power consumption and thermal output information for mac pro computers

Power Consumption And Thermal Output Information Pro Computers Full Bore The
Power Consumption And Thermal Output Information Pro Computers Mac Pro And

LuxMark on the other hand saw around a 14 reduction in performance, from 2040K samples per second down to 1750K when run in parallel with the x264 test.

By having all three players share one large heatsink Apple can optimize for the most likely usage scenarios where at most one processor is running at close to max TDP.

I have a Promise Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt chassis with four 3.5 7200 RPM hard drives inside.

Power Consumption And Thermal Output Information Pro Computers Mac Pro And

The Pegasus sits four feet away from my Mac Pro and at idle the hum of its drives drowns out the idle fan noise of the Mac.

Its not until you run a prolonged workload that you can hear an increase in noise from the Mac Pro.

I ran FurMark under OS X in parallel with a relatively heavy 4K render in Final Cut Pro.

I was rendering a 20 minute 4K project with two effects applied across the entire timeline.

The basic render used up 4 - 8 threads, while the effects ensured the compute GPU had some work to do.

Even if youre running for short bursts with everything cranking away on a problem.

Its only under prolonged use of the CPU both GPUs that the fan has to spin up this high.

I quit FurMark and kept the FCP render going, which brought system power down from 380W to 326W.

It also slowly dropped fan speed from 1900 RPM down to 1500 RPM before smoothly alternating between 1200 RPM and 1450 RPM.

The way the Mac Pros fan ramps is actually just as important as its ability to remove heat.

There are no dramatic increases in speed, just an incredibly smooth curve that the Pros fan moves up and down.

Power Consumption And Thermal Output Information Pro Computers Full Bore The

Even at full bore the Mac Pros fan noise is more pleasant than harsh.

Its not magic, just good system design coupled with the fact that even with a pair of D700s Apple went a bit conservative on GPU speed.

Had this been a system capable of pulling 800W at the wall, wed be having a different discussion about noise.

If youre running all of the parts at full tilt, are any of them going to throttle I have to work pretty hard to get the fan to spin up under OS X, but in Windows its a lot easier since I can just toss a single multi-GPU workload at the problem.

We dont have good tools to actually measure their behavior in between unfortunately.

Even with all 12 cores taxed heavily, I never saw any drops below the CPUs 2.7GHz base clock.

Once again, I saw no drop in CPU or GPU clocks although I believe I was approaching the limits of where that would hold true.

The system was pulling an average of 410W at that point, with peak power draw at 429W.

The first rendering pass took about a 3 hit, likely due to the CPU not being able to turbo as highat all, but the second heavily threaded pass was on par with my standalone run without LuxMark in the background.

Power Consumption And Thermal Output Information For Mac Pro Computers