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A z620 with 32gigs of ram, quadro k4000 and two 6 core procs running at 2.66gigs is roughly the same price (within 10%, bear in mind that they are yet to bump t

A z620 with 32gigs of ram, quadro k4000 and two 6 core procs running at 2.66gigs is roughly the same price (within 10%, bear in mind that they are yet to bump to the v2 procs that the apple use.) Granted it lacks an SSD, but thats an extra £250, depending on what you want to achieve. Unless you are doing something that really hits the GPU, then this mac is pretty much useless to you. Video editing is mostly IO bound. Only a few effects are use the GPU, let alone can make things faster.

Leynos 13y ago
Bear in mind that the SSD in the Mac Pro is PCI-E. It seems like all the M.2 form factor PCI-E SSDs are going to OEMs right now. Would be interesting to know what they will be selling for at retail.
lhl 13y ago
FYI, the cheapest PCIe SSD card I could find, a 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 will cost you ~$600 (while IOPs weren't specified, a +1GB/s RW was mentioned in the keynote). As you mentioned, much of the cost is in the (extra) GPU (roughly FirePro W7000 class), but being said, I think you underestimate how important OpenCL is these days for video editing. FCPX is heavily dependent on the GPU and presumably Logic will be moving in that direction as well.
- KaiserPro 13y ago
  I work for a large VFX company, trust me, video editing doesn't use the GPU that much.
  - lhl 13y ago
    Depends on the software package you use. FCPX uses OpenCL for real-time playback w/o rendering, including realtime FX, transcoding and accelerating plugin rendering. Premiere Pro's Mercury Engine does similar things with CUDA accelerating many effects, scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and color-space conversions. If you're going to do proxy-less RT 4K like they mentioned in the keynote, you will need the GPU. BTW, I spec'd out a Z620 w/ an E5-1620v2/12GB RAM and topped $3K even w/o video cards. 2 W7000's puts you over $5K: http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config&ProductLineId=433&FamilyId=3539&BaseId=38384&oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID= http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config...

Leynos 13y ago

Bear in mind that the SSD in the Mac Pro is PCI-E. It seems like all the M.2 form factor PCI-E SSDs are going to OEMs right now. Would be interesting to know what they will be selling for at retail.

lhl 13y ago

FYI, the cheapest PCIe SSD card I could find, a 240GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 will cost you ~$600 (while IOPs weren't specified, a +1GB/s RW was mentioned in the keynote). As you mentioned, much of the cost is in the (extra) GPU (roughly FirePro W7000 class), but being said, I think you underestimate how important OpenCL is these days for video editing. FCPX is heavily dependent on the GPU and presumably Logic will be moving in that direction as well.

KaiserPro 13y ago
I work for a large VFX company, trust me, video editing doesn't use the GPU that much.
- lhl 13y ago
  Depends on the software package you use. FCPX uses OpenCL for real-time playback w/o rendering, including realtime FX, transcoding and accelerating plugin rendering. Premiere Pro's Mercury Engine does similar things with CUDA accelerating many effects, scaling, deinterlacing, blending, and color-space conversions. If you're going to do proxy-less RT 4K like they mentioned in the keynote, you will need the GPU. BTW, I spec'd out a Z620 w/ an E5-1620v2/12GB RAM and topped $3K even w/o video cards. 2 W7000's puts you over $5K: http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config&ProductLineId=433&FamilyId=3539&BaseId=38384&oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID= http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config...