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I love this new device. I suspect I will buy one. But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays att

by rsync 13y ago

I love this new device. I suspect I will buy one. But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays attached, plays three roles: - it is my high end desktop workstation, with three primary high resolution (2560x1600) displays. - it is my HTPC, with one of the six monitors strung into another room entirely. - it is my office NAS, with four internal 3TB disks So, three roles all rolled into one device. This is possible because I can expand it internally with 3.5" disks and pcie cards. In fact, my 3x gt120 cards only take up 3 of the 4 slots. To duplicate this, I think I need to: a) add an external disk enclosure b) drive my fourth display via HDMI c) pray that 3x 4k displays leaves can coexist with 2x 2560x1600 displays as secondary displays, which seems unlikely d) pray that the disk array doesn't cannibalize enough thunderbolt bandwidth to interfere with the displays e) another external box for cd ripping and general optical disk usage ... and all the while, with a single physical CPU, and no ability to ever upgrade the graphics cards. Granted, my needs must not be complicated if I can live with gt120s in 2013, but it was nice to know I could upgrade. Oh, and I have upgraded my SSD boot device three times in the 4.5 years I've owned this system. That was nice. So again, I actually really like this device - I think it is a very, very cool computer. But as a discriminating mac pro user who pushed the form factor to the limits, it is not at all what I need.

specialist 13y ago
> But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Yes! Totally yes! I held off buying a MBP just so mine would be one generation better than my coworkers'. I just know there's a MBP in the pipeline, because the inventory has been allowed to dry up. Why wasn't a new model announced?
- seanp2k2 13y ago
  Probably a minor refresh for Haswell. I wouldn't expect too much. Pure speculation, but maybe they had some integration difficulties and didn't want to commit to a specific timeline, or they couldn't release it /right now/ like the MBA so they wanted to hold off to fill out their fall event. There are a ton of other things that could have held it back; perhaps Intel isn't ramped up enough on volume production of the quad-core Haswells and they didn't want to just update the dual-cores first.
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    Exactly, that's all the MBA refresh was - much to my girlfriend's disappointment - no retina display (but if the Air got a retina display, there ends up being very little to differentiate between the Air and the new Pros).
dman 13y ago
Or you could buy a HP Z820 with liquid cooling, dual xeon processor, a fusion io card, three workstation gpus, and 12 sata drives :)
- rsync 13y ago
  Thanks for that tip. I might just do that. Perhaps reload my mac pro with snow leopard one last time, get another year or so out of it, and then "switch" to linux on an old school workstation like this. Hate to abandon all of my mac VMs, though. I don't think a non-mac vmware host can run mac VM guests... without a lot of mucking around, that is...
  - ScottBurson 13y ago
    I'm fairly sure I've seen people run OS X as a vmWare guest on either Windows or Linux.
    - 65a 13y ago
      It's entirely possible on VirtualBox, but it requires you to have a similar processor to an existing Mac, and some additional wizardry. I can verify it works for some virtualization software through at least Snow Leopard...not sure about Lion and beyond (but probably).
      - annnnd 13y ago
        I love VirtualBox and I think it beats VMWare and others in UX department anytime. That said, for running Mac (Hackintosh) I would STRONGLY recommend VMWare. On VirtualBox I have tried 3 (!) different images and they were all slow, while the one I am running on VMWare works properly. And I mean properly. I never had these kind of problems with Linux and Windows guests on VirtualBox though, so I'm not sure what the problem is - but it is real.
    - snuze 13y ago
      Yup, I've run OSX as a vmWare guest on Windows. It's possible and it works.
matthew-wegner 13y ago
Maybe build a Hackintosh? I've been running one for 18 months (coming off a Mac Pro when it became clear upgrades would be a long time coming). It's pretty great. If you're careful with hardware selection you can apply Apple's own software updates with zero issues. See: http://www.tonymacx86.com/351-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-may-2013.html http://www.tonymacx86.com/351-building-customac-buyer-s-guid...
- free652 13y ago
  I am using a hackintosh for over a year now, I had a macbook pro prior. Works great, Core i7 3770k with 32gb, SSDs... Funny enough I use a corporate issued Retina as my Windows Laptop (and Steam gaming..) I can't lock it at work (Apple, no kensington?!), so I keep it at home mostly.
- Dirlewanger 13y ago
  Awesome. Thanks for the link. Would you be able to say with any reasonable certainty that it is primarily the motherboard that is key for building a Hackintosh? I want to build a Haswell Win7/OS X machine, and judging from this link and the other brief research that I've done, that if one sticks with Gigabyte for the motherboard you're more or less all set.
  - free652 13y ago
    Correct. The motherboard is the key, followed by the WIFI adapter.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  How hard was it to fit the processor onto the motherboard? Thermal compound &c. That strikes me as the only really tricky bit. (PS: that hardware looks as if it would work fine with Ubuntu)
- sitkack 13y ago
  Unless Apple comes out with another expandable tower that has multiple sockets and supports > 128GB of ram I won't be buying one of their desktops. I have an _old_ Q6600 based hackintosh with RAID SSD and RAID 10 secondary. Granted the ram maxed out at 8GB but the machine is still speedy. Having > 64 would vastly simplify my workflow by enabling more VMs to be live at the same time.
kevinpet 13y ago
I think that the whole notion of "it's nice to know I could upgrade" is primarily a consequence of what's currently in the system. Consider the next upgrade. You buy this thing in 2013. For bulk storage, you hook up a usb 3.0 raid array and a cheap usb dvd drive. A couple years later, you decide you need more fast storage, so you add on a 512GB / 4 TB thunderbolt fusion drive box (note: this product doesn't exist today). Next year, you upgrade the USB raid array to thunderbolt and decide you want an external cinema quality 4k / THX video converter, that also connects over thunderbolt. Then in 2016, you conclude that the 24 core macbook pro is sufficient for your day to day, and hook up your bulk storage to that when you're home, but leave the cinema converter and the old usb raid array hooked up as your htpc. Incidentally, to address your specific scenario, I'm pretty sure that an Apple TV costs less than your gt120 did. In other words, you doubled down on the tail end of one way of doing things, and little of that will carry over to the new standards. It's the same situation many people were in with AGP graphics cards, IDE hard drives and ATX power supplies without the additional 12v connector.
- rsync 13y ago
  I definitely see what you are saying, and that is why I do think it is a very impressive and very cool computer. But a lot of the value for me was the one device. A single, unix based[1] device that did everything from be my htpc to be my fileserver to be my desktop, music player, build box, run all my vms, etc. I derived a lot of value from that. Even if the second device is an apple TV, it's still a second device. Also, diverging a bit, a lot of folks are talking about a lot of video based expandability via the thunderbolt ports, but remember - it's not even as fast as 4x pcie ... 10mb/s over copper vs. 120 mb/s ... if I have my numbers right.
  - comex 13y ago
    Some Googling suggests that PCIe 4.0 4x is 64Gb/s per direction, Thunderbolt is 10, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20. Edit: Then again, this thing has 6 Thunderbolt ports. As ugly as it would be, a device could hypothetically be made that uses, say, 5 ports.
    - 13y ago
rch 13y ago
Your first two sentences sum up the situation for me as well. It looks like a nice way to quietly drive a bunch of high-resolution monitors, but I still need new workstation. Maybe I'll see something I can use at SC13 in November. An updated CX-1 (which I guess would be -2) would be as nice as it is unlikely.
dan1234 13y ago
The displays don't actually run over thunderbolt, they just share the (mini displayport) connector so there's no need to worry about losing bandwidth.
- bestham 13y ago
  That is not entirely accurate, the DP signal can be embedded in a TB stream (like on the Apple TB Display, where the actual signal in the TB cable is TB data) but a TB device can demux the DP data and output DP data in the DP/TB connector. The DP data actually uses pars of the total available bandwidth with Thunderbolt 2 since there is no dedicated 10 Gbit channel for video data as with classic Thunderbolt.
kayoone 13y ago
care to elaborate why you have all of this in one device? My guess is that having 3 seperate devices (a workstation, a NAS and a small HTPC) makes more sense for encapsulation and failure scenarios. However, if the workstation runs 24/7 anyway it might make sense as the uptime of the NAS/HTPC probably isnt very critical if you mess something up on the Workstation and have to reboot or something. Also like to know what you use 6(!) displays for :) What do you work on ?
jdboyd 13y ago
Many users would find a USB3 array to be fast enough. I would likely go that route instead of a TB array just based on the cost difference between the two. I expect that a 4k display will totally consume a TB port each. The 2x 2560x1600 displays should be chainable off a single TB port (you can do that currently). That leaves to more TB ports. Also, I expect that each TB port has its own bandwidth separate from the others, so if your TB array is the only device on the 5th or 6th port, I expect there would be no issue. There is certainly no getting around that your tower would require a separate disk box and DVD or blu-ray reader. That is unfortunate. The video card upgrade situation deeply concerns me though. The FirePros aren't entry level like the GT120s are, but they won't be top of the line 6 years from now. Further, what if I need to be running CUDA applications?

by rsync 13y ago

specialist 13y ago

> But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Yes! Totally yes! I held off buying a MBP just so mine would be one generation better than my coworkers'. I just know there's a MBP in the pipeline, because the inventory has been allowed to dry up. Why wasn't a new model announced?

seanp2k2 13y ago
Probably a minor refresh for Haswell. I wouldn't expect too much. Pure speculation, but maybe they had some integration difficulties and didn't want to commit to a specific timeline, or they couldn't release it /right now/ like the MBA so they wanted to hold off to fill out their fall event. There are a ton of other things that could have held it back; perhaps Intel isn't ramped up enough on volume production of the quad-core Haswells and they didn't want to just update the dual-cores first.
- FireBeyond 13y ago
  Exactly, that's all the MBA refresh was - much to my girlfriend's disappointment - no retina display (but if the Air got a retina display, there ends up being very little to differentiate between the Air and the new Pros).

dman 13y ago

Or you could buy a HP Z820 with liquid cooling, dual xeon processor, a fusion io card, three workstation gpus, and 12 sata drives :)

rsync 13y ago
Thanks for that tip. I might just do that. Perhaps reload my mac pro with snow leopard one last time, get another year or so out of it, and then "switch" to linux on an old school workstation like this. Hate to abandon all of my mac VMs, though. I don't think a non-mac vmware host can run mac VM guests... without a lot of mucking around, that is...
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  I'm fairly sure I've seen people run OS X as a vmWare guest on either Windows or Linux.
  - 65a 13y ago
    It's entirely possible on VirtualBox, but it requires you to have a similar processor to an existing Mac, and some additional wizardry. I can verify it works for some virtualization software through at least Snow Leopard...not sure about Lion and beyond (but probably).
    - annnnd 13y ago
      I love VirtualBox and I think it beats VMWare and others in UX department anytime. That said, for running Mac (Hackintosh) I would STRONGLY recommend VMWare. On VirtualBox I have tried 3 (!) different images and they were all slow, while the one I am running on VMWare works properly. And I mean properly. I never had these kind of problems with Linux and Windows guests on VirtualBox though, so I'm not sure what the problem is - but it is real.
  - snuze 13y ago
    Yup, I've run OSX as a vmWare guest on Windows. It's possible and it works.

matthew-wegner 13y ago

Maybe build a Hackintosh? I've been running one for 18 months (coming off a Mac Pro when it became clear upgrades would be a long time coming). It's pretty great. If you're careful with hardware selection you can apply Apple's own software updates with zero issues. See: http://www.tonymacx86.com/351-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-may-2013.html http://www.tonymacx86.com/351-building-customac-buyer-s-guid...

free652 13y ago
I am using a hackintosh for over a year now, I had a macbook pro prior. Works great, Core i7 3770k with 32gb, SSDs... Funny enough I use a corporate issued Retina as my Windows Laptop (and Steam gaming..) I can't lock it at work (Apple, no kensington?!), so I keep it at home mostly.
Dirlewanger 13y ago
Awesome. Thanks for the link. Would you be able to say with any reasonable certainty that it is primarily the motherboard that is key for building a Hackintosh? I want to build a Haswell Win7/OS X machine, and judging from this link and the other brief research that I've done, that if one sticks with Gigabyte for the motherboard you're more or less all set.
- free652 13y ago
  Correct. The motherboard is the key, followed by the WIFI adapter.
keithpeter 13y ago
How hard was it to fit the processor onto the motherboard? Thermal compound &c. That strikes me as the only really tricky bit. (PS: that hardware looks as if it would work fine with Ubuntu)
sitkack 13y ago
Unless Apple comes out with another expandable tower that has multiple sockets and supports > 128GB of ram I won't be buying one of their desktops. I have an _old_ Q6600 based hackintosh with RAID SSD and RAID 10 secondary. Granted the ram maxed out at 8GB but the machine is still speedy. Having > 64 would vastly simplify my workflow by enabling more VMs to be live at the same time.

kevinpet 13y ago

I think that the whole notion of "it's nice to know I could upgrade" is primarily a consequence of what's currently in the system. Consider the next upgrade. You buy this thing in 2013. For bulk storage, you hook up a usb 3.0 raid array and a cheap usb dvd drive. A couple years later, you decide you need more fast storage, so you add on a 512GB / 4 TB thunderbolt fusion drive box (note: this product doesn't exist today). Next year, you upgrade the USB raid array to thunderbolt and decide you want an external cinema quality 4k / THX video converter, that also connects over thunderbolt. Then in 2016, you conclude that the 24 core macbook pro is sufficient for your day to day, and hook up your bulk storage to that when you're home, but leave the cinema converter and the old usb raid array hooked up as your htpc. Incidentally, to address your specific scenario, I'm pretty sure that an Apple TV costs less than your gt120 did. In other words, you doubled down on the tail end of one way of doing things, and little of that will carry over to the new standards. It's the same situation many people were in with AGP graphics cards, IDE hard drives and ATX power supplies without the additional 12v connector.

rsync 13y ago
I definitely see what you are saying, and that is why I do think it is a very impressive and very cool computer. But a lot of the value for me was the one device. A single, unix based[1] device that did everything from be my htpc to be my fileserver to be my desktop, music player, build box, run all my vms, etc. I derived a lot of value from that. Even if the second device is an apple TV, it's still a second device. Also, diverging a bit, a lot of folks are talking about a lot of video based expandability via the thunderbolt ports, but remember - it's not even as fast as 4x pcie ... 10mb/s over copper vs. 120 mb/s ... if I have my numbers right.
- comex 13y ago
  Some Googling suggests that PCIe 4.0 4x is 64Gb/s per direction, Thunderbolt is 10, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20. Edit: Then again, this thing has 6 Thunderbolt ports. As ugly as it would be, a device could hypothetically be made that uses, say, 5 ports.
  - 13y ago

rch 13y ago

Your first two sentences sum up the situation for me as well. It looks like a nice way to quietly drive a bunch of high-resolution monitors, but I still need new workstation. Maybe I'll see something I can use at SC13 in November. An updated CX-1 (which I guess would be -2) would be as nice as it is unlikely.

dan1234 13y ago

The displays don't actually run over thunderbolt, they just share the (mini displayport) connector so there's no need to worry about losing bandwidth.

bestham 13y ago
That is not entirely accurate, the DP signal can be embedded in a TB stream (like on the Apple TB Display, where the actual signal in the TB cable is TB data) but a TB device can demux the DP data and output DP data in the DP/TB connector. The DP data actually uses pars of the total available bandwidth with Thunderbolt 2 since there is no dedicated 10 Gbit channel for video data as with classic Thunderbolt.

kayoone 13y ago

care to elaborate why you have all of this in one device? My guess is that having 3 seperate devices (a workstation, a NAS and a small HTPC) makes more sense for encapsulation and failure scenarios. However, if the workstation runs 24/7 anyway it might make sense as the uptime of the NAS/HTPC probably isnt very critical if you mess something up on the Workstation and have to reboot or something. Also like to know what you use 6(!) displays for :) What do you work on ?

jdboyd 13y ago

Many users would find a USB3 array to be fast enough. I would likely go that route instead of a TB array just based on the cost difference between the two. I expect that a 4k display will totally consume a TB port each. The 2x 2560x1600 displays should be chainable off a single TB port (you can do that currently). That leaves to more TB ports. Also, I expect that each TB port has its own bandwidth separate from the others, so if your TB array is the only device on the 5th or 6th port, I expect there would be no issue. There is certainly no getting around that your tower would require a separate disk box and DVD or blu-ray reader. That is unfortunate. The video card upgrade situation deeply concerns me though. The FirePros aren't entry level like the GT120s are, but they won't be top of the line 6 years from now. Further, what if I need to be running CUDA applications?