Are older Intel Mac Pro and Mac Studio M1 still worthwhile?

I was looking around for older Intel based Mac Pro or older M1 Studio and I found a few unopened Mac Pro 2019 with 96gb and a Radeon pro w5500 gpu for about 2K USD and base model M1 Max studio with 32gb for the 1K. Are the older Intel Mac Pro and M1 Max studio very capable for indie feature editing and particularly color grading with Resolve? With my limited knowledge of Apple Mac Pro, I do know they were the cream of the crop during their days and were heavily used in post houses.

BTW, most of my projects are indie shorts and features of up to 100 minutes, ingesting raw and ProRes mostly up to 6K @ 60fps at the most, and delivering mostly in FHD or 4K in intermediate formats or H.265, and some DCP generation. My current system chokes on 6K when I use over 20 nodes hence looking for the upgrade.

Also, on the Intel 2019 MacPro, can the gpu be upgraded with the Radeon RTX 7700 XTX and the DeckLink 4K PCI use on it?

If you’re experienced with PC, I’d rather get a good PC setup. And in the light of recent experiences around here, rather go for NVIDIA for the GPU.
A Mac is only superior if portability or saving electricity is essential.

I was looking around for older Intel based Mac Pro or older M1 Studio and I found a few unopened Mac Pro 2019 with 96gb and a Radeon pro w5500 gpu for about 2K USD and base model M1 Max studio with 32gb for the 1K. Are the older Intel Mac Pro and M1 Max studio very capable for indie feature editing and particularly color grading with Resolve? With my limited knowledge of Apple Mac Pro, I do know they were the cream of the crop during their days and were heavily used in post houses.

BTW, most of my projects are indie shorts and features of up to 100 minutes, ingesting raw and ProRes mostly up to 6K @ 60fps at the most, and delivering mostly in FHD or 4K in intermediate formats or H.265, and some DCP generation. My current system chokes on 6K when I use over 20 nodes hence looking for the upgrade.

Also, on the Intel 2019 MacPro, can the gpu be upgraded with the Radeon RTX 7700 XTX and the DeckLink 4K PCI use on it?

I'm still using the 2019 Mac Pro and doing fine "so far." This is a 16-core system with the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo GPU and 256GB of RAM, and it's maybe not scorching these days, but still very fast. Not sure if there are drivers to support a GPU this new, but I think the Decklink will work. We're using two UltraStudio 4K Extreme 3 12G's (one for the system, one for Omniscope), but those are external Thunderbolt connections.

I've frequently used 6K files as a source, but generally in a 4K timeline, rendering to 4K. For our purposes, that's fine -- I haven't seen the need to actually have a 6K timeline with 6K material. It will play at 24fps in real time with 30 or 40 nodes (even mild NR), but 60fps would be rough. It has no problem with H.264 or H.265 material, but we try to transcode those files to ProRes 422 first when possible.

Did you ever try 10 bit 4:2:2 HEVC without transcoding? Would that be decoded by the CPUs only? After all, that Mac Pro has enough of them.
But, AFAIK, those machines don't have any specific hardware for this. While it still is a solid machine for a shop that has mainly RAW or ProRes coming in, it may be limited with all these 'semi-pro' cameras around shooting that demanding HEVC codec.
We also tried to keep our old 'cheesegraters' alive as long as we could, being such great workhorses. But now students are showing up more and more with material as described above. If they don't forget to have TC activated in their cameras, it works absolutely fine on a Mac mini M2 Pro 16 GB.

Thank you gentlemen. After Uli’s first response, I kind of decided to just stay with PC and will upgrade my old computer, pretty much replacing everything except for case, power, and storage to a gen12 Intel i9 cpu, up the memory with fast DDR5 to 128mb, new mobo, and the Radeon 7700xtx gpu with 24gb vram.

Sounds good. But might be better to go for Nvidia, considering all the negative experiences we've recently read about regarding AMD's drivers.

My budget for this build is a gpu of $1K. The 7900xtx has 24gb vram and supposed to be comparable to the NVidia 3090 that also has 24gb vram but the 3090 is way out of my budget. However, looking at the gpu benchmarks from gaming sites, the 4080 Super with 16Gb vram and the 4070ti have overall gaming performance equal to that of the 7900xtx albeit they’re a hundred to two hundred more which I can spring for. However, I’m not certain if those benchmarks translate to creative content (video editing/coloring) applications. I can’t find any comparison of the and with any of the NVidia gpu based on creative content apps. Besides Puget, which does not have a 7900xtx versus 4080 super or 4070ti, are there any others out there doing this service for creators?

If the 4080 Super or 4070ti is equal to or slightly better in performance, they only have 16Gb and 12 gb vram respectively and I don’t know if that will be a bottleneck for Resolve.

While you can never have too much hardware power for DR, I think 24 Gb VRAM would only be needed to work in 8K, like e.g. for 360 degree videos. 16 GB should be plenty for UHD.
But somebody with such a GPU should chime in, since personally I didn't ever experience RAM shortage on Apple's M*.

I’ve been told that the best bang, if I can find it, is the 4070ti Super. A couple of content creators in LA said that not to go for the 4080 or 4080 Super as they are trash and pricey…. And to just go with the 4070ti Super.

I doubt that I will be doing any 8K in the next year or two or five, although I have had clients who has given me 6K from RED and BMD to ingest. Although I don’t subscribe to future proofing, I also do want to spend on a lemon.

So I think it’s now between the AMD 7900xtx 24gb vram versus NVidia 4070ti Super.

6K to ingest shouldn't be a problem, I was referring to timeline resolution.

Doing more research, I found the AMD 7900 XTX to show performing results over the NVidea in the following Puget test on DVR studio. Even it scores low for the gpu effects test, it was still better than the 4070ti super card. Overall, it’s a performance card and has the best value as they are now available for about $640 if you catch them on sale.

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I have been using AMD GPUs since Resolve 11 and never had drivers issues with Resolve. I can only believe that the newer drivers are even more solid and well supports in DVR Studio.

So far, with the info from Puget and other benchmarks, as well as comments from friends of the creative community, I am leaning towards the AMD as it has all the features I need and at a reasonable price point.

Also keen to know if this will have a positive impact using an older Mac Studio M1 Max does anyone have a real life experience where they can vouch for the performance?

You can't add a GPU to a M* Mac. Or do I misunderstand your question?

You could potentially add more GPU devices through the use of peripherals but the throughput will then be limited to the interface used.

After further research, the AMD 7900 XTX with 24gb is just 2% better in total effective performance compared to the NVidea 4070ti Super. Also I learned from other folks who own the 4080 is that it has some problems with heat when OC and definitely more expensive compared to the prior ones mentioned. Both NVidia cards have 16Gb vram. So while the amd has more vram, I think from a price/performance standpoint the 4070ti super is where I think is the sweet spot for those 3 cards. Also, probably less headache with NVidia drivers over the amd.

You could potentially add more GPU devices through the use of peripherals but the throughput will then be limited to the interface used.

No, external GPUs are no longer supported in Apple Silicon (M1 / M2 / M3).

I’m about to purchase the 4070ti Super with 16Gb vram. My plan is to replace the 2 old amd GPUs on my current system (see signature below) which has been a workhorse for things up to 4K BRAW at 60fps, where it will start to struggle with 15 nodes, OFX, and NR. Then I came across a used Mac M1 Max with 10 core cpu and 24 core gpu 32gb for 1K, $200 more than the 4070. That perked up my curiosity because in particular it doesn’t consume electricity like my pc built. But I worry about not being able to use my declink pci card for my reference display on the Mac and will it provide similar performance compared with an i9 12900k cpu and the 4070 ti super gpu? And of course, I can always upgrade the RAm on the PC and stuck with 32gb on the Mac. I can’t find anything on the web to research this matter and was wondering if anyone here have any experience with this two products. Thanks!

I'd go for the PC.
That Mac is a bit short on memory for demanding processes and while you can use the Decklink in an external box, it'll be too much of a hazzle IMHO. The only two arguments in favour of the Mac are portability and energy consumption. But it may take you more time to get a stable setup with the PC, if you don't have the experience.

Thanks Uli.