mac mini lion server quad core i7 for terragen

[penboack]

This rumour has been doing the rounds for a while, along with the idea that Apple is exiting the pro market. But it makes no sense. Why bother updating Final Cut Pro to do 4k video and develop Thunderbolt if you are planning to concentrate on the consumer market. TB is pointless for the consumer, it offers nothing over USB 3.0 and is far too expensive to implement on consumer devices.

If Apple really were discontinuing the Mac Pro line they would have made an announcement in January, ahead of Intel announcing the E5 Xeons and given 3 months for people who wanted to buy a Mac Pro to buy one, just as they did with the XServe.

Apple don't release separate figures for Mac Pro sales, but they probably sell in similar volume to HP's workstations, so a ballpark figure of 1-2 million per annum would be a reasonable guess and would imply a very higher margin profitable line of business for Apple.

[coremelt]

What do you need a full size tower for?  So you have slots for a Quadro, pro video io, pro audio io and a RAID card right?  Well all those things are now available through thunderbolt EXCEPT the Quadro.

Yeah something is coming to replace the mac pro tower, but I doubt very much it will be same form factor with five PCIe slots, because not having to have that was kind of the point of thunderbolt.

[coremelt]

So i've done some 3-4 hour renders on the mini now on animation sequences.  At the default fan settings the CPU cores can get up to 96 degrees! The fan doesn't go automatically go above 3200 rpm even when the thing is running on all cores.

Using smcFanControl and setting it do 4500 RPM minimum the mini is still very quiet and keeps the cores at a more reasonable 80 degrees.
HD temperatures never get above 40 degrees so looks like they've got them well isolated from the CPU core.

[penboack]

Thanks for the render temperature results.
I have just installed smcFanControl on my MBP.

I agree with your comments on the tower cases, they are too big!
The system only really needs to include CPU, GPU and system disk. All additional storage would be better via TB.
To keep these systems both cool and quiet they need to use large low speed fans, which places some restrictions on case size. A half (current) height stackable case would be a big improvement. Other Vendors could then match their storage to design, like the Hitachi G-Drives do already.

Speaking of which, I just noticed, 6 months after they were announced, http://www.g-technology.eu/products/g-raid-thunderbolt.php.
That might just be a sign that something is coming from Apple...

[coremelt]

I've got two Pegasus R4 thunderbolt disk arrays and very happy with them, thats originally why I bought the mac mini, for it's thunderbolt port so I could have one of my arrays accessible over the internet while my mac book pro was out of my studio.

It turned out to be a useful little number cruncher as well.

[penboack]

That's a great disk array to have.
What App are you using to measure the temperatures?

[coremelt]

This one:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/12381/temperature-monitor

Plus as mentioned before smc Fan Control to set a minimum RPM of 4500 on exhaust fan
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23049/smcfancontrol

[penboack]

Thanks for the links.

I looked at temperature-monitor yesterday, but it hadn't been updated since September 2011, looked again today and it was updated yesterday (see below for details).
Downloaded and installed.

From the developer's website http://www.bresink.de Release 4.95 (Build 120327):
"This build resynchronizes Temperature Monitor with Hardware Monitor:
Added support for the iMac (Mid 2011) model series.
Added support for the MacBook Air (Mid 2011) model series.
Added support for the Mac mini (Mid 2011) model series.
Added support for the Mac mini Server (Mid 2011) model series.
This build ensures that the software is recognized as safe application by the Gatekeeper feature of future OS X systems.
Corrected a problem where the speech synthesizer option "speak sensor names" did not persist between relaunches of the application."

[efflux]

I'd definitely be concerned about heat. This is the number one enemy for computer life. I have a Macbook pro and I found it totally unsuitable for TG2. It was obviously slow compared to my desktop PC but it got very hot while trying to render with TG2. I don't think these compact machines are meant for this sustained hammering.

[coremelt]

Which model macbook pro do you have?  I have a latest model 17 inch quad core mac book pro and I constantly hammer it rendering Nuke, Smoke and Terragen. So far no problems.

[penboack]

Same as you, but the previous (early 2011) model upgraded to 8MB RAM (I fitted a Crucial 8GB Kit). I'm considering putting 16GB RAM in it, as that would help with very large scenes in CINEMA 4D, but it isn't compelling and I couldn't recoup it on resale in a year or two as most people don't need 16GB. I would go as far as to say that it's the best computer I have ever had. I've used PCs and various Macs, but the quad core MBPs are outstanding.

May purchase a Mac Mini in the next 2-3 weeks to use as a render node.

Looked at the Ivy Bridge offerings slated for release at the end of April, essentially a die shrink and (very) slight clock speed increase, GPU improvements will be more interesting.
Interestingly I think that intel are dropping the 6-Core i7s presumably to force Workstation vendors to use Xeons (they can do this sort of thing in periods when they have a lead over AMD).

If Planetside made the interactive preview in Terragen take advantage of multi-core processors it would be an amazing time saver, at the moment it uses a single core.

[coremelt]

Interestingly I think that intel are dropping the 6-Core i7s presumably to force Workstation vendors to use Xeons (they can do this sort of thing in periods when they have a lead over AMD).

Where did you get that from?  The Sandy Bridge E 6 core i7's like the 6 core 3930k just launched a few months ago.    They are considerably cheaper than a Xeon ($500 for the CPU).  I think you're getting mixed up, there won't be any Ivy Bridge i7's at launch, those are coming later on in 2012 with Ivy Bridge E and there will be Xeon and non Xeon varieties just like there is for Sandy Bridge E i7's.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5174/why-ivy-bridge-is-still-quad-core

Personally I'm going to pick up a Sandy Bridge E 6 core system looking for any price reductions coming up, there won't be very much difference maybe 15 percent increase for Ivy Bridge as far as CPU render power goes, so if they are clearing out Sandy Bridge E CPU's and moboards that will be a very fast render box for a few years to come.

[penboack]

Sorry I didn't make that very clear, I was referring to Ivy Bridge i7s not Sandy Bridge.
Interesting article.
Thanks for the link.