Safari on rMBR (late 2013 model)

[CA3LE]

Wow... the new Macbook Pro rocks.

 

This is on AC wireless, to my Netgear Nighthawk AC 1900 using Comcast 105 Mbps.  Using Safari.  Someone was recently emailing me about Safari.  They said they were getting lower readings on their Macbook pro, only in Safari.  Well, I'm testing under the same conditions... same computer, same browser.  I think you have something else causing an issue because on my network, it's screaming fast.

 

Click the image and you'll see that one is a classic download test accompanied by a multithread speed test.

 

While I'm on the subject of speed, look at the PCIe SSD performance...

 

(testing with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test - by the way, my own write test of a 10GB disk image creation performed at a low of 780 MB/s and high of 988 MB/s so blackmagic seems to be a good disk speed test on Mac)

 

The late 2013 Macbook is ridiculous. I have the 15 inch, fully upgraded with 1 TB SSD.

 

 

Don't even get me started about the display.  Because of pixel doubling you can see that my screenshots are huge...

 

I've been starting to notice that my iMac is slowing me down so I needed to upgrade.  But I wanted something portable.  I can output this to my iMac's display when I want to and get a nicer work space for the type of stuff I do and at the same time take full advantage of the second discrete graphics card... well to truly take advantage of it I'd need a 4k monitor but I'm waiting till 4k monitors are much cheaper.  It would be really nice but when the display costs more than the computer... loses it's appeal.  The 4k resolution is at a lower refresh rate too.  60 Hz 4k would be nice Apple.

 

I think I need to replace my iMac's SSD.  I was getting 500 MB/s read and write at first but I've used it a lot... they degrade over time.  This is a 2011 model I bought in April.  With only 256 GB Corsair Performance Pro SSD

 

Don't get me wrong, my iMac is still very fast.  But you guys know me... I have a need for speed.  It's kinda what I do... hence the website.  Anyone looking to upgrade to a laptop that can put badass desktop computers to shame should be looking at the new macbook line.  Pair it with a solid network and you can't go wrong.  I'll be able to blaze through my routine and get two or three times the work done.  

 

You can't upgrade the memory later, so make sure that you get what you'll need up front... but speaking of SSD degradation.  The SSD is a discrete component according to my research... so that's good, although Apple says it's "not a user serviceable part" ... it is, I change "non user serviceable parts" all the time and I would bet that there will be third party drives released.  So when it degrades, which it will... it's replaceable.  ... 2000 MB/s SSD performance may be possible with aftermarket PCIe SSD.  They run PCIexpress 2.0, I believe it's 4 lanes.  So there is headroom there for improvement.  Time will tell.  Funny, the girl at Apple told me, "it's soldered on the board..." -- probably just wanted me to spring for the more expensive one.  Bitch.  Oh well, I'll put it to go use.

 

All I know is that I'll be able to work faster and more conveniently now.  Thanks again Apple.  (killer battery life too, especially for an core i7.  Past hour, 9% used.)

[nanobot]

Can't you chain several displays together?

Either way, I really want to pick up about eight of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824002640

Of course, before I do that I need to build the backbone to support it, which includes the following:

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131817

2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814105005

2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116938

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233363

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139019

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817494006

6x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3ER15M5990

8x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624

Two of the SSD's would be in a RAID 1, for the operating system and programs, to make sure they are kept safe. The other four SSD's would be RAID 10 for speed and reliability for the data that needs to be kept fast. The SSD's would be on the SATAIII ports.

Then the eight HDD's would be in a RAID 10 setup so that there are two HDD's in each RAID 1, and then the four RAID 1's are in a RAID 0. For maximum storage and reliability.

Overall the project would cost around $32,000. Which is why I haven't started on it yet.

Without the graphics stuff (which costs $20,600 alone) the system would cost under $12,000. Which really isn't so bad considering you would have 12 physical CPU cores (24 logical with hyperthreading), 64GB of memory, 8TB HDD usage, 1.5TB SDD usage, and 1600W of potential power. And if you removed RAID you would have even more. Just below 16TB HDD usage space, and 3TB SDD usage space.

Thanks,

EBrown

[CA3LE]

Can't you chain several displays together?

Either way, I really want to pick up about eight of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824002640

Of course, before I do that I need to build the backbone to support it, which includes the following:

2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814105005

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131817

2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814105005

2x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116938

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233363

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139019

1x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817494006

6x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3ER15M5990

8x http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624

...

Overall the project would cost around $32,000. Which is why I haven't started on it yet.

 

$32K!  Dude, personally if I needed that much power... I'd get a loaded Mac Pro... and raid some Thunderbolt drives.  

 

 

And if that didn't get it done... I'd get two or three of them and still come in under $32K.

 

 

That's like the size of a medium drink from McDonalds.  You can daisy chain them... (up to 36 devices) and have a 20 GB/s link between the machines.  Mac is superior in my opinion.  

 

Wouldn't you love a more elegant machine...

 

 

It even knows to turn the lights on the ports when it detects that you've turned it... it senses that you're trying to to plug something in and lights the way.  The design is beautiful.  It was beyond what I need right now.  The way that I'd want to get it...

 

 

Minus $3600 without the display...

 

 

For the people out there with super heavy computing tasks where time is money.  Like video engineers... that makes sense.  Not too many applications are taking advantage of the GPU aspect yet, final cut pro and some other high end software are doing it.  Sure, you can build a single PC machine that would be more far more powerful but can you do it with this kind of footprint? Can you do it this quietly? (only 12dB)

 

In my opinion, the Late 2013 Mac Pro is a work of art in every aspect.  You'd have to be insane to spend $32K on a PC.    

[nanobot]

That loaded Mac Pro has the same power as my proposed system, so it's not a bad choice really.

But, let's compare:

My base system (with the same specs as that Mac Pro):

Using this CPU as a substitute: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116492

And this RAM as a substitute: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233384

And this GPU as a substitute: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814105004

And using only two of the SSD's instead of 6, and no HDD's and no monitors:

$8,240

This system STILL has a more powerful CPU. It has a .5Ghz faster clock on every core (6Ghz overall faster), and is roughly $1359 less.

So really, my proposal is not that far off. You just looked at the $32,000 and didn't really take the other items into account. The fact that it has 8 2560x1600 resolution monitors, the fact that the graphics cards were more overkill than the Mac Pro ones, the fact that it had a .9Ghz faster clock on every core (10.8Ghz overall), and the fact that it had 18TB more storage space. (8.5TB more after you do the RAID configurations I wanted to.)

If you had the four $3600 monitors to create the same display size, you are looking at $23,979. Then to add the storage stuff ($2999 for the thunderbolt storage system, you need the 18TB one, configured in RAID 10 to get the same storage redundancy as my proposal, you are up to $26,978. BUT the problem with this is that 18TB of your storage is mechanical HDD, not SSD. So, for $5022 more you get 8 displays (not four, though the total resolution is roughly the same), you get 3TB SSD storage vs 1TB, and you get 16TB HDD storage vs 18TB. The 2TB differential is the killer here. Now I don't know the IOPS and throughput of the Thunderbolt storage, to tell if it compares, but assuming it does you only save $5022, but with the processor differential and RAM clock differential (10.8Ghz CPU clock differential, and the 267Mhz RAM differential), it may be worth the extra $5022. It's also more expandable and such.

Using the replacements above, to get a very similar system (apart from the storage replacements), it's $28,850 for the system I proposed. And look, that's only $1872 more than the Apple equivalent. And you still have 6Ghz more CPU power (gross), and 2 more TB of your total storage are SSD. And if I replace four of the SSD's with one more of the HDD's, it's $25,530. That's $1448 less than the Apple equivalent all of a sudden. And the only advantage my proposal has is the 6Ghz overall gain on CPU clock. I can't even find a less powerful six core CPU compatible with that motherboard. So I guess that's as far as I can cut costs. (Again, I rounded my proposal's estimate, it may be between $1000 and $1800 cheaper based on my rounding guesses.)

Not saying the Mac Pro is a bad choice (it may be a better one, less configuration requirements, fewer driver problems, etc.), but it is not a cheaper choice, for the same setup.

Thanks,

EBrown

[mudmanc4]

Yea that new mac pro seems like the shit to git - although the design is obviously mastered for various reasons.

This old 07' MBP is still cruising along, save I'm mainly in a shell or several, otherwise it's troublesome. Slow when piling on the apps I mean to say. I can only imagine you must be smiling inside while using that new machine Ca3le

[Pgoodwin1]

Yeah. I've been drooling over the new MBP. Our mid-2006 MBP is getting very long in the tooth. I put a bigger HDD in it, and some more RAM a couple of years ago, but it's only a Core Duo machine so it would measure like a pixel width on a pie chart comparison against the new one. We don't really have the great need for speed here so we're getting by with the old one and a mid-2010 iMac which is still a great machine but even it is only an i3 processor-HDD machine and no screamer. It handles all my music work really well though, as those files aren't very big. It would be nice though to wait only a fraction of a second to convert music file types rather than the 5-10 seconds I wait now. Still I lust over the new MBP. It would be nice to be able to use a laptop doing music in multiple places in the house - which I can't really do easily now.

[mudmanc4]

Feelin' your pain pgoodwin - more all the time. But hey , gotta take the good with the bad and do what we can with what we have at hand

[Pgoodwin1]

Among my old (still working) computers, my 1994 PowerBook 520c still fires up and runs (on AC power, the battery is shot). I haven't used it for anything since about 2001.

PowerBook 520c

Introduced May 1994

Discontinued June 1995 (520) September 1995 (520c)

Initial Price $2,900 ($4435 in 2013 dollars)

Support Status Obsolete

Weight and Dimensions 6.3 lbs. (520) 6.4 lbs. (520c), 2.3" H x 11.5" W x 9.7" D

Processor Motorola 68LC040

Processor Speed 25 MHz

Number of Cores 1

Coprocessor None

Cache 8 KB L1

System Bus 25 MHz

Storage 160 - 240 MB

Media 1.44 MB floppy

SOFTWARE

Original OS System 7.1.1 (PowerBook 500 Series Enabler)

Maximum OS Mac OS 8.1

Built-in Memory 4 MB

Maximum Memory 36 MB

Memory Slots 1 - PB 5xx

Minimum Speed 70 ns

Interleaving Support No

Built-in Display 9.5" 8 bit (520c) passive matrix LCD

Resolutions 640x480

Graphics Card None

Graphics Memory 512k

Display Connection Mini-15

Wi-Fi None

Bluetooth None

Ethernet AAUI-15

Modem None

ADB 1

Serial 1

SCSI HDI-30

Display Connection Mini-15

Infrared None

Audio In 1 - 3.5-mm analog input jack, 1 - Built-in microphone

Audio Out 1 - 3.5-mm analog output jack, 1 - Built-in speakers

Slots Modem, Optional Type II/III PC Card Bay

Bays PowerBook Expansion Bay (90-pin) PDS

Hard Drive Interface SCSI

SENSORS

Motion Sensor None

POWER

System Battery PB 500 Intelligent Battery (M1906) (NiMH)

Maximum Continuous Power 40 W

Our first Mac was a 1988 SE with a 20 MB HDD and 1 MB RAM - upgraded right away to the then max of 4 x 1 MB SIMMs @ $35 per MB!!!! We were still using that SE in 1999 for text editing on a shared network of newspaper writers. I still have an SE in the basement. My wife started a desktop publishing business with it and a LaserWriter printer in '88 and in 1990 we bought a small A&E newspaper. I believe she was the first newspaper in Cincinnati to paste up text and graphics onto the newspaper layouts. She was also the first to go fully digital - giving the printers a Zip drive instead of layouts. It took a long time for the newspaper printing companies to switch from cameras to the portable media. I think she started doing it digitally in 1996 or '97.

Edited December 31, 2013 by Pgoodwin1

[mudmanc4]

Utoh now were getting into the good stuff !   I remember around 85 the high school had a whole line of brand new macintosh machines , if I could remember what program we had to write I might smile for a week straight. Jr year we did Autocad 2 (I think) on them, well thats come a long way in 30 years -- to say the very least lol Having to type in the coordinates for each sector and watch as the machine plotted out the dots .   

 

But my first Apple was a iBook PPC G4 can't say must have been around ten years ago. Never looked back, have not built myself a new machine since. Just Apples. 

[Corey Smith]

Wow... the new Macbook Pro rocks.

 

This is on AC wireless, to my Netgear Nighthawk AC 1900 using Comcast 105 Mbps.  Using Safari.  Someone was recently emailing me about Safari.  They said they were getting lower readings on their Macbook pro, only in Safari.  Well, I'm testing under the same conditions... same computer, same browser.  I think you have something else causing an issue because on my network, it's screaming fast.

 

Click the image and you'll see that one is a classic download test accompanied by a multithread speed test.

 

While I'm on the subject of speed, look at the PCIe SSD performance...

 

DiskSpeedTest-rMBP(late 2013 1TB PCIe SSD).png

(testing with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test - by the way, my own write test of a 10GB disk image creation performed at a low of 780 MB/s and high of 988 MB/s so blackmagic seems to be a good disk speed test on Mac)

 

The late 2013 Macbook is ridiculous. I have the 15 inch, fully upgraded with 1 TB SSD.

 

Screen Shot 2013-12-27 at 1.55.57 AM.png

 

Don't even get me started about the display.  Because of pixel doubling you can see that my screenshots are huge...

 

I've been starting to notice that my iMac is slowing me down so I needed to upgrade.  But I wanted something portable.  I can output this to my iMac's display when I want to and get a nicer work space for the type of stuff I do and at the same time take full advantage of the second discrete graphics card... well to truly take advantage of it I'd need a 4k monitor but I'm waiting till 4k monitors are much cheaper.  It would be really nice but when the display costs more than the computer... loses it's appeal.  The 4k resolution is at a lower refresh rate too.  60 Hz 4k would be nice Apple.

 

I think I need to replace my iMac's SSD.  I was getting 500 MB/s read and write at first but I've used it a lot... they degrade over time.  This is a 2011 model I bought in April.  With only 256 GB Corsair Performance Pro SSD

DiskSpeedTest-iMac-2011.png

 

Don't get me wrong, my iMac is still very fast.  But you guys know me... I have a need for speed.  It's kinda what I do... hence the website.  Anyone looking to upgrade to a laptop that can put badass desktop computers to shame should be looking at the new macbook line.  Pair it with a solid network and you can't go wrong.  I'll be able to blaze through my routine and get two or three times the work done.  

 

You can't upgrade the memory later, so make sure that you get what you'll need up front... but speaking of SSD degradation.  The SSD is a discrete component according to my research... so that's good, although Apple says it's "not a user serviceable part" ... it is, I change "non user serviceable parts" all the time and I would bet that there will be third party drives released.  So when it degrades, which it will... it's replaceable.  ... 2000 MB/s SSD performance may be possible with aftermarket PCIe SSD.  They run PCIexpress 2.0, I believe it's 4 lanes.  So there is headroom there for improvement.  Time will tell.  Funny, the girl at Apple told me, "it's soldered on the board..." -- probably just wanted me to spring for the more expensive one.  Bitch.  Oh well, I'll put it to go use.

 

All I know is that I'll be able to work faster and more conveniently now.  Thanks again Apple.  (killer battery life too, especially for an core i7.  Past hour, 9% used.)

 

Yeah i have noticed that the SSD speed of my new macbook pro as well. 

I don't want to bother with hosting an image but I'm getting 926.5MBs write speeds and 980.7MBs read speeds to my 512GB SSD. Its kinda crazy makes my i7 32 gig ram iMac look slow.