Dermot Shane wrote:Merci Francois!
have a 23-hour render session under way on the 10-core model (55 hours of C300mk2 footage transcoding to ProRes). I'll keep you posted! It's been a few hours and I don't even hear the fan, it's much more quiet than the maxed out regular 2017 iMac, surprisingly. There's plenty of hot air coming out of the back vent, but the fans are bigger/quieter. The machine is barely warm after hours of all 10 cores running full blast,
this is excatly the workflow my cleint is targeting, getting dalies turned around quickly to ProRez, currently useing a 5.1, so the imacpro should be a significant improvement in terms of speed
one thing their 5.1 has going for it is reliablity
The render finished without problems, stayed cool and quiet all the way. Apple designed quite the cooling system. You can tell the classic iMac's cooling system is getting near its max design capacity with the 2017 maxed out iteration (you often hear the fans, and the iMac does get hot). But the iMac Pro's cooling design is plenty sufficient for the current iteration of the iMac Pro (and has room to accommodate more for the next couple of years no doubt).
As for turning around ProRes dailies, compared to the 5,1 Mac Pro, here's one of the quick tests I ran:
42mins 1080p ProRes4444 clip transcoded to 422HQ:
17min 39sec on our Mac Pro 2012 12-core 3.46GHz (note the faster, upgraded CPU's here)
9min 40sec on our iMac Pro 2017 10-core 3.00GHz
With all cores working full blast on both machines, the iMac Pro is roughly twice as fast! Both machines have 32GB of RAM, and the export was going from one SDD drive to another in both cases, so drives do not account for the difference. Given the performance and cooling efficiency of the 10-core iMac Pro, I think the 18-core model is well worth it. Both Xeon chips are 140W, so the cooling performance should be identical. But 18 cores @ 2.2 vs 10 cores @ 3,0 -- roughly 25% faster I guess, if we extrapolate total GHz? That's an expensive upgrade for just 25% more. Maybe the 10-core is the sweet spot if budget is an issue. But if budget is no issue, I think the 18-core is going to be just as cool and quiet as the 10-core.