User Upgradability on the new Mac Pro?

I understand that one can configure the new Mac Pro from around $3,000 to almost $10,000. But can one buy the base unit and then upgrade parts later on? For example, RAM upgrade, CPU upgrade, graphic card upgrade, etc.
Is the Mac Pro as quiet as a Mac Mini?

The tear-down images and data on the Xeon E5-xxxxV2 series processors look like the cpu can be upgraded by the user. All E5 processors use the FCLGA - 2011 socket, same pin-out so should be replaceable:
1620V2 - 4 core - 3.7 GHZ - $294
1650V2 - 6 core - 3.5 GHz - $583
1680V2 - 8 core - 3.0 GHz - $1723
2697V2 - 12 core - 2.7 GHz - $2618
Interesting tidbit - the max addressable memory for the 4, 6, 8 core models is 256 GB, while that of the 12 core is 768 GB.

Similar Messages

Is it worth the upgrade to a new Mac Pro?

I have a question about the new Mac Pro. I have a 1st Generation Mac Pro (the one released in 2006). I primarily use it to do a lot of motion graphics and video editing/effects. I use Final Cut Pro, Motion (I have FCS 2), After Effects, Cinema 4D, etc. Would it be worth upgrading to the newer Mac Pro? Would I notice much difference in rendering speeds, working with 3D, etc?
My current Mac Pro has 5 GB of Ram, and the NVidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card; 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Processors
I'm really debating on selling my Mac Pro and purchase one of the 2009 Mac Pros but only if I would really notice much of an overall difference.
Thanks in advance for any answers and input!

Hi, it really depends on what you plan to do with the computer. If running windows in 64 bit mode is a worry for you, then I would trade your 2006 for at least a 2008 mac pro. The Harpertown mac pros are still considered by many just as fast as the 2009, if not faster in some things. Remember, it is hyper threading that gives the 2009 their power and the speed of 1066mhz DDR3 memory.
If you plan on just using the mac pro for light video editing and encoding and using pro apps, the 2008 mac pro will be more than enough. I had a 2006 mac pro going from a G5 Quad. Once I found out that I really enjoy running windows on it and the thought of a new cinema display, I decided to trade my 2006 for the 2008. Sometime in the next few years, I will then trade up my harpertown for the Nehalem mac pro and so forth.
You are right! very few people these days have 2000+ dollars to spend outright on a computer, but I got a great deal on my 2006 trade which was 1850 - the 2008 3.0 harpertown for 2300.00

Rendering problems on the new Mac Pro with premier CC

Previosuly on my iMac, periodically i got strange green compression and distortion on my exports, especially when converting from native canon 5D files to say another format such as quicktime. Now I've upgraded to the new MAC PRO and things are way worse, random distortion, artefacts and coloration is appearing in my final renders, this is almost making my workflow come to a stop. Anyone having same problems? any solutions from Adobe?
I found that deleting the preview files and rendering helps sometimes, but surely this is a terrible bug that needs to be fixed
in preview
and in the exported movie
and even crazy inverted style colours like this
help!

Ditto. I have recently been getting the same problem on export from Premiere.
There's another thread here - Mac Pro Render & Export Glitching...: Apple Support Communities -
Any idea Adobe as this seems to be getting worse and is costing me.

What kind of monitor is recommended for the new Mac Pro?

I want ot upgrade to the new Mac Pro from an imac, but what kind of display/monitor would be recommended and how much might it cost?

There are lots of 27"-30" monitors that would work, with the right connector adaptor. Many sell for around a 1/3rd of an Apple display. Personally, I like Samsung monitors, but LG makes some very nice ones, and even Dell's monitors are often quite good. Acer has some nice large screen monitors out too, and while the name might not be commonly known to many people, they are and have been a major equipment manufacturer for decades now and their quality is usually pretty good.
Keep an eye out for sales in the coming weeks and go look at some, preferably side by side.
You should be able to pick up something good in the 25"-30" range for easily under $500/$600 USD (on sale, perhaps well under $300).

Premiere Pro CC and the new Mac Pro - are all upgrades necessary?

Monday I'm ordering the new Mac Pro because my Mid 2012 Mac Pro tower is simply too slow and crashy no matter how much money I sink into it. Thing is, every little upgrade I add onto this new Mac Pro is very expensive, so I want to make sure I don't add anything that won't make a difference in edit performance.
My ultimate goal is to be able to work with 4k, and even 5k footage in 2014. More and more clients are giving me Red media, and my system right now can't handle it (I have to render proxy files for everything).
Attached are my hardware upgrade options for my processor and graphics card. These options can only be offered when I order the computer. Neither the processor or the GFX card can be changed by me later. Note that these options alone almost double the computers's price (3600). As of now I assume that getting the fastest everything is the way to go, but is there any reason I should not go this high?
jesse

We have an issue when we send a film to the media encoder it crashes about half of the time for no particular reason
Anyone else got that too with Premiere Pro CC and the new Media encoder?
Lack of detailed info makes your question impossible for anyone to answer you!
eg. ...."Doctor it hurts...anyone else got something that hurts?"

Is the new mac pro 2014 upgradable? if so which parts?

I am a Video editor and graphic designer. i want to know how far can i expand the new mac pro 2014.. which parts on the machine are upgradable.

It is actually "Late 2013" in Apple parlance. Most use "nMP" for New Mac Pro" or you could call it a 6,1
There is no sign or confirmation that the Dxxx can be upgraded unless from another nMP, doubt there will be upgrades while SSD etc are and Apple shows how on product support page how to remove and install memory and the SSD device.

I'm in the market for the new Mac Pro.

I'm in the market for the new Mac Pro. I've been waiting for it to be released and have some cash set aside for this. I am a video editor and use Premiere Pro CC, and After Effects. My primary content is simple documentary films - so nothing too intense, but always HD (1080) video. I don't see 4k in my future but it's always a possibility so I want to future-proof my purchase for the next 3 years or so. With respect to storage space and RAM, I can make that decision myself based mostly on cashflow (since they are likely both user-expandable). However, with the basic configuration of the number of cores and video graphics card, I could use some advice. I think they are both set for the life of the computer, so important to get it right.
My current thinking is to start with the 6 core model (I guess I have no real reason for this decision, except that I feel like the 4-core base model is put there to make the price feel lower, while the real advantages in performance start at the 6 core - am I way off on this one?). But, I wonder if I should spring for the 8 core or even the 12 core? Probably overkill for me - out of my budget anyway.
The other decision is the graphics card - is the D500 enough? Will it be limiting factor in the future? Or should I move to D700?
Here are the cost differences:
from 6 core to 8 core is $1500
from D500 to D700 is $600
Which is worth it? (neither, both?)
Thanks.

Whether it's worth it depends more on you and what your current and future needs are.
The good news is that Adobe's CC apps can already take advantage of the AMD FirePro GPU's in the Mac Pro, and offer hardware acceleration of the Mercury Playback Engine, which you'll see in Premiere, After Effects, and Media Encoder. According to the Adobe staffers I've talked to, even the FirePro D300's will see a big benefit, in fact they say you won't see a big bump by upgrading the GPU. As far as Adobe's apps are concerned, their OpenCL use is all single precision, and the D500/D700 upgrades put a lot of weight in double precision performance (which is unused in their apps). Their recommendation - put the bulk of your budget on cores and RAM.
How many depends on how elaborate and complex your work is. Simple documentary films with the odd effects, transitions, titles, and grading.. you'd be fine with a 6-core IMO. If you're leaning towards getting into really layered comps and effects, you'd shorten those long render times down a lot with the 8-core. As for memory, I'd recommend at least 4GB per physical core.
Good luck!

After Effects and the new Mac Pro

I recently got one of the new Mac Pros and it doesn't get along great with After Effects, particularly when it comes to ray-tracing. There is no Nvidia GPU option for the new machines, so ray-tracing defaults to CPU. But then, even with a simple solid, it gives you an out of memory error. I've seen postings saying this is fixed in 12.2 but I've got 12.2 and the newest CUDA driver installed and run the machine with all other apps closed, but no luck. Presumably I'll figure out how to get it running after a fashion eventually, but even then, even with the new machines' many fast cores etc, CPU ray-tracing on the new Mac Pro is not looking promising on the speed/usability front.
Element 3D is an option, but its reflections can't interact with the comp the E3D object is within, only with the environment map in the plug-in itself, so there are many cases where it's a poor substitute.
My question isn't really how to get ray-tracing to work with the new machines. That would be great, but my sense is the answer there is, it effectively can't.
My question is, given that motion graphics increasingly involve the complex interplay of light, reflection, transparency, and three dimensional objects, and that from here on out Mac Pros will no longer accommodate nvidia cards, and that many creative types will only work on Macs, how long will this state of affairs continue? How long can it continue? Are there any plans to make After Effects fully functional on the new Mac Pros? Ray-tracing has always been balky and wonky and prone to error messages and crashes, but despite all that it's also an indispensible part of After Effects.

A fun update, long after the fact:
So I've learned Cinema 4D in order to reacquire the capability After Effects once offered internally and have succeeded after a fashion. Let's look at the relative ease of the new method versus the old one using a real-world scene from my project: Adding a bus shelter over actors on a bench.
In ray-trace enabled After Effects of old, I could draw simple draw shapes in Illustrator, extrude them into objects, collect them under a null and position it in my scene. Particularly powerfully, I could bend 2D photograph layers into half-domes for a fun roof, and create planes of transparent glass of any thickness I chose with refraction levels that made for interesting visuals as actors moved behind it, and add reflectivity to any layer I chose -- including the dome roof, for instance, which would then pick up the reflections of any other objects in my scene. I could also put 2D layers in front of my bus shelter as easily as placing a layer closer to the camera than the makeshift model. Well, sometimes it didn't work as advertised; sometimes you also had to have the foreground layer above the background one in your comp even when both were 3D and that wasn't supposed to still apply, but at least it was After-Effectsy. The whole thing was After-Effectsy, which of course is good because presumably AE users know AE, but also it was similarly logical.
To achieve a similar end with C4D and Cineware, all you have to do is this: Build your bus shelter model in Cinema 4D. Wait, first learn Cinema 4D, a hugely complicated piece of software. Come back in 3 months, I'll wait. Hi again. I see you've built your bus shelter. In fairness, you were able to add textures and complicated curves you couldn't in After Effects. But then you always could, if you were willing to learn a hugely complicated piece of software. Anyway, let's get that model into after effects. Just drag that C4D project into your AE project and put it in the comp. Put other layers in front of it or behind it. Easy! Now just a few caveats. 1. Scale. There is no formula available anywhere for the relative scales of your two projects. So tweak that. Just go back and forth between the two software suites -- I hope your computer can have both up and running at the same time! -- until you get that right. 2. Cameras. You can import your AE camera into C4D and vice-versa as easy as pressing a button in Cineware. It shows up somewhere strange in C4D unless you use a workaround unless you are also camera tracking in AE in which case you can't. 3. Scale again: Your camera will match its moves in both suites now. But they are drastically different sizes. If you import your C4D camera into AE it becomes tiny tiny tiny, if the scale of commercial C4D models is to be considered at all standard. Just shrink your model down to say 1% and you should be good to go. And if you tweak your camera in AE or C4D, you have to junk your imported camera and re-do that step. 4. Reflectivity. Your C4D model will only reflect items in your C4D project, not the, um, scene it's going in. 5. Refraction. Transparent C4D items will indeed show your AE items behind them. But you can't add refraction. 6. I've saved the best for last. Say you want your actors in your bus shelter, meaning part of the model is in front of them and part behind them. You used to place them (shot on a greenscreen or roto'd) in the bus shelter model. Now you simply do this: Divide your bus shelter model into halves, the in-front half and the behind half. Put both under nulls. Give the front null a C4D "tag" called compositing. At least its name makes sense. Then go into the tag and enable a numerical "object buffer." You're almost done! Next simply go into "render options" in C4D and into "multi-pass" there and then enable object buffers again there, so intuitive! Make sure to enable the same numerical object buffer you enabled in your compositing tag. Good? Good! Now, all you have to do is place two copies of your C4D project heirarchically in your AE project. You're still almost done! Now all you have to do is go into "multi-pass" in your Cineware plug in in the instance of it that goes in front of the actors and specify your numerical object buffer again. Wait, one tiny thing: If your Cineware plug-in is still set on the default "Standard" setting that option will be grayed-out. Just switch it to the much slower-rendering C4D opions and you're good to go! And don't worry about two copies of your C4D project in your AE one meaning it will now take twice as long to render, because it will. But, as a bonus, you've probably learned a lot of ways to render C4D models really well when learning C4D because Adobe made you. So you can use those to make your AE comp really shine... or wait, could, but they're not supported. You can however render it in that flat ugly video early Pixar style, but life is full of trade offs, no? You end up rendering out the layer you need in C4D and comping it into AE exactly as effects artists have done ever since always. Which is to say AE gave up even trying to do 3D and sent you into the waiting arms of a more-capable competitor, their seeming specialty in the world of video. Maybe it's better this way. AE was only ever for comping. It briefly got a swole head. Now it's back in its comfort zone. The end

QX 10 – optimised for the new Mac Pro?

I recently upgraded to a new Mac Pro.
So am now considering going back to QX (I am a pro graphic designer).
They have a deal offering special pricing for upgrades from version 3 (AUD $399)!
Question: Is QX 10 optimized for the new Mac Pro?
Any designers (having previously used / using InDesign) out there with QX 10 experience?
Your thoughts please?

QX 10 is QuarkXpress (version 10 - latest version) – a pro publishing/page layout application. Adobe InDesign knocked QX off its throne over a decade ago. Now that Adobe have introduced their subscription model (as opposed to their former purchase upfront model), many pros like me are now looking for alternatives. QX is about the most likely. I'm just doing some homework before I jump (after all it's my livelihood we're talking about here).

What is the best storage solution for the new Mac Pro

Hi All,
With limited funds when purchasing the new Mac Pro, I'm starting to look at storage for music/pictures/video etc - I'm thinking of storing this data externally and connecting via Thunderbolt or Firewire or USB3 to access the data... Not sure what type of storage to use, upgrading to 1TB PCIe-based flash seems excessive for costs and I would like at least 2TB, anyone have any suggestions?
What are the alternatives for storage... (single disk Raid) I've recently had to replace my internal WD hard drive (lost everything) and the backup time capsule failed, again knackered disk (looks like WD format error with Maverick OS bug), don't want to format them just incase..
With the new Mac Pro coming with 256GB PCIe-based flash storage, I'm reluctant to upgrade the storage because of costs and would like some redudancy when it comes to storage.
Any suggestions?
Many thanks
Russ

landing page at OWC for Thunderbolt products.
Helios enclosure (the new dual-slot Helios PCIe chassis) and moving various hard drives into Thunderbolt cases (in time) but mainly into my favorite USB3 hard drive enclosure.
For those without eSATA enclosures, a simple eSATA to USB3 adapter might do the trick.
USB3 is plenty fast to house two hard drives.
If you can, I'd try to order with 500GB to get started and have more room for system and default for scratch or even for Aperture/iPhoto or Lightroom.
Always take the precaution and zero a drive before use. Want a solid enterprise ideal for RAID, then look no further than Seagate Constellation series. 128MB cache doesn't hurt and fine for RAID5, NAS or whatever you want.
There should be retail PCIe-SSD products in 2014.
Large storage, http://macperformanceguide.com/topic-thunderbolt.html

Buying the new Mac Pro

Hi there, I want to buy the new mac pro, I am a after effect user, need to know which graphic card to select, there is two option: 1-NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB four of them, or 2-ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 512MB of GDDR5 memory single one.
Thanks Edward.

true Andrew!!
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600XT (256 MB)
I have, works with AE CS4, basta.
no need for Photoshops' geeky eyedropping and GPU intense interface improvements.
anything else is pure hardware marketing insanity (not blaming Adobe directly, ok!?)
I think it's really time for a slowdown on new technology impacts and settle down to the key purposes and develop them. that would take a huge impact on operability, stability, exchange among other platforms.
this digital warfare must come to an end.
it kills creativity!
without creativity this planet will become dead...

WHY AFTER EFFECTS STILLS SO SLOW IN THE NEW MAC PRO?

I have the new mac pro with this settings:
3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5
64 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 ECC
AMD FirePro D700 6144 MB
Software OS X 10.9.2
And the AE performs slower than in my old mac pro. I have set the preferences as seen on all those tutorials on this site, I have an SSD external disc for cache files, memory and multiprocessing settings correctly...and previews are very very slow, and I can not even render a single comp without waiting 10 minutes. I am very disappointed and frustrated with this situation...
Am I missing something?

I don't understand why it's even up to the user to figure out what settings are best. Isn't the application in a vastly superior position to know what its resource constraints are at any given moment? Instead I have to try rendering a couple of comps, kill the render, fix the render queue since AE STILL doesn't offer a graceful way to quit and resume renders.
I have to say that one of the attributes of AE that consistently disappoints me is multiprocessing and its accompanying memory management policies. I regularly produce hundreds of network graphics at a go, and I can never reap any benefit from multiprocessing, because AE has to load the entire project into each core, instead of just loading the comps it needs to render at any given time. Similarly, a project that requires 400 heavily-automated versions (a regular occurrence for some of my Latin America clients, where graphics have to be versioned for multiple feeds and languages) can simply choke AE. If it could load this stuff into memory on-the-fly (or at least offload some of it when memory gets tight), this wouldn't be a problem, and I sincerely doubt the performance would be worse than it is now. This is on a previous-gen Mac Pro with 48 GB RAM, so, while not strictly state-of-the-art, it's no slouch.
Heck, even opening some of these projects just to browse their contents is a painful 30-minute process, as AE apparently has to not only load everything into memory before I can even do anything, but, judging by how it hangs for many minutes at 99% on the progress bar, it also seems to be evaluating all the expressions in all the hundreds of comps (presumably so it can render the project thumbnails). And yes, I've tried splitting the projects up, but this leads to its own complications, particularly when revisions come in a week or two later.
I don't want any of this to sound overly negative, since I know AE has a small team and this sort of stuff isn't trivial to implement. I do appreciate this application and all it does, particularly for me creatively and professionally. I just get a bit tired of seeing new releases come every year and this stuff seems to go unaddressed.

IMac vs the new Mac Pro for video editing in FCPX?

Hi.
I am currently using a macbook air for all my editing and rendering of videos in FCPX. The editing process is reasonably smooth when dealing with shorter clips, but when I tried to edit multicam clips, things started to slow down. Also, the rendering and compression processes are tedious. I am planning to edit and process a much larger number of videos in the next years to come, so I have decided to do a serious upgrade of my system.
For the moment, I am torn between a maxed out iMac 27", which would be the cheapest alternative, and the 6 core Mac Pro or 4 core Mac Pro.
When I look at benchmarks of the new Mac Pro's in Geekbench, the iMac is never very far away in terms of performance. Does tests like this tell anything about how well the Mac Pro will perform in FCP? Does the hardware in the Mac Pro have features which makes it superior to the iMac, in other ways than for example the "pure power" of the CPU and GPU?
Christopher.

FCP X 10.1, Motion 5.1 Updates w/Dual GPU Support (new Mac Pros) (from Thursday)
Apple released Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Thursday with support for Dual GPUs in the new Mac Pro and more.
Long list in the Final Cut Pro X 10.1 Release Notes that also links to info on How to back up important FCP X 10.0.x files before updating. (Today's Apple docs listing also has more related to Final Cut Pro X 10.1.)
Also out today are Compressor 4.1 and Motion 5.1. Full release notes below but here's a clip from the App store Motion 5.1 changes:
Optimized playback and rendering using dual GPUs in the new Mac Pro
FxPlug 3 with custom plug-in interfaces and dual-GPU support
Faster project loading, especially for complex projects
Share directly to YouTube at 4K resolution
Spanish language localization
Dual FirePro Dxxx Rendering FCP-X
http://www.barefeats.com/tube05.html
Intel Xeon processors are designed to run 24/7 and stay cool and under load.
Mac Pro so far hold up strongly for years, easy to add and upgrade RAM and processor, and maybe, hopefully, even the twin GPUs. Thunderbolt2 for all your projects and storage as well.
6 or 8-cores is going to walk away from iMac which is breathing hard and not designed for constant heat. Haswell was designed to conserve and reduce.

The new Mac Pro (6,1) and TRIM

With its economical internal design and limited internal expansion options, the new Mac Pro depends heavily on the speed and flexibility of Thunderbolt 2 for expansion. In the old days, we could add four HDs in the internal bays and one more under the optical drive. This also allowed us, if we used SSDs instead of HDs, to enable TRIM for other than Apple drives.
We know that TRIM doesn't work with a USB 3.0 connection. The question is, can TRIM be enabled on an SSD connected in some fashion through Thunderbolt? I know that graphics cards can be plugged into an external PCIe expansion chassis and that eSATA SSDs, such as the OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2, can plug in too. But does having to pass through the Thunderbolt interface interfer with or prevent TRIM support? For that matter, what kind of external connection to an SSD at the other end of the Thunderbolt cable would be able to support TRIM? I'm currently using a CalDigit PCIe card which provides two eSATA external connections, and when a NewerTech Voyager Q is connected and an SSD plugged into it (like putting bread in a toaster), the drive is seen as "Rotational" in System Information, and TRIM cannot be enabled.
Since TRIM support is important for continued performance and longer life of SSDs, is this an issue with the new Mac Pro's design philosophy?

Hopeful but not comforting.
With Mavericks, not all SSDs will report TRIM support, but doing a benchmark both before and after the change should confirm that TRIM is functional.
I should see TRIM = YES and not from some benchmark.
Thunderbolt support for TRIM is good. But Intel has as yet? never supported TRIM on an array, so not sure how that is accomplished.
"Is" or "may" and "could" - I just wouldn't make a "TRIM is supported by 10.8.5 and later" as it may vary by Macs that had native SATA III with PCIe support, the new Samsung controller Apple has been using. Certainly not in 5,1 Mac Pro except if and only for an Apple SSD BTO upgrade.

How to use hard drives with the new mac pro

A few quick questions about upgrading to new Mac pro desktop
I currently have 4 internal hard drives for a total of 8T
What will the solution be to add storage to the new desktop?
I assume it will be thunderbolt options?
Lets say I wanted at least 8TB of storage to add to the computer
and attached the storage via thunderbolt will it be as fast data throughput
as the harddrives in my current computer hooked up to the external bus?
I also have a pci card running my audio plugins for Universal Audio how will those pci
cards work on the new mac pro?

Also will the transfer rate with the pegas be as fast as if the drives were connected to the bus in the machines like the old mac pro?
To answer that, think of this as a Bottleneck problem. The overall performance is as slow as the slowest device.
At this writing typical rotating drives can produce a momentary burst at 125 MBytes/sec or 1,000 Mbits/sec. Only FireWire 800 is starting to be a limit for that -- EVERYTHING else is faster. Thunderbolt-1 is 10,000 Mbits/sec -- ten times faster.
The best SSD can produce a burst at maybe 800 MBytes/sec or 6,400 Mbits/sec. There is not a big speed difference in an SSD RAID, because the latency is already low. But the 10,000 Mbits/sec of ThunderBolt-1 is still plenty fast enough for that as well.
If ThunderBolt-2 devices really can run a single data stream at 20,000 Mbits/sec, that does not make ANYTHING faster -- it just moves the ceiling (potential bottleneck) a bit farther away.

User Upgradability on the new Mac Pro?

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