Thinking of canceling my order, but...

[wildmac]

What do you mean with decent one? One that is already equipped with e.g. 3.33 HexCore, SSD and so on? Then you would not have to upgrade...

If you can do the upgrades yourself, look out for a 4.1 2,66 Quadcore with lowest Ram and maybe GT 120 or something and then add the parts. I think you get one way below 2k.

Yeah, ideally one where I wouldn't have to mess with CPU upgrades. That 3.33 Hex would do nicely..

The ones that are cheap are those lower end quads.. and those would still need a lot of work, and aren't really that cheap.

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Personally I just buy the best computer I can afford every 3 years or so. It's always a bit of a crunch, but I'd rather eat beans and rice for a while to have decent tools then be a penny pincher and limp along on the cheap option.

Really depends on the overall price difference. The nMP I have on order is $4500.. if I could get a cMP to my liking for around $2500, that's enough savings that I'd have to seriously consider it. But from what I've looked at sofar, by the time I was done the price difference would be closer to $1k, at which point I'd rather go with the new computer.

 

[deconstruct60]

So looking at the Anandtech review, the nMP is a dog on PS 5 and LR 3, but... the problem is those are old versions.

That isn't the primary issue. It is a "dog" more so because those two programs can't particularly take advantage of 12 cores. There is little reason why should push past 6 cores with those two. Much higher base clocks on the much more affordable configurations.

Anandtech didn't have a "normal" Mac Pro. They had the "money is no object" Mac Pro. if you don't have "money is no object" workloads then those results aren't quite as useful.

 

[wildmac]

That isn't the primary issue. It is a "dog" more so because those two programs can't particularly take advantage of 12 cores. There is little reason why should push past 6 cores with those two. Much higher base clocks on the much more affordable configurations.

Anandtech didn't have a "normal" Mac Pro. They had the "money is no object" Mac Pro. if you don't have "money is no object" workloads then those results aren't quite as useful.

Yeah, that's part of the consideration as well. But now that we are seeing some D500 tests roll in, it appears the D500 sweet spot might be a poor spot, with the D300 delivering near equal or better results in some cases, with only the jump the the D700 being worthwhile...

 

[JavaTheHut]

But I also want the LR performance, as I'm shooting with a Nikon D800, and those raw files are huge.

Comparing LR3 vs LR5 there are significant improvements IMHO

 

[wildmac]

Comparing LR3 vs LR5 there are significant improvements IMHO

Yeah, and we are not seeing test results for that yet.. (not sure if there are any LR benchmarks out there).

 

[theSeb]

the other variable is that right now, only the nMP has TB2.
So buying the iMac would be akin to buying the old Mac model with only FW400 right after the FW800 model came out.
When was that, when the Cheese grater G5 came out? I forget.

Personally I just buy the best computer I can afford every 3 years or so. It's always a bit of a crunch, but I'd rather eat beans and rice for a while to have decent tools then be a penny pincher and limp along on the cheap option.

2013 rMBPs also have TB2

 

[deconstruct60]

An interesting development is the Haswel-E cpu that will be launched mid 2014. A 6 and 8-core i7 with HT. Put that in a iMac, and things really are going to kick ass.

The i7-59xx isn't going to fit in an iMac any better than a Xeon E5 1600 or previous Xeon 3600/3500 would. 130W processor isn't going to fly in an iMac. There are really two subsets of Core i7 products. One is based on the mainstream ( common desktop and laptop ) market basic design. It has limited I/O and (in but a very limted number of corner cases ) integrated GPUs. The second is based on the Xeon design with tweaks for the "high performance" desktop market ( turn some supplementary features off and others one).

Highly doubtful that i7 Haswell-E comes in mid 2014. Second half 2014 but probably not close to the midpoint. Even more doubtful that Apple would ever use Haswell-E in any Mac.

Frankly second half of 2014 is about the time Broadwell might so and it would make more sense for the iMac to follow that rather mainstream update than conceptual stall on microarchtecture implementation.

 

[deconstruct60]

Yeah, that's part of the consideration as well. But now that we are seeing some D500 tests roll in, it appears the D500 sweet spot might be a poor spot,

No double precision float work or higher VRAM capacity demands the two should be about even. The GPU package in the D500 is meant to be an incremental step above the package the D300 uses. They actually have same number in mainstream products. HD 7870 GHz edition ( Pitcairn based like D300 ) and HD 7870 XT ( Tahiti LE based like the D500)
Apple removed some of the differences by underclocking both. Even more removal by throwing ECC abilities of the D500 under the bus. [ Not sure why there would be high demand for double precision float while also throwing ECC out the window. Doesn't may much sense at all. If users are concerned about precision, they probably are concerned about errors also. ]

with the D300 delivering near equal or better results in some cases, with only the jump the the D700 being worthwhile...

Likely the D500 sags less on multiple 4K display set ups ( or anything else driving higher GPU VRAM usage ). If have apps that don't 'live' in VRAM and just looking for pushing pixel fill rates and screen frame rates faster then the D700 provides a gap.

 

[wildmac]

Likely the D500 sags less on multiple 4K display set ups ( or anything else driving higher GPU VRAM usage ). If have apps that don't 'live' in VRAM and just looking for pushing pixel fill rates and screen frame rates faster then the D700 provides a gap.

Yeah, this has me thinking further.. (which is probably a bad thing..)..

Given what we are seeing from the D500 compared to the D300, for what I do, either the D300s for saving or D700 for performance make the most sense. I'm never likely to be even running more than one 4k monitor at all, much more likely to be running my dual Dell 24"s as long as they last.

So unless we see some other benchmarks by mid-Jan that make a better picture here, changing my order to either the low or high seems in order.