| Joined: | Sun Apr 1st, 2012 |
| Location: | Carthew, Cornwall, United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 6834 |
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I have found the MacPro still consumes a significant amount of power over a week even when shut down, complete savings can only be achieved by switching off at the wall socket or pulling the plug. During Aug to Oct, I have scarcely used the MacPro, it was shut down but still plugged into the electric. This week I have now used the MacPro for three full days, I will be interested to see the figures on Sunday when I take the readings. In fact I am writing this with the MacPro!
Really.
I must check mine as well then.
I am looking forward to seeing the figures for November and December by which time the numbers should have stabilised and a broader view can be seen.
For browsing the internet, writing eMails and partaking in forums, the iMac is just fine. Even a bit of spreadsheet use or simple image editing but when dealing with large numbers of large images, terabytes of music files, other processor intensive and storage intensive tasks the Mac Pro is a clear winner with at least eight (maybe nine) internal bays available for hard drives including up to three very high speed PCIe slots for SSDs, which make the biggest improvement to performance per buck I have ever seen. The sheer convenience of being able to slide hard drives into the computer or even run very fast external drives on eSATA or Firewire means that for me at least the MacPro is an indispensable tool and manageable cost wise by employing the iMac(s) for low demand tasks.
So that's my take on the computer side, for now.
I have my MacPro with a boot 1TB SSD boot drive and two 540rpm drives of 1TB and 2TB capacity. The 1TB HDD is for swap disks and data storage and my processed or work in progress images are on the 2TB drive.
All my RAW images live outboard on external drives connected via USB3. Also Lightroom (for cataloguing) and Capture Pro v12 have no problem working this way.
USB3 is (almost) as fast as Firewire and eSATA so I see little benefit to upgrade to faster external connections.
I am wondering if a MacMini (i7 4core) or iMac 27" i7 (2015) is better for processing. It seems that Apple are making the new MacPro the really power machine as expected but the iMac is close behind at a lesser cost.
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Still learning after all these years!
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