Setting up a new mac office

[Digitalize]

Working on a 4k 32" display day in day out I couldn't imagine using a 24" 1080p display for anything other than really basic office type work. Some 27" 1440p would give a much nicer work space, either having multiple windows or just a larger work area once space has been eaten up by toolbars etc.

[ZesPak]

Digitalize said:

Working on a 4k 32" display day in day out I couldn't imagine using a 24" 1080p display for anything other than really basic office type work. Some 27" 1440p would give a much nicer work space, either having multiple windows or just a larger work area once space has been eaten up by toolbars etc.

See my post, it would also cost 2 to 3 times what he spent now.

[marcg]

I'm working on the comparison with what we have now, not what could be. Our 21.5" imacs do fine for all but the biggest projects so I think what I've bought should feel like a significant improvement.

Look at it this way- 4 or 5 years ago the equipment I've bought would be nearly top spec?

[Digitalize]

4 or 5 years ago a 27" 1440p monitor would have been top spec.

I'd also assumed you were coming from 27" iMacs, I forgot they even do a 21.5"!

[marcg]

So a couple of weeks in (?) I reckon the new Mac's are about 60% faster. So not many multiples faster but definitely an improvement. Navigating around the models is quicker. Still not seamless but faster. I'm not sure what's limiting them now though. Opening files off the server is still slow but then we are limited by the speed of the server hd. The server is the 2013 Mac, btw. Overall, I'm happy with the setup. The bang for buck is good.

[mikef]

marcg said:

So a couple of weeks in (?) I reckon the new Mac's are about 60% faster. So not many multiples faster but definitely an improvement. Navigating around the models is quicker. Still not seamless but faster. I'm not sure what's limiting them now though. Opening files off the server is still slow but then we are limited by the speed of the server hd. The server is the 2013 Mac, btw. Overall, I'm happy with the setup. The bang for buck is good.

The good news is that these boxes are upgradeable. The less good news is that they are not as upgradeable as the 2009-2012 models, which is why I went for that; and that upgrades are expensive relative to the low price you paid for the box

Looking at Activity Monitor or a 3rd-party utility (like iStat menus), where are the bottlenecks? Is the app maxing out CPU, or memory, or waiting for disk transfers? Did you get SSDs in the end, or spinning disks?

There are a variety of potential bottlenecks that you could upgrade to get past - but be aware that may just reveal another bottleneck...

• CPU speed
• CPU number of cores (does your software take advantage of multiple cores)?
• Memory amount
• Memory speed
• Disk type/speed

A selection of upgrades here: http://www.owcshop.eu/catalog/index.php - you may find some items cheaper from UK resellers, but these upgrades tend not to come up used on eBay

A relatively easy upgrade is SSD, if disk is a limiting factor. The disk bus in tower Mac Pro's is SATA2, so there's an inbuilt limit there, but if you don't already have an SATA SSD, that makes an immediate difference. To give you an idea, these are speeds reported by BlackMagic Disk Speed Test (free utility) in my 2010 Mac Pro:

Disk	Model	Read MB/s	Write MB/s
5,400rpm HDD	WD Green	109	106
7,200rpm HDD	WD Black	85	87
SATA SSD	Crucial M500	265	251
PCIe SSD	Mercury Accelsior Pro	655	460

There's also now a PCIe Accelsior Pro Q on the OWC site which is 50% faster than the Accelsior Pro - but would cost more than the rest of your Mac Pro

[marcg]

Thanks Mike. I will have a look tomorrow when I'm back in the office. Can you elaborate a bit on how to diagnose the bottlenecks? I know where to find activity monitor but what am i looking to check?

[mikef]

Sure - depends which version of OS-X you are running (About This Mac menu option)

Also, it would be useful to know
- how many Xeon CPUs - one or two?
- How many CPU cores?
- model (or speed) of CPU
- SSD or hard disk?

[marcg]

Apple Mac Pro 3,1 2 x 2.8 GHZ XEON Quad 8 Cores 500GB HD 8GB RAM, AMD radon 5870. El capitan. Not SSD

[mikef]

marcg said:

Apple Mac Pro 3,1 2 x 2.8 GHZ XEON Quad 8 Cores 500GB HD 8GB RAM, AMD radon 5870. El capitan. Not SSD

That sounds like a decent amount of processing power. Fire up activity monitor, then Window -> CPU Usage and Window -> Keep CPU Windows on top and run your daily apps flat out. That will show how many cores are being used and whether they are being used flat out. Window -> Activity Monitor [CPU Tab], sort on %CPUv will show which processes are using the CPU. Window -> Activity Monitor [Memory tab] is much easier to understand with El Capitan than previously. If the memory pressure pane is green when running your daily apps flat out, then you are OK for memory. If not, consider adding more. Window -> Activity Monitor [Disk tab] shows you the disk loading. If the reads or writes are running at max in the IO pane, then that's likely holding you back. Moving to an SSD will make any machine feel much snappier all round - see the relative speeds I posted earlier. There's not much you can do about the network speed apart from bonding both Ethernet ports, which is a faff and unlikely to give you more than a nominal boost in throughput.

[Vaud]

marcg said:

So a couple of weeks in (?) I reckon the new Mac's are about 60% faster. So not many multiples faster but definitely an improvement. Navigating around the models is quicker. Still not seamless but faster. I'm not sure what's limiting them now though. Opening files off the server is still slow but then we are limited by the speed of the server hd. The server is the 2013 Mac, btw. Overall, I'm happy with the setup. The bang for buck is good.

You are more likely to be limited by the network speed than the server HD.

[dmsims]

Vaud said:

You are more likely to be limited by the network speed than the server HD.

Not if they are running Gigabit

[marcg]

Ok, so have run the activity monitor and attach screenshots. When sketch up is on, I seem to be using 7 out of 8gb RAM. Which suggests a bit more might help. What is more confusing is that OSX mail seems to be using 125% of CPU at times. And safari, listening to BBC radio6 seems to be using nearly a gb of RAM?

[marcg]

[marcg]

[dmsims]

marcg said:

And safari, listening to BBC radio6 seems to be using nearly a gb of RAM?

I just tried Radio6 on a Macbook pro running El Capitan - 58MB

What happens if you close all other Safari windows and just leave the Radio player window running?

[dmsims]

Why are you running a mail client and web mail ?

[marcg]

Actually, Mail was going off on one... I restarted it and things look a lot more normal.

Playing about with Sketchup, I'm getting ~6gb RAM being used, CPU at around 50% and disk usage negligible. There's a spike when a file is opened or saved but nothing in the normal operation of the program.

In terms of the feel of the program, its slightly (and only slightly) stuttering in navigating - zooming in or out happens in steps, orbiting causes textures to need to be rerendered which takes about a second. I'm guessing the only way to improve that would be a more powerful graphics card?

[marcg]

Webmail was for a personal account. iplayer had been left running over the weekend. I don't know why that should have taken so much RAM though? Its not as if you can review three days of radio.

[dmsims]

The only way you are going to improve Sketchup (hardware related):

CPU clock speed (it does not need cores)
Better graphics card

Buy a PC (sorry)