How powerful a Mac Pro do I need?

[ptarmigan]

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Well, after being instantly impressed and disappointed in the same moment with the new iMac 27" - I just can't live with that shiny screen as I would have to completely re-arrange my office, re-site the ceiling light and more to reduce reflections to an acceptable level - it looks like a Mac Pro is the only viable option.

 

So, in order to keep cost down, it will be minimum RAM and just one 2 TB HDD as I can more cheaply source extra RAM and extra HDDs elsewhere.

 

What speed processor should I go for? If I go for the 8 core it pushes the price close to £3k with the larger HDD and AppleCare which is over £1k more that what I had hoped to spend on the 27" iMac and then I will need to but a new monitor as I just have an older square format 19" IIyama that won't be good enough.

 

What size processor should I go for? Any advice welcome.

[wstotler]

it looks like a Mac Pro is the only viable option.

 

So, in order to keep cost down, it will be minimum RAM and just one 2 TB HDD as I can more cheaply source extra RAM and extra HDDs elsewhere.

 

What speed processor should I go for? If I go for the 8 core it pushes the price close to £3k with the larger HDD and AppleCare which is over £1k more that what I had hoped to spend on the 27" iMac and then I will need to but a new monitor as I just have an older square format 19" IIyama that won't be good enough.

 

What size processor should I go for? Any advice welcome.

 

I've been buying Macs for 15 years now and my strategy works like this:

 

(1) Check for the model you might want to buy, here:

Mac Buyer's Guide: Know When to Buy Your Mac, iPod or iPhone

 

(2) If you're near the end of a product cycle, wait for Apple to update their product line. The previously "high end" thing becomes the cheapest thing in their line up when the update happens. (Or, the cheapest thing is better than what, just days ago, was the fastest thing.) - The MacPro is in a "Don't Buy" phase, right now, BTW.

 

(3) If you're in the beginning/middle of a cycle? Buy it now. OR, look at the refurbished machines.

 

(4) Buy the least powerful machine in the lineup, processor-wise. While you have concerns about processor speed, the actual difference between the fastest and slowest processors available in any given lineup is not really relevant. The UI will function at the same apparent speed, the horsepower is enough to perform your tasks, etc. (The only exception is with rendering huge video files in a pro capacity OR 3-D modeling and rendering, etc. In this case, processor speed does matter--but that's specialist work and there are a whole set of caveats associated with raw speed that must take into account the whole architecture.) So, the faster thing always gives an edge, but in the context of paying the premium for the "fastest thing" right now, it won't matter in three years. (And that "edge" only matters marginally in practice, today.) Any Pro machine will be significantly slower than what you will be able to buy then, anyway, so a faster processor now won't give you longevity, really.

 

(5) Max out the RAM to as much as you can afford--I normally want at least 8GB under the hood. You can do this with third-party RAM, as you suggest. This will improve your machine's overall performance noticeably and give your machine longevity.

 

(6) Buy the AppleCare.

 

(7) I use fast Firewire 800 external drives (G-Drive, no fan, no noise) for storage and scratch disks, with the machine's built-in *only* being used to hold the OS and associated software. So, the size of the built-in drive only needs to be enough to hold the OS and applications. E.g., its stock size is not relevant to the equation. (On a laptop it is--on a MacPro, it's not.)

 

IMO, this strategy gets you into a Mac that will be good going forward for 3 to 4 years. And you're covered against failure for 3 of those with the AppleCare.

 

Thanks,

Will

[ptarmigan]

I've been buying Macs for 15 years now and my strategy works like this:

 

(1) Check for the model you might want to buy, here:

Mac Buyer's Guide: Know When to Buy Your Mac, iPod or iPhone

 

(2) If you're near the end of a product cycle, wait for Apple to update their product line. The previously "high end" thing becomes the cheapest thing in their line up when the update happens. (Or, the cheapest thing is better than what, just days ago, was the fastest thing.) - The MacPro is in a "Don't Buy" phase, right now, BTW.

 

(3) If you're in the beginning/middle of a cycle? Buy it now. OR, look at the refurbished machines.

 

(4) Buy the least powerful machine in the lineup, processor-wise.

 

(5) Max out the RAM. (You can do this with third-party RAM, as you suggest.)

 

(6) Buy the AppleCare.

 

I use fast Firewire 800 external drives (G-Drive, no fan, no noise) for storage and scratch disks, with the drive in the machine *only* being used to hold the OS and associated software.

 

This approach has served me well--no need to be on the bleeding edge EXCEPT for the RAM.

 

I generally only purchase a Mac every 3 years, BTW.

 

Thanks,

Will

 

Will

 

Thanks. I am in need pretty soon as I have run out of HDD space on the iMac and I don't want to spend anything else other than on a new machine - this one is 3 years old in May.

 

So, slowest processor, that's interesting to hear as it's not upgradeable in Mac's, is that the case? I did upgrade a processor on my PC though apart from the work lappy and mrs p's lappy, I don't have any PCs now

 

If I go for a slower processor that could be a significant saving - not that I was considering the 8 core one anyway.

[wstotler]

So, slowest processor, that's interesting to hear as it's not upgradeable in Mac's, is that the case? I did upgrade a processor on my PC though apart from the work lappy and mrs p's lappy, I don't have any PCs now

 

Yes, slowest "new" processor in the lineup.

 

This goes against the marketing angle and perhaps common wisdom, but in the context of a three year purchase and overall user experience, the processor won't matter in the end. (Except for critical video/3D rendering work as a pro.)

 

You're already getting "this year's fastest" when you buy into the lineup.

 

The "slowest" thing was last year's "fastest" thing.

 

It will be more than fast enough, provided you feed the machine with RAM.

 

And next year, *all* of the processors will be "slower."

 

Remember, "fast" is an *incremental* thing these days, unlike the really substantial jumps in speed you could get near the beginning of the decade or in the 90s.

 

Plus, computers are disposable. Buy it. Use it. Chuck it. Upgrade? Forget it.

 

Thanks. I am in need pretty soon as I have run out of HDD space on the iMac and I don't want to spend anything else other than on a new machine - this one is 3 years old in May.

 

Look into good external storage. Again, I recommend the G-Drives that are fanless. Connect with Firewire 400 or 800. Offload everything from your hard drive except the applications to the external. (Photo libraries, music libraries, documents, etc.) Use file aliases to point the Mac to iPhoto and iTunes libraries. Select the external drive manually for Aperture. Set your Photoshop scratch disks to the externals. Use your machine's desktop for temporary work and then offload to the external. Etc. This approach eases upgrading the core machine to a new machine when the time comes and also gives your data protection, provided you purchase two drives and then back the one up to the other. (You can buy a cheap application that will do this on a schedule for you, pushing one drive's contents to the other. I don't recommend TimeMachine--seen a fair number of issues with that.) $400 gets you two silent, 1TB G-Drives. (And you can back up the data from your laptop to one of them, which will clone over to the other.) I really recommend this as a strategy as it protects your data in case your Mac dumps--or you have to ship it off for service.

 

You can get another year out of that machine and then look at upgrading to something else then.

 

Thanks,

Will

[ptarmigan]

Yes, slowest "new" processor in the lineup.

 

This goes against the marketing angle and perhaps common wisdom, but in the context of a three year purchase and overall user experience, the processor won't matter in the end. (Except for critical video/3D rendering work as a pro.)

 

You're already getting "this year's fastest" when you buy into the lineup.

 

The "slowest" thing was last year's "fastest" thing.

 

It will be more than fast enough, provided you feed the machine with RAM.

 

And next year, *all* of the processors will be "slower."

 

Remember, "fast" is an *incremental* thing these days, unlike the really substantial jumps in speed you could get near the beginning of the decade or in the 90s.

 

Plus, computers are disposable. Buy it. Use it. Chuck it. Upgrade? Forget it.

 

 

 

Look into good external storage. Again, I recommend the G-Drives that are fanless. Connect with Firewire 400 or 800. Offload everything from your hard drive except the applications to the external. (Photo libraries, music libraries, documents, etc.) Use file aliases to point the Mac to iPhoto and iTunes libraries. Select the external drive manually for Aperture. Set your Photoshop scratch disks to the externals. Use your machine's desktop for temporary work and then offload to the external. Etc. This approach eases upgrading the core machine to a new machine when the time comes and also gives your data protection, provided you purchase two drives and then back the one up to the other. (You can buy a cheap application that will do this on a schedule for you, pushing one drive's contents to the other. I don't recommend TimeMachine--seen a fair number of issues with that.) $400 gets you two silent, 1TB G-Drives. (And you can back up the data from your laptop to one of them, which will clone over to the other.) I really recommend this as a strategy as it protects your data in case your Mac dumps--or you have to ship it off for service.

 

You can get another year out of that machine and then look at upgrading to something else then.

 

Thanks,

Will

 

Thanks again. As for external storage, in the short term I'd look to use the 3 extra internal bays and a mate has recently modded his Mac Pro to take 6 internal drives rather than expand my current external drive setup. I have a Lacie dual thing (forget the name) set up in RAID and a couple of other drives. 3 internal 2TB drives on a Mac Pro will more than cover what I need for quite a while.

[johnastovall]

Macintosh Performance Guide for Digital Photographers & Performance Addicts

 

Everything you need to know in setting up a Mac Pro.

[adan]

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Well, purely from a processor/speed point of view, my 27" iMac (dual core, 3.something gH) handles M9 files very fast. So presumably a Pro model with at least the same specs would work just as fast. I'd say anything with more than a dual-core would be fine, regardless of clock speed.

 

Agree as to the buying strategies - although, oddly, my "new" 27" cost less than the 24" it replaced as top of the iMac line (which was what I'd originally gone to purchase as "end of life").

[haroldp]

All the above is good advice.

 

I am using an 8 core macpro, (12 G RAM) but only because I often stitch 2-500 mp panorama's, and Nikon Capture NX is a pig with 24 mp files. ACR with M9 files run like a bat.

 

Buy the smallest disk drive, and least RAM from apple, it is much (about 1/2) cheaper elsewhere and is exactly the same. I just paid USD $ 159 for Hitach 2TB 7200 rpm drives.

 

Some drives which have reported longevity problems elsewhere ( Seagate 1.5 T ) seem to be OK in the macpro because it has prodigious cooling capacity.

 

Regards ... Harold

[haroldp]

The macpro has 4 internal SATA disc bays. These will be much faster than externals, even FW800. The fastest external connection is eSATA (about 25% faster in my benchmarks than FW800).

 

For real speed, create a small partition (20-30GB) at the top of two or three internal drives and set them up as a raid 0 array (striped) using Leopard's internal raid function. These will add their space and be much faster than individual drives. Use the Raid 0 array for scratch ( cache ) space in PS or LR (or whatever editor you use). This will probably make a bigger processing speed improvement than the next faster processors.

 

Th macpro is a truly industrial build device and you will not regret it. It can also grow to 32 GB of RAM if you need it.

 

Regards ... Harold

[ericperlberg]

The macpro has 4 internal SATA disc bays. These will be much faster than externals, even FW800. The fastest external connection is eSATA (about 25% faster in my benchmarks than FW800).

 

For real speed, create a small partition (20-30GB) at the top of two or three internal drives and set them up as a raid 0 array (striped) using Leopard's internal raid function. These will add their space and be much faster than individual drives. Use the Raid 0 array for scratch ( cache ) space in PS or LR (or whatever editor you use). This will probably make a bigger processing speed improvement than the next faster processors.

 

Th macpro is a truly industrial build device and you will not regret it. It can also grow to 32 GB of RAM if you need it.

 

Regards ... Harold

 

I agree with Harold, SATA speeds are several times faster than FW 800. Of course it depends on how often you're using your disks and how you set things up but raiding the internal drives is a fast solution. The Mac Performance Guide linked to above is an excellent (IMO) guide.

 

There are so many different strategies you can deploy. The latest MacPros will allow you to add an extra SSD drive as a startup.

 

The thing about processors is at this point we're at a really transitional point in Software. Ironically the whole idea of virtual cores which makes the i7 processor so desireable is not useful for a lot of software. One important advance in Snow Leopard is a technology called Grand Central which makes it much easier for programmers to take advantage of virtual core technology. Apple made Grand Central open source to try to get it used more widely to help motivate programmers to start using it.

 

So if you are thinking about today's software then the fastest quad core MacPro is probably faster on most software you own than the Nehalem processors but going down the road a bit that might change radically. or not...

 

And its probably true that with photo work you're only talking about a few seconds difference on most filters and plugins. When it comes to 3d or video work then the 8 core MacPros will make a much bigger difference.

 

If you use photoshop you should check out Lloyd's stuff on optimising for photoshop.

 

Another issue coming very soon is adding external drives. e-sata is roughly the same speed as internal drives and e-sata cards are fairly inexpensive and more and more e-sata drives are available at good prices. USB 3 is also very fast and LaCie has just announced their first USB 3 drives. Of course you'll need to add a USB 3 card but adding cards is one of the things that makes a macpro more useful than an iMac.

 

Don't forget you'll need a backup solution so if you raid the 3 or 4 internal drives you'll still need an external backup of them.

 

The other potential advantage of a macpro is that you can get a really good monitor. I have a 3 year old Eizo Coloredge right now that I'm selling and looking seriously at the NEC spectraview 30". Lots of people are using it like Andrew Rodney and ole' Lloyd and it seems to satisfy at a price that is almost affordable.

[ptarmigan]

Thanks everyone, some sound advice. Now I need to start looking at the options for monitors. haven't used two screens for a while so is it one large 30" or two 22" monitors?

 

I assume I can run two fully calibrated monitors of the Mac Pro without running additional video cards?

[ericperlberg]

I assume I can run two fully calibrated monitors of the Mac Pro without running additional video cards?

 

That's my understanding, the NVidea "basic" card can handle 2x 30" monitors. Unless you play a lot of games or do 3d or video work I think you can use the "basic" graphics card. The ATI card won't bring anything in terms of photography.

 

Personally I'd rather have one large display if the option was 2x 22" monitors. I can't see the advantage to that, what's your thinking? I think you'd wind up with half of one of the monitors unused and slightly cramped on the other.

 

Again, I've heard good things about this one. If you want a second hand Eizo 24" 1600x1200 coloredge CG210 mine is for sale. The nice thing about it is that it rotates 90 degrees so its also a 1200x1600 monitor (ie you can rotate the monitor to maximise landscape and portrait). PM me if you're interested. I'm going to buy the monitor I linked to above. If you can afford the NEC, it's worth researching.

 

But don't forget you need a backup solution to your hard drives. Redundancy Redundancy Redundancy unless you don't care what happens to your images.

[tobey bilek]

Any iMac will photoshop M9 files. My 24 matt which is 2.5 yers old is fine.

 

Current PS will handle only up to 2 GB ram for PSD and 4 for TIFF. Your camera files are DNG or PSD after conversion or small JPEGS. More ram is of no value for photoshop.

 

Shades are sold to enclose computers from stray light.

 

Turn off the overhead light for critical work. I work in a dark room for anything critical. My screen is calibrated for that use and environment.

 

All that said, a tower is a nice machine . By the time you pay for it and a monitor you are up into $5000.

 

No screen, glossy or matt, can withstand stray light on it so you have to have a work around no matter what. I have put my Macbook glossy next to my matt iMac IN A DARK ROOM, and can not see a difference. Some how you have to solve the overhead no matter what you do.

 

Work on that first.

 

I think you need a more powerful computer only if you do med/large format or stitch panoramas regularly or make hugh files with multiple layers.

[haroldp]

A real graphic arts monitor is a huge improvement. Most (probably all ) 'included' monitors and notebook screens show about 75 % of the NTSC gamut, Adobe RGB is about 122 % of NTSC. Real graphic arts monitor's will show at least Adobe RGB.

 

If you edit for SRGB screen or web display, this might not matter, but if you edit for print it matters a lot.

 

Any calibrated monitor is better than any non-calibrated monitor, but after I calibrated everything (including scanners), and generated custom profiles for my papers, the next big step to predictable editing was a graphic arts monitor.

 

There are many good ones, and I cannot tout one over another, but they are all expensive. Starting is about $ 1000 for a 20". I am using a Samsung XL20, but do not have an opinion as to whether it is better or worse than others.

 

I have spent much more than that for less improvement.

 

Regards ... Harold

[ericperlberg]

Current PS will handle only up to 2 GB ram for PSD and 4 for TIFF. Your camera files are DNG or PSD after conversion or small JPEGS. More ram is of no value for photoshop.

 

 

As written technically correct, Photoshop itself can't use more ram though if you're computer has only 4 gig of ram photoshop won't get anything like 4 gig for its use.

 

As an aside, my understanding is that the number is that Photoshop can only use 3 gig regardless of what's opened before it starts to page swap (technically I think its 3.5gb under 32 bit Snow Leopard with .5gig being used for overhead).

 

However, when CS5 comes out in the 6-9 months it will run in 64bit mode under snow leopard in which case, 3gig (or 4 or 2 or whatever) will no longer hold true, it will be orders of magnitude more with resultant speed increases for larger files.

 

Also, that's just photoshop. Your system needs ram and if you have anything else open at the same time those programmes will use up some ram depending. As I write this Safari is using 1.97 gig, Lightroom in the background holds 1.53 gig and Mail and netnewswire and dreamweaver and iTunes and various system services are all holding some various amounts of ram. Out of the 9 gig of ram I have installed on my aging 3 year old MacPro, 1.5 gig is free. Photoshop isn't running. If it was, it might only get 1.5 gig depending on what else is going on in the background.

[jimleicam3]

I have had my MacPro since 2/08, and of course once I purchased mine, the new ones came out. I have 2x2.8 GHz Quad Core Xeon, with 4 GB ram. I use CS4 and Aperture 2.0 with no problems. I am adding Lightroom in the spring after I take the course. Would I like a faster machine? Sure, but I thing all I have to do is add some more ram and I should be all set. Cheers.

[Eoin]

I've recently gone through this exercise, retiring my aged G5 and replacing it with a Mac Pro. There is a 24" iMac in the house as well, but to be honest, the screen is a PIA to use for photo editing.

 

Anyway, considering the investment required, I took a medium term view with the Mac Pro. The G5 has worked well for the past 5 years and is still seemed pretty usable in every respect.

 

I decided on a middle of the road 8 Core 2.66 with 6Gb of stock Apple memory and 6Gb of memory sourced elsewhere. A standard 1Tb Boot Drive and I added a GTX 285 graphics card with it's 1Gb of ram for Aperture which is my main photography application. I added 3 x 300Gb Velociraptors for an internal 750Gb Raid 0 Partition and a 150Gb Scratch Raid 0 partition. As for a new screen I opted to leave the 23" Apple Cinema Display on he G5 and I bought a Eizo CG243W for the new system.

 

I must say, while most of the apps I use may not fully utilise the 8 cores, I'm sure their next release versions will. Aperture screams, C1 screams and CS4 is very fast. I hadn't noticed how lacking the G5 had become, but now I see how much quicker I can adjust in realtime without any lag, it's brilliant. And these are 24Mp Sony files.

 

All in all, I spent more than I needed. I didn't need to upgrade the Graphics Card, the GT 120 worked fine also. 3 x Velociraptors were unnecessary, a few €100 7k 1Tb drives (F3's) would have worked as well. But hey, if I can get another 5-6 years out of this system it will have been worth it.

 

However, I must say, the biggest eye opener for me was how bad the Apple Cinema Display really was. This Eizo is wonderful and makes such a difference to my colour workflow even though the ACD was profiled the colours of the Eizo are really WYSIWUG.

[topoxforddoc]

Ian,

 

Any Mac Pro will be fine - old or new. Find a bargain, buy more memory and some large SATA drives. Buy some external drives for backup, which you can take off site. Find a nice monitor. I use an old LaCie Electron Blue 22"CRT, bought for £60 - I'd have to spend an awful lot to better this screen.

 

Best wishes,

[ptarmigan]

Thank everyone, some good advice. I think I may have a buyer for my iMac so now it's just finalising what I want. I'll let you know what I decide on.

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