BlackMagic eGPU - Yes, I Know It's Mentioned In Other Threads... BUT!

[Dave Maze]

14 hours ago, DBounce said:

Ok, just did some testing with the 1DXMk2 files. Honestly, FCPX seems to be about the same either way with these files. They play back ok on both in internal and external drive. And the eGPU makes no perceivable difference. I'm thinking my money would be better spent on a fast external M.2 drive for the C200 files. Transfer speeds make a very noticeable difference where the C200 is concerned. A fast drive would seem to offer the best bang for the buck.

Thank you for testing that. So sad that it's sucking. I hope FCPX fixes this so external GPU is better. I guess Ill go with an i7 MacBook Pro 15". I still need to try an iMac Pro with MJPG files. 

[Don Kotlos]

I received a new macbook pro 15 yesterday. 

I suggest anyone that wants to upgrade from a >=2015 macbook pro to wait a bit or at least don't waste money on the i9 CPU. The throttling issues are a real problem and the performance improvements are tiny for heavy workloads in video processing. For photo editing it is much better and it might be worth the upgrade. 

There are plenty of throttling examples around, but here is one with FCPX in which disabling 2/6 cores improves performance!

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/18/how-macbook-pro-throttles-with-final-cut-pro-x/

Again I will stress out the fact that if you are into Resolve/Premiere and need a laptop you are better off with a Windows machine. 

If you really want to get the new macbooks for other reasons, then use this to speed up your fans:

https://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

[DBounce]

1 hour ago, DaveAltizer said:

Thank you for testing that. So sad that it's sucking. I hope FCPX fixes this so external GPU is better. I guess Ill go with an i7 MacBook Pro 15". I still need to try an iMac Pro with MJPG files. 

I hate to say it, but I’m going to hold off from buying the new MBP. I’m thinking there is no compelling reason to part with close to $7k when it’s likely there is no performance gain in real-world use.

As for the eGPU, it’s probably going back. It might make some difference to render times, but slow render times was never my motivation for purchasing it.

[jpfilmz]

26 minutes ago, Don Kotlos said:

I received a new macbook pro 15 yesterday. 

I suggest anyone interested that wants to upgrade from a >=2015 macbook pro to wait a bit or at least don't waste money on the i9 CPU. The throttling issues are a real problem and the performance improvements are tiny for heavy workloads in video processing. For photo editing it is much better and it might be worth the upgrade. 

There are plenty of throttling examples around, but here is one with FCPX in which disabling 2/6 cores improves performance!

https://9to5mac.com/2018/07/18/how-macbook-pro-throttles-with-final-cut-pro-x/

Again I will stress out the fact that if you are into Resolve/Premiere and need a laptop you are better off with a Windows machine. 

If you really want to get the new macbooks for other reasons, then use this to speed up your fans:

https://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

I just picked one up yesterday as well and im not seeing a massive throttling issue like whats being reported. Im not getting constant 4.8ghz cpu speed.  Average 2.2 to 3.5. But im still testing.  I coming from a 2013 macbook pro so from a 2016 to 2017 owner the 2018 might not be worth an upgrade.

 

[DBounce]

28 minutes ago, Don Kotlos said:

Again I will stress out the fact that if you are into Resolve/Premiere and need a laptop you are better off with a Windows machine. 

I would love to see a new Razer Blade Pro with thin bezels, hdr 4K screen and option for 64GB of ram. 

[Damphousse]

On 7/16/2018 at 8:03 PM, webrunner5 said:

No I think you are seeing how terrible an Apple laptop is LoL.

It is a pretty shocking set up.  Laptops of any kind are just not ideal for 4k grading and editing.  And the Mac thing is just ridiculous.  I prefer a simple clean black box under my desk with all drives, graphics cards, and various other cards tucked neatly away in one package.  Having a wire jungle on my desk with several boxes is not elegant.

[DBounce]

So after some more testing with and without the eGPU, I have concluded that render times are reduced by approximately 25%. Color me unimpressed... and disappointed. I expected more for north of $700.

[jpfilmz]

53 minutes ago, DBounce said:

So after some more testing with and without the eGPU, I have concluded that render times are reduced by approximately 25%. Color me unimpressed... and disappointed. I expected more for north of $700.

Did the playback improve any with the C200 files?

[DBounce]

2 minutes ago, jpfilmz said:

Did the playback improve any with the C200 files?

No, the biggest difference to playback is the speed of the hd. When I moved the files to my internal 2000 MB/s drive playback was acceptable. But connecting the eGPU yielded no perceivable performance improvements for playback.

[Dave Maze]

On 7/19/2018 at 9:04 AM, DBounce said:

I hate to say it, but I’m going to hold off from buying the new MBP. I’m thinking there is no compelling reason to part with close to $7k when it’s likely there is no performance gain in real-world use.

As for the eGPU, it’s probably going back. It might make some difference to render times, but slow render times was never my motivation for purchasing it.

Just went into the apple store with a hard drive full of 1DC MJPG files. FCPX cuts through it like a breeze. I layered four layers of MJPG 4k in a timeline and added a color grade. It played fine. Only when I did 8 layers did it drop frames.

Apple has a leasing program I wasn't aware of. An iMac Pro base model to lease is like $180 a month for a 24 month lease. A MBP to lease is $160 a month! For $20 more you can have a computer that SMOKES. Im going to think more about it, but I may go iMac Pro. I sit in my office all day anyways. 

[Don Kotlos]

30 minutes ago, DaveAltizer said:

Just went into the apple store with a hard drive full of 1DC MJPG files. FCPX cuts through it like a breeze.

That is with the iMac Pro right? Depending on the source of the footage that can be a decent machine. For example with H264 a normal mac might be fine, but for demanding codecs like MJPG or flavors of RAW then it makes more sense to go with the imac pro.

[Robert Collins]

On 7/19/2018 at 6:52 PM, BTM_Pix said:

I think BM will do well with ths box.

 

It certainly seems a popular product with youtube vloggers.....

[Robert Collins]

A pretty strong comeback to the i9gate issue...

 

[kye]

19 minutes ago, Robert Collins said:

A pretty strong comeback to the i9gate issue...

It would have been good if he quoted a percentage figure for how much faster the i9 was - those bar graphs all looked quite consistent at about 10-20% faster with the i9.

[deezid]

I mean you can put your Macbook Pro i9 into a freezer, attach the Blackmagic eGPU to it and performance problems are solved.
I don't see a problem here...

[Don Kotlos]

If you compare the 2018 to previous gen MBP in some heavy rendering task you will see what everyone means by i9 being limited. The performance gain will be very small ~10-15% and in some extreme cases it can be worse as well. That is far from the ~50% performance gain that you would expect theoretically from using 2 extra cores. 

On the other hand, if you use a program that occasionally uses all of the cores at max for few seconds then you will see that performance boost. This is what the Geekbench measures and with which you can get ~50% better performance gain. 

As has been shown here, the problem is with the inability of the cooling system to get the CPU under 100C, once the wattage is >60W. Once you restrict the wattage to some level that the cooling system can handle, you can actually get a boost in performance.

For example I did the cinebench test in which you can see turboboost for the first few seconds and then the throttling with some oscillations of the frequency:

 

I then restricted the wattage to 45W:

I also did the test where I allowed the wattage to go high for the first few seconds and then restricted it to 45W:

That is ~35% better than the older generation MBP and ~12% better than the stock settings. Keep in mind that the boost in performance with the i9 when compared to i7 comes only when the CPU can use more than 45W. The Geekbench score for the i9 with the fixed 45W is ~20700 for the multicore similar to the base i7. So while restricting the wattage can be helpful in CPU heavy tasks such as scientific computations/video rendering/etc for the average usage when all of the cores are used for less than few seconds the current settings work fine. 

You can also see that with the 45W limit, the temperatures didn't reach 100C so in theory an even higher limit ~55W would work even better and which can get the performance gains close to the theoretical 50%.

In short, the current macs do not perform as good as expected. I am confident that apple can at least provide some remedy with a combination of wattage limitation after few seconds + some tighter coupling of fan speed and the temperatures. 

[webrunner5]

3 hours ago, Don Kotlos said:

In  short, the current macs do not perform as good as expected. I am confident that apple can at least provide some remedy with a combination of wattage limitation after few seconds + some tighter coupling of fan speed and the temperatures. 

Hope Springs Eternal in Apple Land! ?

[dslnc]

A pity they didn’t go for a Vega 64 16GB egpu straight away. Aiming for the higher end since it cannot be upgraded.

lets hope they will give us more options soon. I like the idea of a near silent unit. But I would prefer nvidia to get Cuda power for 3D renders. 

 

 

[kye]

18 hours ago, deezid said:

I mean you can put your Macbook Pro i9 into a freezer, attach the Blackmagic eGPU to it and performance problems are solved.
I don't see a problem here...

I'm surprised that no-one has made a cooler for the MBP.  Considering that these computers use the case as a heatsink, all you would have to do is make a platform to put it on that gets a good thermal couple to the bottom and then have some way of getting rid of that heat elsewhere.

Things like these would have some effect:

but even something like a larger aluminium heatsink would probably get a better thermocouple, especially if you shaped it to fit snugly, and then you could have a much larger surface area underneath that with fans.

This might seem a bit ridiculous, but eGPUs only make commercial sense because they improve the speed of your computer, which lessening the thermal throttling will also do, and installing some fans and a heatsink is a lot cheaper than having an entire device with a video card in it!

[Robert Collins]

31 minutes ago, kye said:

I'm surprised that no-one has made a cooler for the MBP.  Considering that these computers use the case as a heatsink, all you would have to do is make a platform to put it on that gets a good thermal couple to the bottom and then have some way of getting rid of that heat elsewhere.

Things like these would have some effect:

but even something like a larger aluminium heatsink would probably get a better thermocouple, especially if you shaped it to fit snugly, and then you could have a much larger surface area underneath that with fans.

This might seem a bit ridiculous, but eGPUs only make commercial sense because they improve the speed of your computer, which lessening the thermal throttling will also do, and installing some fans and a heatsink is a lot cheaper than having an entire device with a video card in it!

I'm not sure I agree. By the time you have bought your fan, external egpu and desktop monitor to recreate a fairly feeble desktop, you should realize that what you probably need is an iMac (pro). And if you need to save money and want to remain portable just get a fairly basic Macbook Pro 13.

I used to use M43 which has a relatively small sensor. I found I was spending more and more on heavier, faster lenses that eventually I realized what I actually wanted was a bigger sensor.