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The nMP wasn't designed to be rack mounted, but you can do that too!

Both my cMP sit on tables as it cuts down on dust and the occasional reconfiguration.

Of course it does...

It's a full tower made to be on the floor under or beside your desk. You can hang it from the ceiling if you want but it was designed to be on the floor. The nMP was designed to be on your desk.
 
I only use to connect 2 Lan to my tcMP (I consider naming it nMP anachronous), power, USB KBD and HDMI display, occasionally I plug a LaCie LBD TB2 SSD when some work demands large storage, usually I'm happy accessing shared files at our NAS at near 200MBps (a 12TB pool Raid 6 (3x4TB+2 parity spare hdd).

I dont use video/audio capture H/W (ok ocassionally a USB ATSC tuner to watch or record some special ATV program, but it dont account for work).

My desk have never been less cluttered, I have only the tcMP, the 32" 4K the Apple's Touchpad a Das Keyboard 4 and my 2 phones and some times my iPad sharing the iPhone's dock (I plug everything to the Keyboard's USB3 ports).

My tcMP use to have open/unused 5 TB2 and 3 USB3 ports, having only 6 cables attached (power,video,usb3,tb2, lan1, lan2).
 
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Of course it does...

It's a full tower made to be on the floor under or beside your desk. You can hang it from the ceiling if you want but it was designed to be on the floor. The nMP was designed to be on your desk.

Either way, it's still a pretty weak argument. It has more to do with personal preference more than anything.
 
Disagree. My cMP has had as many as 14 cables coming out of it. It all depends on how you use it.

You used what, every port on the cMP, front and back? That really takes some doing.

Either way, it's still a pretty weak argument. It has more to do with personal preference more than anything.

If your personal preference is to have everything (including 14 or so devices) on your desk, then I can see where the nMP would be an improvement. The nMP is smaller, leaving you with more space to store a myriad of external devices and cables on your desk.

I can't say that's for me or for anyone I know, but if that's how you work, smaller must be better,.
 
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I can't say however I would put the nMP on the floor as it would be even worse for dust and shag carpeting would block air flow.
 
Guys I have been thinking a bit about the possibilities about next Mac Pro, and came to conclusion that everything what Apple will come up with at 2999$ as starting config will be simply milking their customers.

If Apple wants their hardware be competitive, I think, has to do this:

Quad core Xeon E5 - 1620v4 3.5 GHz/3.8 GHz,
16 GB of RAM DDR4 ECC
512 GB SSD
Dual Radeon Pro DX300 based on Ellesmere Pro with 2048 GCN cores, each and 4 GB of VRAM.

Price? 1999$.

They could then combine the "need" from the community for xMac.

It would not cut their margins, because the GPU can be found for under 200$, so AMD would sell it to Apple for under 150$ for each GPU, CPU is 294$, RAM can be sold to OEM's for as low as 50-60$ for 16 GB kit, 512 SSD 120-150$(Apple gets their own memory controller anyway, and other things related to SSD hardware).

Then they can always bring 6, 8, 14, 18 core configs, as BTO options, up to 256 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and another 2 tiers of GPU hardware.
 
IMO any new Mac Pro released by Apple, unless significantly discounted, should contain a CPU with more than four cores. The 6,1 quad core loses, in CPU performance, to many lower cost offerings.
 
Hah, it even lines perfectly with Intel pricing, and posibilities for another tier.

2999$ as second tier instead of 3999$. How can Apple make it better?

6 core Xeon E5-1650v4 with 3.6 GHz costs 617$. RX 480 with 8 GB of VRAM renamed as Radeon Pro DX500. Config?

6 cores, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD, DX500. 2999$. 600$ option for CPU and 400$ for GPUs. Matches it perfectly.

And Apple can edvertise it as significantly better pricing offer than before.

I don't know if it is only me, but if Apple will do anything else than those two configs(meaning: worse value for money) it might not be worth the money.

Or in other words, Phil Shiller can advertise it with Yorkshire sentence: "It costs a fortune, my ass!".
 
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Do they have any choice? Realistically, everything else will look ridiculously expensive compared to what it offers.

When MP 6.1 was released it was actually good value for what it offered. My logic is that even 5K iMac is still not bad value for what it offers.
 
Do they have any choice? Realistically, everything else will look ridiculously expensive compared to what it offers.

When MP 6.1 was released it was actually good value for what it offered. My logic is that even 5K iMac is still not bad value for what it offers.
It was only a good value if a 256 GiB internal disk, single processor, no more than 64 GiB of RAM, and a midrange desktop GPGPU that couldn't run CUDA matched what you needed.

If you needed much more storage, or more CPU cores, or more RAM, or you didn't need a GPGPU card or needed CUDA - it was a horrible value.

Let's kill this nonsensical idea that the MP6,1 was in general a "good value". If you tried to match the MP6,1 configs exactly in Linux-land - it would seem to be OK.

If, like most people, you tried to build a system that matched what your workflow needed - the MP6,1 could be much more expensive that the system you needed. (That is, the MP6,1 config closest to what you needed was way more expensive than a SuperMicro, HP or Dell system that more closely matched what you needed.)

The MP6,1 was a great FCPX dongle. Outside of that, it often wasn't a good value.
 
You used what, every port on the cMP, front and back? That really takes some doing.

1 USB mouse / 1 USB keyboard / 1 USB to webcam on overhead ceiling / front 1 USB to midi video switcher / 1 audio input-1 audio output to Mackie mixer / Two Black Magic capture cards - 2 HDMI inputs from 1 wide angle camera and 1 close in camera - 1 HDMI output to monitor - 1 HDMI out to Teradek cube ( Experimental ) / Two video cables from a sapphire AMD 7950 to dual monitors / 1 Lan cable to router.

While I'm probably the exception to the rule, cMP's are not immune to external cabling.
 
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1 USB mouse / 1 USB keyboard / 1 USB to webcam on overhead ceiling / front 1 USB to midi video switcher / 1 audio input-1 audio output to Mackie mixer / Two Black Magic capture cards - 2 HDMI inputs from 1 wide angle camera and 1 close in camera - 1 HDMI output to monitor - 1 HDMI out to Teradek cube ( Experimental ) / Two video cables from a sapphire AMD 7950 to dual monitors / 1 Lan cable to router.

While I'm probably the exception to the rule, cMP's are not immune to external cabling.
Let me ask you this: How has the nMP eliminated the need for all of these cables?
 
Now your nitpicking. Until you have something more interesting to say, I'll end that topic of discussion.

As it is you made a statement that, while true, is irrelevant if no one made a statement to the contrary. Perhaps you'd also like to point out that water is wet, 2+2 = 4, and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west despite the fact no one has made any statement to the contrary? After all they're all accurate, even if irrelevant, points.
 
It was only a good value if a 256 GiB internal disk, single processor, no more than 64 GiB of RAM, and a midrange desktop GPGPU that couldn't run CUDA matched what you needed.

If you needed much more storage, or more CPU cores, or more RAM, or you didn't need a GPGPU card or needed CUDA - it was a horrible value.

Let's kill this nonsensical idea that the MP6,1 was in general a "good value". If you tried to match the MP6,1 configs exactly in Linux-land - it would seem to be OK.

If, like most people, you tried to build a system that matched what your workflow needed - the MP6,1 could be much more expensive that the system you needed. (That is, the MP6,1 config closest to what you needed was way more expensive than a SuperMicro, HP or Dell system that more closely matched what you needed.)

The MP6,1 was a great FCPX dongle. Outside of that, it often wasn't a good value.
It was good value compared to WORKSTATIONS that Dell and HP offered. It actually offered more horsepower than those workstations at similar price point(you had to pay more for HP and Dell computers at the same performance level).

So it was good value. Time has moved for Apple quickly, tho.
 
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Guys I have been thinking a bit about the possibilities about next Mac Pro, and came to conclusion that everything what Apple will come up with at 2999$ as starting config will be simply milking their customers.

If Apple wants their hardware be competitive, I think, has to do this:

Quad core Xeon E5 - 1620v4 3.5 GHz/3.8 GHz,
16 GB of RAM DDR4 ECC
512 GB SSD
Dual Radeon Pro DX300 based on Ellesmere Pro with 2048 GCN cores, each and 4 GB of VRAM.

Price? 1999$.

They could then combine the "need" from the community for xMac.

It would not cut their margins, because the GPU can be found for under 200$, so AMD would sell it to Apple for under 150$ for each GPU, CPU is 294$, RAM can be sold to OEM's for as low as 50-60$ for 16 GB kit, 512 SSD 120-150$(Apple gets their own memory controller anyway, and other things related to SSD hardware).

Then they can always bring 6, 8, 14, 18 core configs, as BTO options, up to 256 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and another 2 tiers of GPU hardware.

This price is nice for us, but it is into iMac's territory which is a more favored product, Apple cares more about it, so I find it a little bit difficult to see a MP so cheap. Also have in mind that it's a "Pro" -> more expensive for sure.
 
It was good value compared to WORKSTATIONS that Dell and HP offered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall a lot of the value comparisons back then were vs workstations that had actual real FirePro graphics cards in them, rather than gaming cards with a firmware hack to make them call themselves "FirePro".

I suspect the other workstations with real FirePro's also don't have the endemic thermal failures (due to the 6GB VRAM) that ALL (at least d700) nMPs (and the replacement parts) will inevitably suffer from when pushed hard enough, for long enough.
 
Was it better value? It was. You couldn't config computer with similar performance in similar price bracket. Most of Workstations with similar performance level were 1-2k USD more expensive, because of the price of the Workstation GPUs at that time.

And you never benefited from the difference that workstation GPU gave you(ECC Memory).

About the MP 7.1 and the prospect of what I have written higher. Worrying thing is the lack of support for RX 480, or Ellesmere XT GPU in macOS Sierra. So either it will be implemented later, or... Apple will use cut down Vega 10 GPU with HBM2 as second tier GPU option. Why is it important? Because HBM2 brings ECC memory with just BIOS change.

So Radeon Pro DX300 - Ellesmere Pro with 2048 GCN cores, and 4 GB of VRAM with lack of ECC.
DX500 and DX700 could have different levels of performance end ECC memory as differentiating feature.
 
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