How will the new MacPro work with BootCamp?

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Of course Apple has announced the new strange MacPro, though not answered all of our questions about it. And my biggest question at the moment is about BootCamp, which because of Windows limitations of only being installed within the computer.

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I know on Laptop’s the only solution then is to partition your SSD harddrive and install windows there, but on current MacPro’s you can use an entire secondary hard drive as your bootcamp partition.

The new MacPro is run by a single SSD harddrive, so as of now it looks like you will have to partition, and install Windows on that, which means you will need a very large and expensive SSD drive to fit a full working windows environment and a full working Mac environment.

My current MacPro’s boot drive is a 3TB hard drive, which has 1.43 TB used. And 902.4 GB of that is used by my user. The scary part of that is that is with all of my extensive iTunes library on an external SAS. And that still leaves 500GB of data for my system and applications on Mac, which is pretty big for an SSD drive. I know there are ways to move your user to a separate hard drive, but it isn’t easy and is easy to really screw up your system! And honestly I wouldn’t really want my user to be external to the system.

Of course much can be moved out of my user, I have 219 GB in Parallels, which I could easily stop using now that I use bootcamp. And I have 117 GB in MobileSync files, which seems like an awful lot of iOS backups. And I just looked and After Effects CC has 107 GB of Disk Cache in my Application Support folder! Youch! Need to figure that out. Hell I have 14.3 GB of Mailboxes for Mail! Youch that is a lot of files, but still files within my User folder that would take up too much space on a single SSD drive!

Well it is a moot point right now, as I have my old MacPro, and couldn’t afford a new model even if it was out and all the questions were answered, but what freaks me out the most is see myself leaning more towards building a bad ass PC, and I really don’t want to give up on Mac as a platform. So maybe a Mac Laptop and a PC, or so I got he Hackintosh route? Some say they are so unstable and hard to upgrade (as you have to wait till files are updated and hacked so you can upgrade), but then I could have a Mac and a PC and have what I really want, a tower bigger than a current old tech MacPro. Something like the ASUS z9PE-D8 WS motherboard in the EEB form factor with dual Xeon’s. That could literally stomp on the single Xeon in the new MacPro and i could run Dual NVIDIA Geforce for Titan’s for graphics. That would be an amazing machine, expensive sure, but I would have so much fast internal storage and I wouldn’t have to invest in a ton of money in Thunderbolt peripherals (especially since Thunderbolt has not really caught on, and it doesn’t seem to be catching on very big in the PC world which means it will always be a niche product).

New MacPro GeekBench Scores

Well the new MacPro (not the final release version) is showing up in MacBench scores according to MacRumors, and the results are pretty good. Currently getting a 23901.

My MacPro model stock rates an 11970, and mine currently rates at 13510, so it is about the speed of my stock machine faster. Pretty impressive. Still there are Hackintosh’s easily getting 28000 or higher (if overclocked), so it is not as impressive as it could be!

The Edit Doctor on NVIDIA Quadro Performance speeds with Premiere CC and my worries on new MacPro

The EditDoctor has an interesting article on how recent NVIDIA drivers have literally doubled the performance of Quadro’s for Premiere Pro.

And this is why I worry about the new MacPro. OpenCL acceleration is not nearly as fast as CUDA on the PC, and the Mac has always had a far inferior OpenCL installation. Multi GPU’s are incredibly hard to code for and only give moderate performance enhancements on even the most mutli-GPU aware games on the PC, so they are only for the most hard core of gamers. The only exception to this is a Maximus configuration from NVIDIA which is a Quadro with a TESTLA card (the non-consumer version of a Titan), which has incredible power and speed and really can use both processors. This all leaves the new MacPro in the code. Most software won’t be coded for multiple AMD GPU’s and even if they are the performance increases are usually pretty modest, and OpenCL can’t touch CUDA! So why made a new “pro” machine without the option for CUDA? The only argument I can see if form over function, and that seems to be what the new MacPro is all about!

Making new MacPro more like old MacPro

I think my move to Windows may be inevitable at this point just from a price perspective.

Adding 3 PCI slots via Thunderbolt 1, like the Magma ExpressBox 3t, is about $1000, as you can see here: http://www.magma.com/expressbox-3t. 


And then let’s talk hard drives. So a 4 drive housing to replace the 4 internal drives in a MacPro. Promise has it’s 4 drive that also includes Raid 0, 1 or 5 so you don’t need to use one of your PCI slots, but new egg sells one with 4 1 TB drives for 1069, or 4 2 TB for $1699! And they will still be external drives, so you couldn’t put boot camp on them!


We are getting expensive here! Especially when a huge PC ATX case is less than $500. And you could get a MacBook AIR to keep a Mac in your life from $999 to $1700, which is less than these parts for your new MacPro!

Unless this thing is really inexpensive, or Apple comes out with their own expansion chassis I am nt feeling sold!

Apple has announced a new MacPro, is it time for the video professional to move to Windows?

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The wait is finally over and Apple has announced a new and more powerful MacPro, but is it really a replacement for the venerable MacPro tower that is out now. Personally I don’t think so, and this is why.

The Current MacPro is all about expandability and choice. You aren’t locked into much as you have 4 PCI slots, 4 drive bays, and 2 Optical Disc bays, so you can really expand within your machine, and can pick and chose the components you want to make the best machine for you.

The MacPro throws all that out of the window and makes a tiny little machine 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches wide, and only 1/8 the volume of the current MacPro is a bizarre little cylindrical tower, and it relies completely on external expandability and it’s 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports (each supposedly doing 20GB of throughput each). Inside is a single PCI 3 SSD for blazing fast speed, but all other drive space must be external, and at wity multiple monitors you will be using up at least one thunderbolt port.

For graphics it has dual AMD FirePro Workstation Class GPU’s with 6GB of VRAM each for some serious power, and can connect 3 4K displays, but you get no choice, AMD only, which is great FCP X and other programs that rely on Open GL and Open CL, but without an NVIDIA card, you get no CUDA support, which is how many top graphics programs get their insane acceleration. And most programs actually bog down with dual graphics, unless you are doing something like an NVIDIA Maximus configuration where you use a QUADRO for the graphics head and a TESLA for the rendering power, but personally I would rather go cheaper and have a new NVIDIA TITAN GTX which is basically a consumer version of the TESLA and is only a thousand, vs multiple GPU’s would should cost at least $2000 and not have CUDA support. And CUDA support rocks! Still AMD claims they are faster than CUDA.

And 20GB is fast, but not as fast as PCI. A 16x PCI bus is 64 GB of throughput, while a PCI 3 (which this Machine says it has at 40GB/s) in 16x is 128GB/s throughput. So yes you could buy a $500 expansion chassis and run a single PCI 2 4x which has a 16 GB throughput, but I would rather have that extra $500 put into my main case and be able to fit it all into one unit instead of having an octopus of cables and drives and expansion chassis connected to a new version of the Mac Cube (actually more like a Pro Mac Mini).

And then we come to the processor, which is a single XEON chip with up to an impressive 12 cores, but the real power of Xeon’s is dual processor, which could have 2 12 Core Xeon’s (though a 12 core Xeon is going to be insanely expensive, especially when you could get an 8 core [or possibly up to 12] i7 with hyperthreading for a whole lot less). If you aren’t going to have multiple processors, why not have the top of the line i7 instead, as on a mac you are not going to be overclocking.

And the rotating thing is weird, especially if all 16 connectors are full. And seriously no front USB ports? I use those all the time!

It will be a powerful machine, but it is dumbed down and not internally expandable. And will be mess if you expand everything externally. And you will have to live without CUDA, which I have grown to love with Premiere Pro and After Effects (yes Premiere will work with AMD, but so far at least CUDA has been faster).

The thing is I love Mac, but I would rather have a huge internal tower. And that means I could go Hackintosh, but they always have issues, especially with upgrades. The other option is going to Windows and getting your choice. You can get a custom build system from someone like Puget Systems (where you can get a pretty bad ass custome built dual xeon system for under $6000) or you can build your own and save money and have a more powerful machine with all the internal expansion you would ever need.

Right now I am leaning towards windows for my next machine, but it will be a while before I can afford a new system anyway, so maybe we shall see if this MacPro is good enough, but I just don’t know about giving up CUDA for a system that is more form than function!