MP 7,1 The Threadripper Pro workstation looks like good competition for the Mac Pro

[MisterAndrew]

Have you seen the ThinkStation P620? What are your thoughts? It looks like a good value compared to the new Mac Pro. For $2,133.82 you get a 12-core AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Pro 3945WX CPU. For about the same price as the base Mac Pro ($5,967.62) you can get a 32-core 3975WX, an AMD W5700 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD.

ThinkStation P620 | The world's first AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO workstation |

Shop for ThinkStation P620 Tower Workstation. Game-changing power. Limitless possibilities. Highly configurable. Shop now!

www.lenovo.com

I can see Apple charging a premium for macOS and the more advanced design with MPX modules, but it looks to me like the base model is still overpriced, especially with the outdated Intel architecture. Hopefully the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be a better value.

 

[IA64]

45% discount? seriously?

 

[MisterAndrew]

It looks like it's the Think Anniversary sale that ends tomorrow.

 

[ArPe]

I’d rather build my own with a mix of new parts, second hand parts (with warranty) and parts I have already. I’m waiting to see how third gen 24 core Threadripper performs. I wasn’t happy with second gen Zen because the single core performance was still not high enough for all those tasks that don’t use all cores. I think third gen is finally there.

 

[MisterAndrew]

Well the regular Threadripper isn’t in the same class. The Threadripper Pro CPUs are comparable to the Xeons in the Mac Pro. It looks like the Threadripper Pro CPUs are only available to OEMs right now.

 

[IA64]

Well you have the Xeon Platinum 9282 with 56 core and 12 memory channel but then...

 

[MisterAndrew]

You can't put that in a Mac Pro. The Lenovo can be configured with the 64-core Threadripper Pro. I think that's better unless you need a ton of memory.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX vs Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 - GadgetVersus

Comparison between AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX and Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 with the specifications of the processors, the number of cores, threads, cache memory, also the performance in benchmark platforms such as Geekbench, Passmark, Cinebench or AnTuTu.

gadgetversus.com

 

[Grumply]

The up-to 128 PCIe Lanes with the Threadripper Pros is the perhaps the biggest deal. To-date, I'm pretty sure you've been limited to just 40 lanes with all of the current Threadripper 3 motherboards - which if you're looking to run multiple GPUs and NVME storage internally, along with additional video/audio I/O, gets sucked up almost instantly.

The 64 lanes of the 7,1 have been a definite advantage for the new Mac Pro (it was certainly part of the reason I couldn't bring myself to switch over to Threadripper 3 - even with its big bang-for-buck advantage).

 

[MarkC426]

But at the end of the day, it’s a PC.
People buy macs because they like the design/ecosystem/MacOS.

 

[ArPe]

But at the end of the day, it’s a PC.
People buy macs because they like the design/ecosystem/MacOS.

If the apps they use are identical some are more attracted to hardware specs than the OS layer between the apps and hardware. There’s one member here in the 3080 thread who sold his Mac Pro and built a Threadripper with ridiculous performance across every app and test.

I personally think the last ever version of macOS for x86 (probably macOS 13 or 14) should be released for all ‘qualifying’ PCs. By qualifying I mean hardware that macOS included drivers for.

Apple would make money from services, convert the last remaining Hackintosh users to licensed users and prep those new users for when ARM is good enough to compete against Intel/AMD workstations.

By then Intel and AMD CPUs will be running around 6.5 to 7 GHz with IPC improvements and Apple Silicon will also have similar performance with better performance per watt fingers crossed.

 

[IA64]

But at the end of the day, it’s a PC.
People buy macs because they like the design/ecosystem/MacOS.

And resale value.

 

[theSeb]

An interesting idea and I would really love that, but I don't see it happening. As much as I love Mac OS and Macs, I am currently speccing out an AMD machine in a spreadsheet. It's been a while since I've built a PC from scratch and I am really looking forward to it, apart from having to dissemble a Windows laptop recently to replace a failed fan. Luckily it's a huge 17" monstrosity and not an ultrabook, but it was still fiddly. I cannot begin to describe just how pleasantly surprised I was that everything worked after the first assembly. I do have some screws left over and I have no idea where I got them from, but what are you gonna do.

I've been using Visual Studio in Windows a lot recently and I can live with Windows again. It is always nice to come back to the Mac though. I only bought my first Mac in 2008, so it's not like Windows is some kind of new alien experience to me. Everything just looks and feels better in Mac OS. I can't quite put my finger on it, but even this website feels nicer to use.

I do enjoy that Lenovo case. It's not as aesthetically pleasing as a Mac Pro, but I think it looks great.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Have you seen the ThinkStation P620? What are your thoughts? It looks like a good value compared to the new Mac Pro. For $2,133.82 you get a 12-core AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Pro 3945WX CPU. For about the same price as the base Mac Pro ($5,967.62) you can get a 32-core 3975WX, an AMD W5700 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD.

ThinkStation P620 | The world's first AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO workstation |

Shop for ThinkStation P620 Tower Workstation. Game-changing power. Limitless possibilities. Highly configurable. Shop now!

www.lenovo.com

I can see Apple charging a premium for macOS and the more advanced design with MPX modules, but it looks to me like the base model is still overpriced, especially with the outdated Intel architecture. Hopefully the new Apple Silicon Mac Pro will be a better value.

Like all Apple products, if you fit the exact use case, it's a great deal. If you don't, it's overpriced given the value you don't get from it.

That all being said, considering, as far as work use is concerned, the only value a Mac provides over a PC is to run things that only exist on macOS, and considering that's mostly limited to Apple's own Pro apps, I'd say this ThinkStation P620 is a much better value.

It looks like it's the Think Anniversary sale that ends tomorrow.

That's a shame; I almost want to snatch one up at that price. It's a really good deal.

But at the end of the day, it’s a PC.
People buy macs because they like the design/ecosystem/MacOS.

Not when you're talking about machines that exist to get actual work done and not personal home use systems. The ecosystem and design don't matter when you're trying to edit multiple 4K streams. And while rendering with Metal is better than OpenGL/CL, it still pales in comparison to CUDA (and you're not getting CUDA on a Mac).

Plus, with only every third version of macOS not being a total dumpster fire, macOS isn't exactly the best platform for users that value long term stability.

 

[startergo]

And resale value.

Resale value? 2400$ MBpro in 2019 now sells for 1300$ ( a year later). What resale value?

 

[MarkC426]

Yeah, but you couldn’t give away an old hp or dell laptop..... 😬

 

[IA64]

Resale value? 2400$ MBpro in 2019 now sells for 1300$ ( a year later). What resale value?

A Mac pro 2013 that had a starting price of $2999 USD is now selling on Ebay for $1000 USD minimum and that's after almost 8 years.

The Apple phones have the highest resale value as well. Good luck finding someone who's willing to buy a 2 year old custom PC for a fraction of the MSRP

 

[startergo]

A Mac pro 2013 that had a starting price of $2999 USD is now selling on Ebay for $1000 USD minimum and that's after almost 8 years.

The Apple phones have the highest resale value as well. Good luck finding someone who's willing to buy a 2 year old custom PC for a fraction of the MSRP

That is old news. Yes older apple products retained value. I just gave you an example with newer products. And you know why? Lack of upgradability.

 

[IA64]

That is old news. Yes older apple products retained value. I just gave you an example with newer products. And you know why? Lack of upgradability.

I don't get it. We're talking about MP here. You mention MBpro and upgradability, I am not sure if I understand you correctly and don't want to hijack this thread but notebooks and upgrades don't work well. But I can assure you that a $2300 HP or Lenovo notebook won't sell for more than $800 after one year.

 

[MisterAndrew]

I agree the Apple & macOS experience is worth a premium, but I also agree that matters less for people who are just trying to get work done using apps that exist outside of macOS. During the original 7,1 presentation part of Apple's justification for the price were comparisons to PC workstations. It was kind of a tough sell then, and much more so now that you can get a PC workstation with superior hardware for almost 1/3 the cost. The Lenovo PC is also attractive to someone like me who could have a current workstation for less than I recently paid for my 6,1 with 7 year old hardware. Paying triple to stay in the macOS ecosystem is a tough pill to swallow.

 

[ArPe]

A Mac pro 2013 that had a starting price of $2999 USD is now selling on Ebay for $1000 USD minimum and that's after almost 8 years.

Its not so clear cut. There are fully specced 12 core 6,1 selling for around 1500-2000 if you look around. It was about $7-8K for that spec in 2013-2014.

 

[itsmeaustend]

Plus, with only every third version of macOS not being a total dumpster fire, macOS isn't exactly the best platform for users that value long term stability.

The grass is always greener on the other side. Windows isn't very stable either to be fair. It is also a complete dumpster fire for the most part.

Not to mention it has that Microsoft touch of just being awful with the way it handles updates (yes, even with all the new options), forcing tracking down your throat, charging an obscene amount for a license, among other things.

I, unfortunately, have to dual-boot with Windows regularly and it's always a breath of fresh air when I reboot back into macOS.

 

[IA64]

The grass is always greener on the other side. Windows isn't very stable either to be fair. It is also a complete dumpster fire for the most part.

Not to mention it has that Microsoft touch of just being awful with the way it handles updates (yes, even with all the new options), forcing tracking down your throat, charging an obscene amount for a license, among other things.

I, unfortunately, have to dual-boot with Windows regularly and it's always a breath of fresh air when I reboot back into macOS.

Really? I mean really? I may agree with you on the cost thing but other than that, I have to wait for an elaboration regarding Windows not being very stable. It may be subjective but over the years, Microsoft has done a great job with W10 and I personally can tell you that my machine hasn't crashed a single time since 19 months.

Yes the way it handles updates is annoying but you gotta see my mac OS nagging constantly about needing to restart the machine to install security stuff...

And "I" certainly don't like how Big Sur GUI is almost identical to iOS. Other than being more vulnerable to trojans and viruses ( the tax you pay being the most popular) I don't think mac OS has any advantage over W10 except for the ecosystem.

 

[theSeb]

Windows 10 is very stable on solid hardware and so was Windows 7. Windows has never crashed on my Macbook Pro in bootcamp and was very stable on my Mac Pro until the PCIe SSD temperature sensor and eventually the SSD itself too died.

My experiences with the hardware side of PCs have not been so rosy. I have one of these massive and heavy 17" laptops. After a year the motherboard and CPU needed to be replaced (under warranty) and more recently one of the fans died. Well it kept spinning at reduced speed and sounded like somebody was killing something inside the computer, so the bearing had gone. I replaced it myself and everything works, except that 3 times out of 5 when I put it to sleep it hangs. Usually there are no errors in the logs other than "Computer was restarted unexpectedly". Great. This never happens when the computer is running. I am quite sure it's related to hardware and I think that people who say it's not stable are also having hardware related issues. The other potential culprit is a driver. So it's a bit of a lottery depending on your vendor and what components they use.

 

[JayKay514]

Back on topic, this is interesting because it's a new AMD chipset, the long-thought-mythical WRX80. In a way it's kind of a like a prosumer version of the EPYC SP3 platform, with more PCIe lanes (and PCIe 4.0 which is 2x speed of previous gen) for more slots and/or more M.2 onboard drives.

I would wait for the next incarnation of Threadripper Pro based on Zen 3, because this one is still based on Zen 2, and while it's good for most general-purpose tasks - and offers lots of speed and power for apps that can scale and multithread properly - if you have latency-sensitive tasks - like doing realtime monitoring in multitrack audio -- specifically there were many issues due to the way the L3 cache was designed. Basically you could never set a relatively low buffer size without getting dropouts.

Some of this could be fixed on later-gen AM4 Ryzen 9s like the 3950x by using 'AMD optimized' RAM, but not on EPYC or Threadripper.

The new Zen 3 designs use a single, large shared L3 cache for all cores, and this pretty much eliminates that latency issue.

I think as a straight comparison with Xeon W the new Zen 3 processors offer a lot more power - 4GHz+ speeds, higher core counts. The new Zen 3 AM4 Ryzen 9s are aggressively priced, too.

For anyone working in audio, where Apple's MPX modules don't really offer anything, higher core speeds are vital - more cores are a nice to have - and at a lower price, is kinda killer.

What TR Pro offer over garden-variety AM4 is many more PCIe lanes, so if your rig requires a lot of PCIe cards, like a Pro Tools HDX setup, or lots of PCIe SSDs, etc, that helps. I'm not sure if they're incorporating Thunderbolt natively on the mobo yet, but quite a few TR motherboards and at least one Epyc mobo seemed to offer it via add-in card.

Unless you are tied to MacOS for certain apps like Logic, there's a lot of value on the PC side, and properly maintained a W10 system can be quite stable.

What I'm keen to see is how the new Apple Silicon will compare for this particular task.

 

[richinaus]

I agree with those saying windows 10 is very stable. I rarely have issues on it and am on it all day long at present, on a custom built PC [not Mac pro territory but a 16 core Zen which is perfect for me].
Updates haven’t been an issue for me either - Win 10 if set up correctly is no worse than MacOS in my experience.

Also I totally agree with the notion that Macs are great for certain tasks and especially when using apple apps.

Really computers are tools to get a job done. Resale value is irrelevent if the computer is earning $$ As cashflow is king.
I couldn’t care less now if my custom PC was worth $1 or $5000 as it is working hard, doing what I need it to do, in a very efficient manner.

On the other hand I totally get it for computers that are for personal use, and will only ever buy Macs for this [music / video / media]. It is a far better experience than Windows.

I am also keen however to see how Apple Silicon compares for tasks, and would be more than happy to see the back of Windows, but just dont see this happening for several years now [developers hold the key and need to get fully on board].