Setting up a new mac office

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Discussion

Buffalo

5,435 posts

253 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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marcg said:
Buffalo - the imacs we are currently using are fine for what we do (architecture for 20 odd flats at a time) but when we get excited about textures or import too many components the models slow down. So we need better but not to the level you do.
After 15 years, I'm scared to go back to pcs. Every one that I use (belonging to other people) seems clunky compared to our 6 year old Mac's. Clunky as in needing cleaning up, not working like new. Our Mac's work well. And, secondhand, Mac's are good value IMHO.
I understand. I haven't used the new desktop that much as I travelled overseas not long after I built it, but I am sure that when I'm back and over the novelty of the new machine with its fancy water-cooled bits, I will be left feeling slightly underwhelmed with it. As it is, I only begrudgingly get on with Windows 10 because I only use it for the specialist software. I have not allowed it access to any emails, etc. and instead do everything via file transfer from the Macs. But that said, for me buying a Mac Pro to use predominately in Windows was a stretch too far on that particular machine. I can still justify Macs elsewhere and prefer to do so - but still with reservation over future direction, because they seem to aggressively target a smaller and smaller market.

Anyway, I remembered something earlier, when you mentioned that you don't need multi-core processors, but textures can slow you down. On my thread (http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&t=1642987) someone posted this link http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpu-applications.html which is a list of mainstream applications that are optimised for nVidia GPUs. You may find your applications on that list, and if so could upgrading graphics cards be some benefit? WIth that and a dash of RAM you might be on your way?

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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Buffalo said:
but still with reservation over future direction, because they seem to aggressively target a smaller and smaller market.
TBH they're doing the exact opposite. By leaving behind creative people, they are making nice looking computers for everyone. They cut out matte displays, 17" laptops, haven't made a powerful machine in 5 years,... they left all that in the name of profit on mainstream machines.

I'm convinced that they'd lose half their market share in the creative market overnight if they sold OSX separately. Ime, in the creative market they are living on goodwill more than anything else.
If your 10k Mac Pro can't compete with a 5k rig and if MS of all people bring out stuff like the Studio, you have to start asking questions.

They are making money hand over fist so it's not going to happen, but I'd love them to "unshakle" OSX from their hardware as it could really stir up the pc market.

Vaud

50,288 posts

154 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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ZesPak said:
They are making money hand over fist so it's not going to happen, but I'd love them to "unshakle" OSX from their hardware as it could really stir up the pc market.
Never going to happen.

Much of the Apple experience is based on it "just working" and the brand damage from. The narrow niche where it would be of interest (compared to the rest of the Apple revenue lines) would commoditise the Mac Pro and drive revenue loss.

They want OSX and iOS to be viewed as "it just works" and not "it didn't work on my friends homebuilt"

Anyhow... there is already a thriving "hackintosh" market for that niche needing high powered computers. It just won't be monetised.

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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Vaud said:
would commoditise the Mac Pro and drive revenue loss.
As said, I really don't know why they still bother if they just bring out something and then leave it for 5 years before touching it again. The Mac Pro was a cool little machine, while very expensive it had a nice design AND was competitive.

It's been ages since I've went the Hackintosh route, I'd thought Apple would have shut that down almost completely now? Is it still a feasable option?
If it is, it could be an answer for the OP instead of getting a 6 year old cheese grater?

Vaud

50,288 posts

154 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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ZesPak said:
As said, I really don't know why they still bother if they just bring out something and then leave it for 5 years before touching it again. The Mac Pro was a cool little machine, while very expensive it had a nice design AND was competitive.

It's been ages since I've went the Hackintosh route, I'd thought Apple would have shut that down almost completely now? Is it still a feasable option?
If it is, it could be an answer for the OP instead of getting a 6 year old cheese grater?
https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/

Apple seem to tolerate this... providing people don't charge for the service. Lots of recommended builds and off the shelf / mods.

Quite techie though, and no support. You can build some beasts of machines...

marcg

Original Poster:

405 posts

194 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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Vaud and Zespak - yes, it's the "it just works" that appeals to me - hence I wouldn't consider a hackintosh. I was also very impressed when I brought a 7 year old macbook air to the genius bar for... something...? Can't remember what, but anyway, they fixed it FOC including installing the latest OS.

Buffalo - unfortunately Sketchup is not on that list. Does anyone have a guide to graphics cards? Sketchup forums suggest NVIDIA is the way to go (over AMD) and it needs to be a 3D optimised card with over 1GB of RAM. A quick google throws up various cards for only around £30. So my previous linked eBay find looks good - fast CPU, enough RAM and a SSD HD - Any thoughts? It's not like its a bargain either, there seems to be lots around that price. It's just a question of looking out for one close to Bristol and with a few of the desired upgrades.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/192109532910

dmsims

6,450 posts

266 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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That one only has 512MB VRAM and it's a really slow card (by today's standards)

marcg

Original Poster:

405 posts

194 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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But good otherwise? If it's only a £30 card away from what I need then that one is only ~£300 plus a monitor.

boyse7en

6,671 posts

164 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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Bit late to the party, but we run a 2009 Mac Pro as a server with two attached Macs (an iMac and a Macbook Pro 17)

I use the Mac Pro as my main machine, running Adobe software (Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator etc) all day without any issues of it running slowly. It's getting on a bit now, but runs fine.

marcg

Original Poster:

405 posts

194 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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Oooh. Good to know.

Been researching graphics cards some more and it looks like £100+ is more realistic for a good card. It's hard to research what I need though as most review sites are aimed at gaming and I'm not clear on the distinction. Sketchup functions a lot like a game in terms of moving through a 3d environment so maybe there isn't a distinction.

marcg

Original Poster:

405 posts

194 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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What specs is your mac pro, btw?

mikef

4,823 posts

250 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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marcg said:
Does anyone have a guide to graphics cards?
In a Mac Pro you really want a graphics card that is flashed for Mac. A PC card will work in theory but give no feedback during the boot process so if something fails then it's harder to diagnose. There are a wide variety of cards that can be flashed for Mac (in fact, most of the "mac" video cards on ebay are PC cards that have been flashed). I got mine from MacVidCards.com in Hollywood. I'm not suggesting you buy from there, but browsing their site gives you an idea of what can be readily flashed for Mac.

Buffalo

5,435 posts

253 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
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ZesPak said:
Buffalo said:
but still with reservation over future direction, because they seem to aggressively target a smaller and smaller market.
TBH they're doing the exact opposite. By leaving behind creative people, they are making nice looking computers for everyone. They cut out matte displays, 17" laptops, haven't made a powerful machine in 5 years,... they left all that in the name of profit on mainstream machines.

We might be talking the same thing, but I was referring to the certain markets that have always bought Macs (musicians, photographers, and programmers). It seemed quite obvious to me that recent upgrades have been with regards to making machines better at those types of users - the people up on stage demonstrating the taskbar rolleyes were directly in that fold.

However, as this thread attests, there are other users that enjoy Macs too, but it feels to me that if they continue going down that path of over-streamlining the component specs and performance strategy to one defined set of users, then the machines will become unfit for purpose for the rest of us that want a general machine for whatever purpose we use them for. Apart from the cost issue, there shouldn't really be any reason why someone like the OP would target an old machine. We would just buy the latest one available. But if my current workhorse died tomorrow I would possibly also look at an older machine to replace it because I don't believe that the latest machine has the correct support (i..e the taskbar won't work in all my situations - yet). It's an odd premise, IMO.

Another example is the comparison between my mid 2014 MBP and mid 2016 (just before latest model with taskbar). Notwithstanding different aged components the two machines are identical (2.8Ghz cpu, 1Tb SSD, 2Gb additional graphics - except one is nVidia, the other is ATi graphics). The 2016 can read-write to disk 1/3 quicker when modelling compared to the 2014 (9xxMb/sec vs. 6xxMb/s). But when using the model after it has run the 2014 is better because the nVidia graphics card has more oomph than the ATi. The reason they changed the graphics so far as I can recall, is to do with battery life. But as "pro" workhorses it is rare not to have them plugged in when really working hard. Moreover, why can't I spec my workhorse with 4Gb graphics? It is these types of changes that make me think that I may need to move from Mac in the future, much as I would prefer to stay put.

<shrug> Sorry for the whinge! smile

Buffalo

5,435 posts

253 months

Tuesday 21st February 2017
quotequote all
marcg said:
Does anyone have a guide to graphics cards?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/192109532910
I asked a friend of mine into gaming to spec my new modelling PC. His recommendation was the nVidia 1080 GTX Sea Hawk. It was an expensive card, £600, it is water-cooled, massive. I doubt I'll ever use it to it's full potential.
Here is what he had to say on the matter:

-Top of the line is the Nvidia Titan X, followed by the Nvidia 1080, followed a a ways down by the Nvidia M6000 workstation card in terms of performance. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

-Go with a Nvidia 1080 card. Both the Titan X and M6000 have more memory (8GB vs 12GB on the titan X and 24GB on the M6000) but almost identical clock speeds, and video memory only matters if you have a ridiculous number of pixels to render (like with multiple 4k monitors). This 1080 card http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82... also comes with a self-contained, maintenence-free liquid cooling loop, which will keep it nice and quiet.

-The 1080 is also a ridiculously big leap in terms of performance over the 9xx series Nvidia GPUs from a year ago. Just worth mentioning.

-You could save a couple hundred bucks and go with a Nvidia 1070 card instead, which is still pretty balls-out powerful.

I have no idea how accurate that is but I've always found his advice to be good for me. I looked on the site listed above for Mac-spec cards (makes sense to have a mac-spec card wherever possible) and I see the 960, 970, 980 spec cards listed on there. They might be a good place to start unless you can find any of the other listed cards and prefer those.

It might also be an idea to ask the Sketchup manufacturers. I did go to all my specialist software providers and ask their idealised specs and got some interesting responses back that enabled me to tweak the PC spec to match how the programs use component performance.

marcg

Original Poster:

405 posts

194 months

Wednesday 22nd February 2017
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Mikef and Buffalo - interesting and valuable advice, many thanks. I've looked into graphics cards, narrowing down the comparison based on the NVIDIA 95/6/7/80 cards vs the iMac we have.

The 2013 iMac comes with an integrated Intel Iris Pro 5200 GPU. According to wikipedia, the spec of this is
40 execution units, 128mB eDRAM, 1200MHz clock speed and performs 832 GFLOPS
By comparison the GeForce GTX 980 is
?? execution units, 4gB DRAM, 1216MHz clock rate and performs 4612 GFLOPS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Gr... (find "intel iris pro 5200")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graph...

Assuming I'm looking at the right comparisons, I think I should see a huge improvement by fitting a new GPU. 980 seems to be around £350 secondhand. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NVIDIA-GEFORCE-GTX-980-4...

So any comments on my final specs:
2.6+ghz CPU mac pro around £300, fitted with 500gB SSD
8GB RAM minimum
NVIDIA GPU at least 960, ideally 980

dmsims

6,450 posts

266 months

Wednesday 22nd February 2017
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The card you have linked is for water cooling .........

980's can be had for around £150 (PC)

Edited by dmsims on Wednesday 22 February 11:00

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Wednesday 22nd February 2017
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GPU bench is a good start, the Iris 5200 is laughable to be called a "GPU" tbh.

This site does some nice comparisons, don't forget there's a big difference in different annotations for the GPU (M, Ti). In general, an "M" (as seen in higher end laptops) will still only have about 60% of the performance of the desktop version.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%...

Don't underestimate the power of raw power (voltage) and the allowance of good cooling in a normal pc tower (like the cheese grater), a 980 is able to outperform an Iris 5200 by a factor of 10.

For these cards though, check your PSU for compatibility and output, also the room in your case. Some of these are properly huge.

marcg

Original Poster:

405 posts

194 months

Thursday 2nd March 2017
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So conclusions - I like to put the results of conversations up to help others who are googling the same issues.

Have set up Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of the file server to a dropbox folder at midnight every night. I considered just having all the files on dropbox but I think we'd end up with multiple versions of everything as we worked on the files through the day. By backing up outside of working hours, we get a snapshot of the end of the day only. CCC also does incremental backups so it is only uploading the day's changes rather than the whole data set. 1TB of dropbox is costing £80 a year as a personal account. Business account would be more like £50 per month and we have no need.

The 2013 iMac will be the file server and the one-day a week staff's workstation. We will see whether it is useable as such. I think it will be fine as sketchup loads data to a local temporary folder and only autosaves to the server.

We have bought two Mac Pros http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/262874883921?_trksid=p20... which will be coming with ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards. I've taken a blunt approach to graphics card performance - more GFLOPS, better? The iMacs currently use the Intel Iris which is supposed to operating at ~830 GFLOPS, the ATI 5870 apparently does 2800. It also has 1GB vs 512MB on board memory. I did want to go with a NVIDIA 680/950/960/970/980 set up but the linked computers turned up on eBay at a good price (£500 for two) so we will see. I also wanted to get SSDs but again, we will see if they are necessary. I'm pleased that upgrading seems a fairly simple process.

Have bought two Samsung monitors https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01HRYELC4/ref... for £105 each.

Also completed the apple set with some wired keyboards.

Total cost for the mac pro set up then £375 each.

ZesPak

24,421 posts

195 months

Thursday 2nd March 2017
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Nice. I wouldn't have skimped that much on monitors but for office use they'll be sufficient.

The SSD is a true worthwhile upgrade, from my experience I'd just do it right away, it'll transform the machines. That said, there's plenty of room in the computers to just put a 250gb SSD as your software/OS drive in there and keep the HDD for storage. If you go this route, don't sell yourself short by getting a 120GB. You'll regret it sooner than you think.

mikef

4,823 posts

250 months

Thursday 2nd March 2017
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If there aren't two optical drives fitted, you should be able to use the loose cables for the second one for an SSD (power and signal). For neatness I bought an OWC bracket to secure the SSD https://www.megamac.com/products/owc-multi-mount-3... but it can just sit loose under the optical drive. For the 2010-12 5.1 Mac Pro, OWC do a neat SSD sled that slides in in place of a HDD https://www.megamac.com/collections/owc/products/o... however I'm not sure that fits the older 3.1

Edited to add: if you do fit an SSD, make sure you enable TRIM to reuse deleted space: http://osxdaily.com/2015/10/29/use-trimforce-trim-...

Edited by mikef on Thursday 2nd March 18:44