I’ll put together a price and spec sheet for I got and paid.
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that would be cool, I know what hardware I want, minus the GPU. I’m not up to speed on that. I know I want Nvidia for the cuda.
“Feck. You could buy a Studio AND a P620 for what we paid for our Mac Pros.” I know right. It kinda hurts, but at the same time, it made more things possible for me. So it was the right computer at the right time. I am glad thou, that I made sure all my external hard drive I bought works with linux.
That’s a pretty sweet video. You and your studio looks really sweet! A little better than my basement :). (but soon, I’ll be out of the basement!)
ohhh, are you going to add influencer to your linked in?
I do like how it makes flame look great.
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I bought my first Lenovo P620 from CDW. They have a ton of different builds and sometimes have them in stock.
P620 specs as purchased:
AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975wx (32 core)
64GB RAM
1TB internal
Nvidia RTX 6000
As purchased it was about $10k. No framestore though. That was a while back at the height of the pandemic during crazy pricing.
After the fact, I’ve done some upgrades.
256GB 4x64GB DDR4-3200 PC4-25600 2Rx4 ($1500). You likely won’t need more than 128GB. But, I do a lot of PFTrack and caching long clips of EXRs is an important need for me.
HighPoint Technologies SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 8-Port M.2 NVMe RAID Controller w/ x8 2TV Samsung PRO 980s (approx $3,400). I love this as a framestore. RAID0 its like 13GB/sec, silent, and pretty compact.
2TB Samsung Pro 980 Linux boot disk ($279)
2TB Samsung Pro 980 Windows boot disk ($279)
P620 backup machine: about $4k, purchased directly from Lenovo.com, Black Friday sale.
AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955wx (16cores)
64GB RAM
1TB Internal
Nvidia RTX a4000
Then after the fact I added a small framestore…
Highpoint SSD7101-a PCIe 3.0 x16 4-Port M.2 NVME Raid controller w/ x4 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus $(1500)
What blows me away about the 3955wx / a4000 is just how good a value that is. I mean, under $4k, shipped? With 5 years on site priority hardware replacement? Bring your own NVME framestore with a Highpoint SSD7101-a and some Samsung 970s and for $6k you can be at at least twice as fast, nearing three times as fast as a 2019 Mac Pro 12 or 16 core that is $13-$17k.
Another major, major consideration is to have a couple of options at your disposal. On every show I’ve been on over the past 6 months, somebody has lost an iMac to hardware failure. My experience is 98% anecdotal, but, 2 years into the pandemic, a lotta iMacs in the wild, leaning on heavy gpu and cpu processes, on a machine with minimal active cooling and no ability to open the damn thing to blow out the dust, with all your home and kid and pet dust mucking stuff up? It’s definitely something you need to consider. If you are on a show and can be down a few days whilst you are in the Apple Genius Bar with your iMac under your arm waiting behind someone to get their iTunes account to sync to their 5 year old iPod Nano…well, that’s a tough spot to be in for sure.
I’m a tinkerer. I love the hardware side of things and enjoy learning and mastering all of this stuff. If you aren’t a tweaker and don’t have a few hours a week to commit to learning and figuring this stuff out, buy a Mac Studio and be done with it. Likely you’ll spend the same amount of time each week ‘doing flame stuff.’ Whether you are administrating your home studio of Linux and Mac gear or waiting for Mac cpu-only machine learning timewarps to render, it’s probably about the same amount of time.
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I reckon the biggest part of why the threadrippers are so fast is the PCI4 bus. Twice as fast getting data to the GPU than the PCI3 everyone else is currently running (MoBos with PCI4 for Intel Chips are on the way, or may have even arrived?).
Which also makes what Apple is doing so interesting as there is no need for any bus to pass info between everything. Where they can go with this is pretty wild. But then again, the instruction set for an ARM processor is limited compared to x86 so there are limitations there.
It’s that thing where there is no right time to buy something as the next update will be 6-12 months away.
All that being said though, I did have a home setup with a Z820 and GTX1080ti that was right up there in terms of flame benchmark performance (prior to the Threadripppers) getting speed comparable to or bettering some Z8s & the latest Mac Pros and I literally threw it together with spare bits from other discarded systems and it cost me nothing… Thts the best bang for the buck I will ever get!!
So if Apple’s new MacPro has busses for cards like the 2019 model do you think we will get more opportunities to run Flame with dedicated hardware like GPU’s and fast storage?
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a revised Mac Pro with M1 (or potentially M2) CPU & GPU, but with PCI4 expansion slots so you can plug in other hardware, but with the thought that a lot of users won’t add their own GPU and just use the Apple silicon it comes with. Most of those other cards though don’t need the benefit of a PCI4 bus. NVMe storage definitely would but not much else.
Completely theoretical/hypothetical but if they’ve joined 2x M1 Max together to make to M1 Ultra, then maybe they will join 4 M1s together for a revised Mac Pro (which we may not even see for a year or two, who knows)? Not sure what they’d call that chip though as Apple are running out of suitable adjectives. M1 Ultimate? M1 Uber? It is all hypothetical really, but what is very real is it being hard to justify double the price for a Mac Pro over a top spec Mac Studio if you are running Apple software (e.g. FCPx) or Resolve. The performance is pretty similar between the two, and even better on the Studio in a lot of cases. No wonder there are so many 2nd hand Mac Pros becoming available.
One thing to consider for some is that the cost of Thunderbolt outboard gear is a lot more than the PCIe equivalent though. When it comes to Fibre Cards, SDI/HDMI Monitoring, etc; you can pay double the price for thunderbolt in a lot of circumstances. It is also pretty messy having a Mac Studio thunderbolt connected to a Fibre card, an Ultrastudio, external storage, etc; etc; Having it all housed within the one box definitely would be appealing in a lot of circumstances too…
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Adam, I think you are right that the pro will be m1 ultra with pcie. Here is my pipe dream. They release a user replaceable mother board for the Mac Pro M1 upgrade.
Randy: Do you recommend this CPU (AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3975wx) to do a Linux install of Flame?
One thing that is really important to think about here, is just thinking “P620 is the fastest” can be really misleading. There are several processor tiers within this family, and only the 3995/5995 is a standout in performance. Any of the lower tier processors can be matched performance by a z840 that is 1/3 the price. Now the top of the line 3995/5995, yeah that are 2x as fast as said z840, but cost 5x the price. Also, I no longer recommend Lenovo P620 as they seem to have a design flaw in the latest motherboard revision that crashes the onboard ethernet card several times a day. Oh well, do what you guys want.
Here is what we know.
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The fastest Intel machine is a Dell 7929 running Dual 6226s which clocks in at 5:38 on the Flame Benchmark, with 13 entries faster, all non Intels.
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The fastest z840 is at 7:50.
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12 of the 13 fastest times are all AMD chips,
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9 of the top 12 machines are Threadripper Pros
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6 of the top 12 fastest machines are reported as P620s, with the other x4 being either Threadrippers or a single Mac, which, from my anecdotal research, is possibly potentially suspiciously fast.
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When @ALan and I ran our own quick test with Denoise/Median to hammer the CPU to test a practical example of whether the 3995 was worth it, the 3975wx was in fact faster in that particular area of Flame than the 3995wx.
So, sure, is the benchmark perfect? No. It’s not. It’s a benchmark. It’s a starting point. A genital measuring contest to say the least. But to say the 3995/5995 is the only standout? That simply isn’t the case. In fact, I don’t see a single instance of a self-reported 3995wx test yet.
And I haven’t even begun to talk prices yet. Now, I’m not talking falling off a truck or eBay specials here, I’m talking about buying the machine straight up, either retail or from a reseller. The z840 was first announced 8 years ago, and is likely to be EOL in either the next or next couple of Flame releases, so why would you want to buy a z840? Okay fine, buy its successor the HP G4 Z8, which, with dual gold Intels from a reseller is $20k ish. And PCIe Gen 3. And was released 5 years ago.
I’ve purchased 3 Lenovo P620s: a 3975wx for my daily driver, a 3955wx Flame/Nuke/Nuke Render/Windows dual boot, and a 3945wx for a Burn node, including a couple of open box RTX A6000s for less than the price of what 2 of the top resellers were charging for a single HP Z8.
Sure, due to the world being a shitty place right now Lenovo had to switch motherboard manufacturers and some of the onboard 10GB cards are flaky. So with all the cash and time you’ve saved chuck in a $100 10GB NIC and move on with your life. I’ve been fortunate to not have any problems with mine, but I’ve got a couple extra NICs on the shelf if it comes to that.
Shit, here’s an open box Lenovo P620 3975wx for $4,200.
Here’s another great starter machine for $2,500. Pickup an RTX A5000 for a couple grand and some RAM and boom, another sub $6K Linux build that is likely faster than any Intel build on the benchmarks.
My babies.
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i just work on the same kit for about 5 years and then when i upgrade its so much faster i feel like a genius. so there.
and well done @randy this is awesome!
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My dream one day is for an Apple designer to be so tired of designing amazingly looking and functioning hardware somehow defects to Lenovo and makes a case worthy of its performance. If the P620 was designed to look as good as the 2019 Mac Pro, I’d pay triple for it.
Have you ever opened a case of a 2019 Mac Pro rack unit? That experience is like opening and closing the door of a luxury car. Or wearing really sexy undies. Unfortunately, opening and racking a Lenovo P620 is like ripping a package of fruit of the loom crew socks with a spoon.
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/BrandNewSentence
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Use the right hardware for the right task: https://www.amazon.com/Cereal-Killer-Weapon-Choice-Spoon/dp/B01AJGX3BM
It depends 
Some might seen a simple spoon. Others might see a pretty bad weapon!
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There is no spoon
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