an 3TB internal drive I use for Time machine. The processor is the single 3.33GHz 6-core which works well with today's single threaded creative apps, and will work even better in the next few years when Adobe and others revise their software to better utilize multiple cores.

I also love the fact that the MP is simple to work on and easy to maintain. I don't have to rely on IT but can do just about anything to it myself. Maintenance pretty much takes care of itself and lets me focus on my work.
 
Generating images mathematically in realtime. Only have 6 gig ram and 320 gb hdd and don't push them -- all my casual stuff (browsing, video etc.) is on an MBP; I only got the MP for high-end GPU for OpenCL. Turns out despite 80 hours optimizing my code [still have one trick left to try] even the AMD 5870 isn't enough by itself (need > 1Tflop/s); it can only do 70% of the job in the required time -- but, big surprise, the 4-core Xeon (under OpenCL) can handle 30-40% of the job itself! SO, with a 12-core I might could barely scrape usability without the need for a GPU. Hah! -- what I really want is a new 16-core and an AMD 7980. That way I could do both higher res and higher frame rate.
 
gabicava83 said:
Raid 5 with two disks.......? How does that work?

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Fusion is rubbish in regards to functionality like workstation. The bandwidth simulations and networking functionality are superb on workstation.

Unlike you I find window management easier on windows.

The mac pro's are superb, better value in getting dual CPU's for people like you and I. Dual screens are superb and something quite difficult with iMacs in regards to getting a perfect matching screen.

Internal HD storage is not so important now with thunderbolt and external raid enclosures. But will they have this on the new version, if any at all.....
Click to expand...

Doh! I meant Raid 0 - Raid 5 is on the external box.

Thunderbolt? Seriously - How many Thunderbolt enclosures have you purchased? To replace the 4 internal drives with a thunderbolt enclosure is nearly $1,000 - before putting drives in it.
 
ssgbryan said:
Doh! I meant Raid 0 - Raid 5 is on the external box.

Thunderbolt? Seriously - How many Thunderbolt enclosures have you purchased? To replace the 4 internal drives with a thunderbolt enclosure is nearly $1,000 - before putting drives in it.
Click to expand...

Totally agree. Expensive, I don't have any need for it, personally I find it hard to see how you could saturate the link (using SSD's ) on a Raid Enclosure via Thunderbolt.

A NAS is a good solution with a good backup, but HD's are still too expensive at the moment.

Thanks,

G.
 
Ive got a Mac Pro 4.1, with a single quad core processor.

I am a bit of a hardcore hobbiest, and do some video editing (final cut express), some app devlopement, and store alot of movies. I have a 1st gen Apple TV that I use to stream movies to the TV in the living room.

I also tend to run some VMs, especially when I am doing developement work. My primary OS is 10.6, but in VMs I also run Xp, and 10.7. I have found myself using 10.7 in a VM more and more lately (I like xcode 4.3 alot better than v3), so it may be time for me to bump the ram up in my machine.
 
Video editing, audio production, web development and your basic administrative tasks.
 
Mostly recreation these days if I’m honest.
I have iTunes, Mail, Messages and a browser set to auto start at login. I then usually add Outlook, Parallels, Word and Excel for work. Then there’s EyeTv and I might also start Handbrake for a while every now and then.

I rarely stop any of the software.

I’m looking for a machine with enough power and storage to allow me to do most of my gaming in Parallels. I thought the nMP was going to be that machine.
 
My cMP 3.1 and 4.1 are mainly for recreation; gaming, general admin (emails etc) and photos. I use a windows laptop in my day job.

I've downloaded Final Cut Pro (trial) and am hoping to mess around with that shortly, I never had the power before with my Mac Mini.
 
Pro: software dev, interface design

Also: video editing, photo editing, music creation

+ regular crap I hate: slack, email, etc responding to various meta notifications that suck the fun and soul out of anything creative :)
 
Digital Performer and lots of VI's in my hex 4,1 is the heart of my audio production studio.

Just bought a second 4,1 quad and have W3690 and SSDs on the way as well… unbeatable value in the Mac world and, with Vienna Pro (if necessary), adequate for my needs for years to come.
 
Mainly for coding. Objective-C, Lisp, SQL, PL/SQL and starting Swift at the moment. Most of the projects require several VMs running Oracle RDBMS and server-side applications against which I develop.

So lot's of storage and fast storage is appreciated. The availability of affordable 1TB and 2TB SSDs solved this problem quite nicely. Having a six core machine and 24GB of RAM does not hurt, either. Sure, I could optimize my environment and might manage to do the same with an iMac … but call me lazy, I'd rather waste some system resources than spending too much time tailoring the VMs to fit a limited environment.

Besides this, I still like a good game from time to time. ;-)
 
I use my top of the line rMBP for general stuff, but I have also been doing some stuff with multiple VMs (Server 2012r2) and I output to a 32" 4K monitor, which makes it all nice to work with.
Shame they didn't offer 32GB for RAM, which I suspect they will with the next one.
 
I'm a doctor and a tinkerer, and I hate waiting for my computer. I basically use it to surf macrumors forums. For that, I was happy with my mac mini. A few years ago, I was tasked with converting about 50 hours or so of home Hi8 and Digital8 videos to digital format. The mac mini (without a 980Ti attached) simply couldn't handle the conversions. Thus began the quest to find a computer that would do it quickly enough. Since I have had bad luck with iMacs (they all get glitchy on me after 3 years), I went the cMP route. It satisfied the tinkerer in me as well.

Also used for:

Civ 5 now and then
Photos (RAM is nice :)
Relatively basic music production with Logic and Sibelius
FCPX (for old movie conversion and ongoing home video messing' around)
Quicken
Numbers
Forklift (great program)
Rome: Total War occasionally

Setup:
MP 5,1, 48 GB RAM, XP941 500 GB drive, 4 spinning drives in RAID 1, MVC 7970 video card, 12-core 3.46 GHz, BluRay burner in the extra optical drive. ACD 30", which I got used a few years ago.

I have had it for going on 5 years now, and it's still rocket fast. I don't want to turn this into another cMP vs nMP thread, but I'm going to keep my cMP going as long as possible.

Hands down, the most awesome upgrade was the XP941 installation. It's unbelievable how much faster the computer functioned after that. I guess there are faster disks now, but mine has functioned flawlessly since installing the 941.
 
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