New Mac Pro real world performance

[Sean Kenny]

To anyone who may be interested.

Just did a round-robin i/o latency test on my Mac Pro 3 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5 - 32 GB Ram 1867 MHz DDR3 ECC - DP 8.06 - RME HDSPe Madi card - iz ADA converters.

In english ..... that's a new 8 core mac pro with 32GB of ram.

Recording was done at 96Khz with a 64 samples buffer. The delay was crudely measured by line up the delayed audio (phase flipped till null) then comparing the original time stamp to the new adjusted time stamp i.e. no actual test equipment used but still as near as damn it.

Delay incurred was 166 samples i.e. 1.73ms which is pretty awesome in my book.

Latency though is one thing, but what about track count, completely separate issue I know but to those interested, I was recording 24 tracks simultaneously at 96Khz and 64 samples buffer and the Mac was fine. I was recording to an external TB "G drive" sata drive.

Gonna get a TB2 SSD when they are cheap enough, not sure what affect if any on the machines performance that will have, but given that over fragmented drives are an issue then so too is disk access speed so anything that is faster is better, (I think?).

It'll certainly make backups (to the same) a lot quicker!

For the record, I'm not a techy, just a jobbing engineer so I bow to anyone's else's superior technical knowledge on this. But this was a real world test and the delay calculation is correct.

When I do a session in anger that'll be the acid test.

This machine is a monster

Regards

Sean

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Thanks for that. I'm hoping to snag the beautiful black trash can in the coming months, so this is good to hear. My only confer now is whether I will be forced to run Yosemite by the time I get it. Mavericks is running my legacy programs (Adobe, Quicken, Finale 2012 or earlier) and if those continue to run I should be good to go, which makes you report all the more relevant.

[Sean Kenny]

Thanks for that. I'm hoping to snag the beautiful black trash can in the coming months, so this is good to hear. My only confer now is whether I will be forced to run Yosemite by the time I get it. Mavericks is running my legacy programs (Adobe, Quicken, Finale 2012 or earlier) and if those continue to run I should be good to go, which makes you report all the more relevant.

Glad it helped. To be fair my previous Mac was a 7 year old early intel mac so for me the difference has been huge and may not be quite so dramatic for those on younger machines, but it still a monster.

Also did check another this afternoon. Loaded 1 stereo track and duplicated it 40 times. Then striped all 40 tracks (i.e. merged/consolidated/printed them) so that they are 40 discrete stereo tracks as opposed to 40 copies of 1 track.

I then applied each of the 40 tracks;

1 masterworks EQ
1 dynamic EQ
1 masterworks leveller
1 masterworks compressor
1 proverb

That's 400 stereo plugins in total. The sample buffer was 2048, sample rate 96Khz.

The playback performance meter didn't even register i.e. the impact was so small dp couldn't even represent it as a significant level and the processing meter was just tickling between 10% and 20% (a visual estimate of the green meter)

now that's computer porn!!

Cheers

Sean

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I'm getting processor envy.

[OLB]

Those are great results, thanks for posting.

I've been working on the 6-core for two months and I've been very impressed so far.
I'm running DP on 64 buffer all the time with a VE Pro slave. I don't run big 500 track templates but 6 instances (1x oversampling), 40 playing tracks, works very smooth. Intensive tracks with all the modern kontakt libraries.

I just did a very interesting experiment. I connected the Mac Pro with a single thunderbolt cable to a macbook pro and used the Mac Pro as a slave. Lightning fast connection times. This seems like a very solid (bit expensive) mobile setup.

Still early testing but the throughput of a TB2 network is 20x the speed of gigabit network.

Trashcan is highly recommended.

[mikehalloran]

How hot does it run when you've loaded it up like that?

[BKK-OZ]

I've been working on the 6-core for two months and I've been very impressed so far.
Trashcan is highly recommended.

+1
I have mine set up with a Promise R4 and I also use it for my 3d animation work and it is a huge step up from my old MP 2,1.

Heat has not been a problem, even when rendering 3d particle systems.