There was also a PCI card available to give this machine Thunderbolt connectivity. The HP Z840 Workstation ticked all the boxes with regard to space for internal drives, PCI-e slots and onboard USB3.0. The opportunity came up to buy, what was at the time, the mother of all Windows PCs for a very reasonable price. I also wanted to be able to mount and connect my HDX card internally rather than forking out for external rack-mount boxes which I know work very well but it’s not a way I like to work, so a Mac Pro Late 2013 Trash Can based system was not for me. I am far from a cable-phobic (you should see the back of the studio racks) but I like the idea of having all my drives mounted inside the case so cooling can be handled by the fans of the PC. I like the old school (Mac Pro Cheese-grater) way of keeping as many of my computer components in one box as possible. I could have probably thrown another £1000 at the old machine to get some more use out of it, but when hardware like the USB ports start to fail, you eventually have to call time on any more upgrades. Also looking to the future, and starting to think about editing 4K video, I knew the Mac Pro’s days were numbered. I did update the graphics card in the pimped 2009 Mac Pro to one with quite a bit of GPU power but it was still not cutting it. 10 streams of 1080p video is a vast amount of data to be working with. The final nail in the Mac Pro coffin for me was the amount of video I was working on. In my work with Production Expert I was seeing more and more Thunderbolt devices heading my way and the only machine I could run them with was a 2012 MacBook Pro, also not a new machine by any stretch. Sadly there is just no such thing as a Thunderbolt PCI card. The other main feature I was missing was Thunderbolt. Also a couple of the rear USB ports were starting to become temperamental, meaning that some days I would start the machine and everything would work fine and on another day I would boot up to find that it could not see my iLok or my Avid Eleven Rack connected via USB. In computing terms 2009 is a very, very long time ago and the old Cheese Grater Mac Pro had no USB-3 or Thunderbolt ports, and while I did add some USB-3 ports to the machine, via a PCI card, it never felt as quick as machines with built in USB-3. I have run the Mac Pro Power Test session on the old machine (as you can see in the video) and it just keeps going and going so why did I feel the need for a new computer? 2009 Is A Long Time Ago I found myself running out of creativity long before I run out of audio processing power. Pro Tools HD ran (and continues to run) really very well on my Mac. And if pro audio was my only requirement from a computer in my studio, I would probably still be using my Apple Mac except for two reasons that I will come to shortly. In July 2015, we swapped out the single core daughter board and replaced it with a 2 x 6 core 3.46GHz processors and 64Gb of RAM to pimp this machine about as far as it is possible to take it. The first round in March 2015, was to swap out the 4 core processor for a 6 core. Over time and with the help of my friend Richard “Rich” Rogers formerly of UK Mac specialists Create Pro, we performed two different upgrades. When I first bought my 2009 Mac Pro, from the UK Apple Refurb store it was a 2.8GHz 4 core machine and at the time it ran rings around just about any other machine (PC or Mac) on the market. I was making the move to what, at the time, I referred to as ‘The Dark Side.’ I was swapping my 2009 Mac Pro for a brand new HP Z840 Workstation running Windows 10. As we have stated on numerous occasions which OS you use is down to you, neither story is an attempt to convert you.īack in March 2017 I shut down my fully pimped 12 core “Cheese Grater” Mac Pro for potentially the last time. We wanted to give all sides of the picture, Russ gave his reasons for sticking with Mac and I want to tell you why, after a long time as a Mac user, I switched to using Windows. Last week we gave the results of our Pro Tools Computer user survey, for some the results were quite a shock and for others not so.
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