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dp8/macbook air or dp7/mac pro
Posted: Tue May 20, 2014 10:14 pm
by cgs
Hello all,
Returning to DP once again, looking for advice on which setup would provide a better experience. 8-16 audio tracks, effects, handful of VI's, MIDI. This is basically a matter of old mac pro w/dp7 VS new (probably underpowered for pro audio) macbook air w/dp8:
2013 macbook air 6,2
1.7ghz dual-core i7
8gb ram
ssd
mac os x 10.9.2
dp 8
2006 mac pro 1,1
cpu upgrade (2) 2.66 ghz quad-core xeon x5355
8gb ram
sata
mac os x 10.6.8
dp 7
Or none of the above... :/
Thanks for your help
Re: dp8/macbook air or dp7/mac pro
Posted: Wed May 21, 2014 10:07 am
by mikehalloran
DP 8 runs 32bit or 64bit and is the version being supported. It will certainly run on a 1.1 Mac Pro - many here are doing it.
The MB Air is a pretty good machine. My wife has the current model and I like it a lot. It will have 128 or 256G Flash for storage. You will need an external drive - either Thunderbolt or usb 3. Get an SSD if the budget allows. It can also handle a second monitor through the TB port.
Re: dp8/macbook air or dp7/mac pro
Posted: Thu May 22, 2014 10:18 am
by cgs
Thanks Mike. I have both of these machines, trying to decide which to set up for DP. Just ran benchmarks on both, the old MP still comes out ahead, probably due to the sheer number of cores. I'm assuming the bottleneck with the MP vs the MPA will be the drive (non-SSD vs SSD). Do you happen to have a recommendation - if I add a single SSD, would it be better to use as the boot drive or the drive containing VI sample libraries (or can one drive be used for both purposes)? I use an external FW drive for recording.
Re: dp8/macbook air or dp7/mac pro
Posted: Thu May 22, 2014 6:25 pm
by mikehalloran
The MP 1.1 has a bottleneck on its bus speed compared to your newer machine over eSATA or Thunderbolt.
I recommend that your single SSD be used as the boot drive - even though it won't be as fast as it would be on a later Mac Pro. You can stream samples from mechanical drives or the main drive. It's not the issue that it was on the G4 where you had to use single threads on multiple drives to wring every last drop of efficiency out of the system. (the good old days, right?)
A PCIe 'blade' drive, unfortunately, suffers from a slow PCIe bus on these. It will work but there is no speed advantage.
Many good threads on SSDs.