Ok so... the new mac pros have been out for a bit...

J

john deaver

Well-known member
About to buy a new mac pro probably the 8 core, and defiantly not the 12 core.

Im coming from a first gen twin intel 2.66 dual core 2 (4 cores total) and wold like to hear from anybody who is using the new machines and what they think. Not a which one should i buy, as i am ultimately going to buy the one i can afford but just looking of Others anecdotal thoughts.

I am also considering a i7 imac

thanks
John
 
I have an 8 core 2.26 from late 2009 with 16GB of ram and am still impressed at how great a machine it is. Far better, much faster and smoother than my new Macbook Pro 2.4 i5 with 8Gb ram.

If you don't need PCI slots, or lots of internal drives, I say buy the Core i7 iMac and spend the money you save elsewhere. OWC has a connection kit for eSata to the new iMacs.
 
Yeah, I also have an 8 core 2.26 from late 2009 and I am pleased as punch with it. It should serve me well for quite sometime. I looked at the iMacs, but I really like the expansion capabilities of the Mac Pro tower. If that is not important to you, then I would suggest the iMac also. They are great machines and I have several buddies that have them and are in love with them.
 
I guess it would help to know where the bottleneck would be in transcoding from AVCHD to prores LT and then on compressor to make final dvd's and h.264 files from finished projects

would an external FW 800 drive be fast enough to support the processing speed that an i7 imac could do in the trancode/compression phase. because by my calculations the new imac should be about 4 times faster than my current machine (assuming that there is no bottleneck)

or... does the fact that current version of FCP does not really take full use of multi core/GPU make an 8 core Mac Pro a waste of money.

I really really wish Apple would stop the development of the next mobile iphone whatever long enough to whip up a real update for FCP to take advantage of some of this newer technology.

And i know that OWC has an eSATA mod for the imac i just hate apple didn't do it first

Iv'e got half a mind to go into the apple store with a portable hard drive with some AVCHD files and jack into one of there imacs and time the transcode time and then do something similar with a new Mac Pro

Right now I'm loosing about a two days per project on processing time.
 
FCP is not multi-core aware, but Compressor is and does significantly speed encoding if you set up a QuickCluster.

There are millions of line of legacy code in FCP and rewriting it to a 64-bit app will take some time. However, there is anecdotal evidence of that because 64-bit code is slowly appearing in parts of the pro apps.

Not buying an 8 core Mac because FCP isn't currently multi core aware isn't a waste of money in my view.

Go to barefeats.com and examine some of the testing down there to learn just how fast these machines are.
 
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