Real Life Mac Pro 2019 Experience

Hi everyone.

A few months ago I was really sure: I was about to switch back to Mac, because of the new Mac Pro.
As always, especially with an expense that big, I like to read and read and read hundreds of topics about it on the web, to be absolutely sure I make the right decision. My motivation, still loving Mac OS, stability and a future proof system (I hope).

But… the amount of information about working with Audio and Virtual Instruments on the Mac Pro 2019 model is a bit scarce. There is some, but not a lot of it is about working with Nuendo.

So I am looking for people who made the switch too, and that can tell me about their experiences with it.

I am mainly doing sound design and mixing for large documentaries, all in 5.1 with loads of plugins, and I am also a composer working with fairly large templates and tons of VI’s. Tracking vocals and solo instruments is also a very important part of my business. Nuendo has been my main DAW for these tasks for 7 years now.

I am looking at this configuration:

Mac Pro 2019
12 core (or 16 core)
32 GB Ram (will expand it with an OWC kit to 128GB)
580x Videocard
1 TB SSD (will expand it with a PCIE card with NVME’s)

My concerns:

  • Mac Os Catalina, I hear a lot of worrying stuff about it, people calling it MacVista etc.
  • The T2 Chip, and using my RME Fireface 802 with it. (ticks and pops are reported, but I like to hear that from you)
  • Nuendo and “speed”. I’ve read some issues about MacOS and Nuendo not being really fast, is that true?
  • I have a 7960X i9 at the moment, with 16 cores, and I am thinking about going for the 12 core Mac Pro version, would that be a mistake?
  • At the moment I have 128 Gigs of RAM, which seems enough for my projects. I am thinking about using the same amount on the Mac.
  • Durability, how long will this system last? Do I need to wait for ARM based Mac Pro’s?
  • Stability and resetting SMC, how often does that happen to you?

Do you have real life experience with huge sessions on the new Mac Pro, what are your issues with it (and be fair).

Or do I need to stay on the WIN10 platform?

Thanks,
Vincent.

Oh, it seems to have come together now - after about six months either forcing it into submission via sudo /terminal, disabling all of the T2 rubbish in recovery mode, and also waiting for Catalina updates that are more ready for prime time. After migration from earlier machines (both Win & Mac), there were annoying permissions issues that went on for a long time. The biggest issue was Catalina-only at the beginning.

Downsides: Catalina. (Big Sur beta seems to be more promising).
The Apple ecosystem is vastly, vastly over priced for what it is by comparison to my Dell T7910 dual Xeon & RTX 2080Ti, Win 10.
Support and Apple Care+ is quite poor - most ‘genisus’ at Apple seem to have no idea about this box.
Has little internal expansion for disks, mostly PCIe. External drive chassis or PCIe M.2 expander required. More money.
AMD GPU still vastly under-performs by way of comparison to Nvidia (also important for me doing NLE work as well as DAW work).
The Xeon-W the mac pro ships with has a very short lifespan because that socket will have no further updates (only discounted larger core CPUs later).
If only using for DAWs, is likely overkill - is a video production box (see PCIe below); an i9 machine might be better suited & priced, eg, the new 10 core iMac arriving soom.

Upsides:
Yes, is a ‘workstation’ class build & components, so should have good lifespan and reliability (like the 5,1 MP perhaps).
Is indeed very quite.
Lots of PCIe slots, especially oriented to NLE production, dual GPUs etc.
Performance is excellent for DAWs: Nuendo, Pro Tools, Logic etc (plugins, VIs, load etc), not so much for NLEs, gaming etc (by comparison to Win).

Likely the best advice - if you really want to spend this kind of money for the ‘privilege’ of MacOS: configure in advance for all you may need. Lifespan should be fine & Apple SoCs will take quite some time to get to this level, the Mac Pro will be along way out yet I’d say. But also do remember that the Xeon-W isn’t going anywhere in terms of development: its a dead end.

‘Xeon-light’, I like to call it. If your examine sideways in PC-land, this chip is only available of a few mid range workstations from vendors like HP & Dell. Otherwise, they stay with dual Xeon flavors of Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum for their workstations of equivalence to the Mac Pro.

- The T2 Chip, and using my RME Fireface 802 with it. (ticks and pops are reported, but I like to hear that from you)

  • No probs with RME UFX+
    - Nuendo and “speed”. I’ve read some issues about MacOS and Nuendo not being really fast, is that true?
  • All good here, excellent in fact.
    - At the moment I have 128 Gigs of RAM, which seems enough for my projects. I am thinking about using the same amount on the Mac.
    Apple mac pro (like the 5,1) likes ‘six channel memory’ for best performance: that means 6 or 12x memory modules = 48GB, 96GB, 192GB etc. I went with 192GB of Nemix Ram, far better priced than OWC and was used by many of the reviewers in the first instance of the MP release.
    - Stability and resetting SMC, how often does that happen to you?
  • all the time, for what ever reason it is common that the mac pro will not re-start without disconnecting and reconnecting the power cord first. Still, apart from being annoying, this seems to have no ill effects otherwise.
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Thanks for your very VERY thorough answer, I really appreciate that!

Do you think disabling the T2 rubbish you mention is still necessary with the latest version of Catalina? And do you possibly have a link or some other information about it?

If only using for DAWs, is likely overkill - is a video production box (see PCIe below); an i9 machine might be better suited & priced, eg, the > new 10 core iMac > arriving soom.

I love overkill :slight_smile: I rather have a system with loads of headroom to be honest. Plus, I am really used to 16 core machines, I love to see a relaxed system monitor instead of a completely utilised one.

Lots of PCIe slots, especially oriented to NLE production, dual GPUs etc.
Performance is excellent for DAWs: Nuendo, Pro Tools, Logic etc (plugins, VIs, load etc), not so much for NLEs, gaming etc (by comparison to Win).

That’s great, that’s all that matters! At least for me :smiley:

  • No probs with RME UFX+

My 802 has a USB 2.0 connection, no thunderbolt, and so far I don’t read a lot of promising stuff about using USB on the new Macs…

Apple mac pro (like the 5,1) likes ‘six channel memory’ for best performance: that means 6 or 12x memory modules = 48GB, 96GB, 192GB etc. I went with 192GB of > Nemix Ram> , far better priced than OWC and was used by many of the reviewers in the first instance of the MP release.

That’s a really good tip, I haven’t thought of that

- Stability and resetting SMC, how often does that happen to you?

  • all the time, for what ever reason it is common that the mac pro will not re-start without disconnecting and reconnecting the power cord first. Still, apart from being annoying, this seems to have no ill effects otherwise.

Ouch, that sucks! That is almost the same problem I have with my AsRock Taichi motherboard I use on my Windows PC, that needs a BIOS reset quite often… I hate that.

Thanks again!

Do you think disabling the T2 rubbish you mention is still necessary with the latest version of Catalina? And do you possibly have a link or some other information about it?

More than ever - the security matters seem to ramp up further with each iteration of MacOS (eg: more new stuff with Big Sur) & now that all macs will have T2 chips. In any case, for the moment, configuring that to a more sensible state is straight-forward & remains a permanent setting in the UEFI: Boot into Recovery via Command-R on start-up, set Secure Boot to ‘No Security’ and External Boot to ‘allow booting from external media’.


Another dopey thing with the Mac Pro, with an Apple bluetooth keyboard none of the start-up key commands will work (on this box at least; some claim it works for them, but mostly no) - I need to use a wired keyboard to enter recovery or other diagnostic modes.

My 802 has a USB 2.0 connection, no thunderbolt, and so far I don’t read a lot of promising stuff about using USB on the new Macs…

USB has always been flakey from time to time on MacOS in my experience. However, it hasn’t been that problematic on this one. One common bug reported widely is that the 2 x top-of-chassis USB-C ports lose their brain from time to time, like with the latest 10.15.6 update but usually is nothing an SMC reset won’t fix. I also have 2 x USB hubs hanging off the mac pro’s rear USB3 ports - one is a USB 3 hub, the other USB 2. Both have a truckload of peripherals attached & I can’t say there’s ever been any problems here (NI S61, Presonus fader port, webcam, dongles etc). I would say that high quality, powered hubs are required. The Sabrient 16 port USB3 hub gets great reviews from mac pro studio users; there’s also the excellent CalDigit TS3 Plus that many use for if they need more connections other than USB-only.

Re. my RME UFX+, that ran fine with both USB and TB drivers. But yes, for the MacOS ecosystem I would consider a Thunderbolt unit for the future (TB3 with Apollos for example, and UA are such Apple fanboys, LUNA is wonderful etc etc) … you can see the trend here: the costs will become far more than the (gouging) price of the box.

That is almost the same problem I have with my AsRock Taichi motherboard I use on my Windows PC, that needs a BIOS reset quite often… I hate that.

Can’t say I ever have this problem with my Dell workstation. But yeah, overall the most odd thing to me about MacOS, ie: supposedly designed to be ‘friendly’, but anytime you need to configure the back end, Apple make this almost impossible by being inconsistent and poorly designed. For example the silly amount of different key commands to get into various layers of the ‘BIOS’ (apple speak: UEFI) - and these often may not work either because of the keyboard (as mentioned above), or because of some kind of ‘magic timing’ (before the chime, after the chime ?) ‘Zap the PRAM’ Command-Option-P-R … on and on. Whereas Windows has a simple tap-F2 to access a single list of anything you might need. Otherwise, you may need to bone up on and make a notepad for Unix commands to use Terminal for other tweaks from time to time, like we would in the much easier Windows Command-Prompt. ‘sfc /scannow’ anyone? Not so easy on MacOS.

Other observations:
The constant, constant asking for passwords by Mac OS is ridiculous and annoying. In my case here, there are excellent security layers on a Synology router & mesh wifi stations, as well as on the Telco’s modem, as well as VPN for external, blah, blah. Inside the facility and its firewalls however, there is a very simple workflow required between out laptops, tablets, NAS cloud, media server, phones, workstations etc. We should be easily able to drag and drop, sync, backup etc but Apple just keeps asking for passwords … Much prefer Windows Hello.

Use a backup system other than Time Machine or iCloud (longer story), eg, ChronoSync, Carbon Copy Cloner.

It is a vastly overpriced ecosystem, but yes, when its good its very good … be prepared to have deep pockets. For example - every time there’s a OS rev, so much of the software /drivers etc stops working. Invariably this also means shelling out more $$s for software updates. Recent examples: Pro Tools 2019-6 continues to run just fine on Windows 10 2004, won’t work on Catalina; ditto Waves v9 vs. v11. In every case I’ve had to pay for Mac OS updated software, not so on Windows.

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Profdraper = Forum Hero!

Your most excellent posts in this thread are what user forums are supposed to be about.

By the way, I build my own PCs and have no intention of going Mac. I just read this out of curiosity and had to say something.

Man, I totally agree wih Getalife2, you’re the king!.. the amount of valuable information you provide is astonishing and higly appreciated. By reading all of your “issues” with the system and the hassle, my image I had of Mac has slightly changed. I was looking to get away from some hassle I had with Windows, but to be honest, compared with the issues you describe about a machine that will cost me 10K at least, my issues with Windows are far less “heavy”. As long as the system is not rebooted by me, it runs for weeks without any problem.

My main reason for switching was that I like, or maybe now - used to like - MacOs, it looks a lot cleaner, and I thought it was very stable, but the more I read about it, the more big problems come up. I also wanted to switch to a comparable hardware configuration, but then bullet proof and rock solid, which doesn’t seem to be the case at all unfortunately. To me that is unacceptable! They had at least 6 years of development time, and still they fail to make an almost perfect system for professionals.

Sooo… I think I have to be fair to myself and my wallet, and invest in a more rock solid PC build. DPC Latency will probably be never on the same level as on MacOS, but for now that is not my biggest problem. Maybe I just have to wait and see what Apple does in the future before I switch and to be honest, if the system was 4 or 5 K less, I would have switched in a heartbeat.

Thanks for your patience and your priceless insights profdraper!

Paul:
Thanks so much for your insight here. I’m also about to make the move to a new machine.
Cheers!

Thanks for all this information. Exactly what I need tor ead up on regarding the Mac Pro.

I am looking to upgrade within the next 6 months, let’s see what happens until then!

Cheers.

Not a good time to upgrade.
One could say there is always a “good” reason to wait for the next best thing, but this is more applicable than ever.
If you don’t have an emergency reason to change your machine, wait for 6 months+, it’ll be worth the wait.

Intel will (finally!!) start shipping a better/wider offering of 10nm chips (12th gen), Win11 will have a bit of time to iron out initial hiccups, and SW vendors will have time to step up to Win11 too.

Changing now means you will have an itch to change again next year…
My 2-cent anyway.

On the Apple side of the fence, it’s somewhat similar. I’d bet their Arm-based ecosystem will mature a lot in the coming year and will be full of surprises! Hopefully good ones…
And the MacOS stability seems experiencing a major biorhythm low these days…

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Sticking with NU 10.2.20 on a 5.1 Mac Pro?