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Lol I have one of those 2nd Gen Thinkpad USB C docks but apparently it doesn't work with the newer touch-bar macbook pros. I'm looking on amazon and there are a million different dock options. I just need to drive two regular 1080p displays. Anyone have any experience with this or have a recommendation?
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Oct 2, 2020 22:02
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VGA? Unless that's a requirement I think I'd prefer the Apple AV Adapter or the Caldigit Mini. There might be another Caldigit, but either of those are handy if a little spendy. Alternatively, a display with USB-C input is oh so nice. nitsuga fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Oct 3, 2020 |
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Oct 2, 2020 23:05
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Is it worthwhile upgrading my Mac Pro 5,1 to an NVMe SSD boot volume? I've done just about everything else I can to this computer; at this point maybe it's just like trying to squeeze juice from an old grapefruit. Maybe the money would be better spent going up to 128GB RAM, or doing that crazy power supply upgrade so I can support a more powerful GPU than my RX580. IDK, I kinda just feel like upgrading something.
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Oct 3, 2020 18:16
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Yeah, switching the boot drive to an NVME guarantees faster boot times and all-around faster performance. Also faster system (ha) updates and faster loading times, but not super fast because to be blunt IMHO Mojave (or any other macOS) is not optimized to work off SSDs. Not sure it's worth going to the SYBA or Highpoint just for a single SSD though.
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Oct 3, 2020 19:19
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Charger for my 2013 rMBP (MagSafe 2 85w) has finally died after looking rough for a long time. Any recommendations over spending £80 (UK) for a new branded one from Apple? How are third party chargers these days? Still need fire insurance for the house?
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Oct 3, 2020 20:58
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Binary Badger posted:Also faster system (ha) updates and faster loading times, but not super fast because to be blunt IMHO Mojave (or any other macOS) is not optimized to work off SSDs. Apple switched macOS to a filesystem explicitly designed for flash which, as a result of same, isn't very good on HDDs, so... IDK what exactly you're looking for them to do
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Oct 3, 2020 21:08
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Subliminal Ninja posted:Charger for my 2013 rMBP (MagSafe 2 85w) has finally died after looking rough for a long time. Any recommendations over spending £80 (UK) for a new branded one from Apple? Third party MagSafe chargers are uniformly garbage. Apple's IP control is tight enough that anybody who wants to build legitimate, good-quality hardware stays away, because they'd be buried under lawsuits from Cupertino. That's thankfully going away with USB-C charging, and you can get a good-quality 13" rMBP friendly USB-C charger for $25-30 now, but it doesn't apply to older systems like yours. They might not be "check your fire insurance" bad, but a poorly designed, poorly built power supply going bad can cook your computer. Counterfeits are also an issue, even from relatively reputable sellers. OWC, which is a long-standing and relatively reputable third party seller in the US, was busted selling slightly discounted "bulk packaging, but genuine Apple" MagSafe chargers that turned out to be counterfeits a while ago. Unfortunately, the best thing to do here is to buy the expensive one, straight from Apple.
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Oct 3, 2020 21:21
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Subliminal Ninja posted:Charger for my 2013 rMBP (MagSafe 2 85w) has finally died after looking rough for a long time. Any recommendations over spending £80 (UK) for a new branded one from Apple? You could do what I did and buy a used 1st gen macsafe charger with a $5 adapter from amazon. It wasn't pretty but it limped my computer along for the last 6 months of it's useful life.
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Oct 3, 2020 21:33
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Mister Speaker posted:Is it worthwhile upgrading my Mac Pro 5,1 to an NVMe SSD boot volume? I've done just about everything else I can to this computer; at this point maybe it's just like trying to squeeze juice from an old grapefruit. Maybe the money would be better spent going up to 128GB RAM, or doing that crazy power supply upgrade so I can support a more powerful GPU than my RX580. IDK, I kinda just feel like upgrading something. yes there are thin n light laptops more capable than your mac pro rn
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Oct 3, 2020 21:36
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I should mention that I've already got an SSD boot drive (plus several more) on the PCI bus, it's just not an NVMe volume. I'm running Mojave. Is there an appreciable bump in performance from my SSD to an NVMe boot volume on such an old machine?
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Oct 3, 2020 22:10
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I would personally be surprised although if you’re doing a bunch of editing or writing simultaneously I can imagine having two solid state storage pools on different buses might be helpful Edit: oh I read he rest of your post. Honestly I mean if you have a slot that isn’t doing anything else then there’s no downside. Would you really use the extra ram? Is there anything else that you feel has limited you?
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Oct 3, 2020 22:30
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Subliminal Ninja posted:Charger for my 2013 rMBP (MagSafe 2 85w) has finally died after looking rough for a long time. Any recommendations over spending £80 (UK) for a new branded one from Apple? get a new one from Apple
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Oct 3, 2020 22:53
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Not really. I want to get into more video editing, I've got loads of footage from my motorcycle and a few cottage trips this summer that I'm going to cut my teeth on. The other thing someone told me to look into was some sort of PSU upgrade to support a significantly-better GPU than my RX580, but I probably can't afford that any time soon. So I'm getting some conflicting information; one friend is telling me since the NVMe volume will be on a PCI adaptor it will hit the same bottleneck that my current SSDs are hitting, but another guy told me he's running basically the same machine as me and his PCIe-NVMe boot volume is getting ~1400MB/s read/write times, where his other SSDs are more to the tune of ~240MB/s - roughly the same as my PCI SSD.
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Oct 3, 2020 22:57
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Mister Speaker posted:Not really. I want to get into more video editing, I've got loads of footage from my motorcycle and a few cottage trips this summer that I'm going to cut my teeth on. The other thing someone told me to look into was some sort of PSU upgrade to support a significantly-better GPU than my RX580, but I probably can't afford that any time soon. AFAIK the drive bus is the bottleneck here and not PCIe, so your friend with the wicked sick speeds is correct. Your slower drives are converting PCIe to SATA. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.
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Oct 3, 2020 23:03
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Mister Speaker posted:So I'm getting some conflicting information; one friend is telling me since the NVMe volume will be on a PCI adaptor it will hit the same bottleneck that my current SSDs are hitting, but another guy told me he's running basically the same machine as me and his PCIe-NVMe boot volume is getting ~1400MB/s read/write times, where his other SSDs are more to the tune of ~240MB/s - roughly the same as my PCI SSD. Ok Comboomer posted:AFAIK the drive bus is the bottleneck here and not PCIe, so your friend with the wicked sick speeds is correct. Your slower drives are converting PCIe to SATA. Propellerhead postin' incoming All the Mac Pro 5,1 PCIe slots are at least 4 lanes Gen2 PCIe. One lane of Gen2 is a 5 gigabit/sec serial connection with 8b/10b coding that reduces the raw performance to 4 Gbps. Multiply by four, because four lanes, and you're at 16 Gbps. Divide by 8 for bytes, and you're at 2 GB/s. Account for packet overhead, and 1.4 to 1.5 GB/s is quite reasonable. So long as the NVMe adapter card connects all four lanes to the SSD, and the SSD is also capable of 4 lanes (most are), that's an expected result. Assuming the current SSDs are SATA, the 5,1 has SATA 2 ports capable of 3.0 Gbits/sec line rate, which after a series of similar overhead calculations results in real world performance of maybe 250 to 270 MB/s. So yeah, the friend with the practical experience isn't talking out of his rear end. The other one, though
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Oct 3, 2020 23:22
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Alright, safe. Thanks guys for clearing that up. So now I'm looking at some options for PCIe NVMe cards. OWC is usually my go-to, but it seems like I could probably do this a lot cheaper via NewEgg or CanadaComputers or even Amazon... thing is, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for (although BobHoward your post going into lanes helps narrow things down). Is something like this what I'm looking for? How about the NVMe drive itself - I understand the Samsung 970 EVO drives are popular. Thanks again for all of your help!
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Oct 4, 2020 00:00
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The 16in Macbook fckn rules. I ordered some dock on Amazon that was like $100 that has two hdmi ports. Hopefully it works. I will be posting a trip report when it comes in on Monday.
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Oct 4, 2020 01:59
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Mister Speaker posted:Alright, safe. Thanks guys for clearing that up. So now I'm looking at some options for PCIe NVMe cards. OWC is usually my go-to, but it seems like I could probably do this a lot cheaper via NewEgg or CanadaComputers or even Amazon... thing is, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for (although BobHoward your post going into lanes helps narrow things down). Is something like this what I'm looking for? How about the NVMe drive itself - I understand the Samsung 970 EVO drives are popular. Ok, so, this is where you have to be careful. Every PCIe slot, no matter how wide or fast, starts up as if it's 1 lane Gen 1. After the two sides of the link exchange pleasantries, they negotiate a higher link width and speed, and try again. Once the link is fully operational, all the lanes are ganged together - they're all being used to talk to one PCIe device. However, some motherboards can "bifurcate" a slot's lanes into multiple logical links. A motherboard might support slicing a x16 slot into four x4 links, or 2x8, or maybe even 8x2. That brings us to the adapter you linked. M.2 NVMe card sockets are just x4 PCIe in a funny connector. The adapter is a passive device which wires lanes 0 to 3 of the x16 slot to one M.2 socket, lanes 4 to 7 to the next M.2, and so on. In other words, it relies on 4x4 bifurcation. Since I'm fairly sure the Mac Pro 5,1 doesn't support bifurcation, if you tried it, you'd find that at most one NVMe socket worked. If all you need is one M.2 NVMe drive, you can buy something like this much cheaper: https://smile.amazon.com/YATENG-Controller-Expansion-Card-Support-Converter/dp/B07JJTVGZM/ref=sr_1_3?crid=W7KMPB8SOSNC If you need multiple drives, well, as long as you have a free PCIe slot, just buy another adapter... There do exist x16 PCIe to 4x NVMe adapters which don't require bifurcation. They pull this off by using a PCIe switch chip to provide four downstream PCIe ports from one upstream connection to the motherboard. Unfortunately, they're quite expensive - last I looked, $400 or more. BobHoward fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 02:10
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Mister Speaker posted:How about the NVMe drive itself - I understand the Samsung 970 EVO drives are popular. As for this, and even the question of what adapter to use, I recommend going through the massive but info-packed OP of this Mac Rumors forums thread, which compiles the results of many people testing various combinations. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pcie-ssds-nvme-ahci.2146725/ Generally speaking, while Samsung SSDs are quite good, they're also overpriced. Since it looks like WD Black SN750 has reported good compatibility, and is considerably cheaper than 970 EVO, I'd be inclined to give those drives a look.
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Oct 4, 2020 02:28
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Mister Speaker posted:Alright, safe. Thanks guys for clearing that up. So now I'm looking at some options for PCIe NVMe cards. OWC is usually my go-to, but it seems like I could probably do this a lot cheaper via NewEgg or CanadaComputers or even Amazon... thing is, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for (although BobHoward your post going into lanes helps narrow things down). Is something like this what I'm looking for? How about the NVMe drive itself - I understand the Samsung 970 EVO drives are popular. That card is known not to work on Mac Pro 5,1s. If you don't want to spend a lot of money, you could go no heat sink and get the Lycom DT-120 for like $20, or spend twice the amount and get the AquaComputer kryo m.2 that has heat sinks for both sides of the SSD (if you get a double sided..) I use the latter card on my 5,1 and it's been great, but not as fast as I would like, but obviously I'm jonesing for the money to get a HighPoint SSD7101-A-1 which is like $400. With my kryo it's about 1300-1400 MB/sec. The HighPoint SSD7101-a-1 can go up to about 6,000 MB/sec with two Samsung 970 Pros; it has 4 SSD slots where you can boot from one SSD and make a RAID of the other three. Buuuuuut, it's about $400, $379 street price. If you don't want to spend $400, for $200 there's the SYBA SI-PEX40129 that'll let you get up to 3,000 MB/sec but some people have been complaining on MacRumors that newer revisions fell off the cliff, literally, in build quality. Both of these cards may need their internal fan replaced, as some have complained the included fan is too loud/shrill. On my Mac Pro 5,1 I'm currently using an Inland Premium 1 TB NVMe SSD that I got for $99 from MicroCenter before the last NAND crash. It's never given me problems except for when I had to temporarily switch back to a Samsung 951 AHCI to update the BootROM To 144.0.0.0. The current version of the Inland Premium 1 TB has like 1/2 the DRAM of the version I bought, but it gives me very close performance to the 970 Pro, and it's much less than a 970 Pro, $120 for 1 TB at the moment. The 1 TB is single sided too. Apple is never ever going to update the 5,1 BootROM so if that's the BootROM you have you shouldn't worry. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 02:40
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Also you shouldn’t need a new PSU for an RX580, those Mac Pros shipped with 1000 watt power supplies. I think the PSU is only a problem if you’re running some real hungry GPUs from nVidia but that particular card worked just fine for me for gaming.
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Oct 4, 2020 02:49
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Yeah, I have the Apple-reccommended Sapphire Pulse RX580, to make sure it runs proper you just have to get both an 8-pin to PCIe cable and a 6-pin to PCIe cable, you can find a bunch on Amazon. Also, you MUST install it before you update to Mojave if you haven't already. The Mojave installer will refuse to budge on a 5,1 without a compatible card.
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Oct 4, 2020 02:55
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This is comprehensive stuff, thanks. I didn't realize there was such a wide range of adapter solutions, or that some of them were so inexpensive. I'm going to grab a couple of those cheap Amazon ones and some WD SSDs when I have the dosh. I'm just a bit concerned about physical space in the case, between my RX580, two SSDs on the PCI bus and all the drive bays full. I'm sure they'll fit. FCKGW posted:Also you shouldn’t need a new PSU for an RX580, those Mac Pros shipped with 1000 watt power supplies. I think the PSU is only a problem if you’re running some real hungry GPUs from nVidia but that particular card worked just fine for me for gaming. Yeah, I have an RX580 already, someone mentioned the Radeon Vega cards or something like that. Binary Badger posted:Yeah, I have the Apple-reccommended Sapphire Pulse RX580, to make sure it runs proper you just have to get both an 8-pin to PCIe cable and a 6-pin to PCIe cable, you can find a bunch on Amazon. Same exact card. Updating to Mojave was an ordeal, ugh. I had to track down the native video card for my machine (which is not the card it came with when I got it from MacDoc) because the EFI update wouldn't take without it. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Oct 4, 2020 |
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Oct 4, 2020 07:06
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So I ordered one dock off Amazon from a company called Vava and sadly it only supports one external monitor with macs. Basically it will only extend the display over to one monitor, every subsequent monitor will get a mirrored display of the first extended one. I processed a return and got a refund (fortunately). I then went ahead and ordered this larger brick thing from a company called 4URPC which reviews confirm work with the 16in Macbook pro. It also supports full size display port which is good for one of my displays. I'll post a trip report when it gets here in a few days. Who knew that getting 2 external monitors with a Mac would be such a pain!
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Oct 4, 2020 17:25
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nitsuga posted:VGA? Unless that's a requirement I think I'd prefer the Apple AV Adapter or the Caldigit Mini. There might be another Caldigit, but either of those are handy if a little spendy. 64bit_Dophins posted:So I ordered one dock off Amazon from a company called Vava and sadly it only supports one external monitor with macs. I think I'd give the Caldigit a try personally. But maybe the other Amazon dock will do the trick.
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Oct 4, 2020 17:59
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64bit_Dophins posted:So I ordered one dock off Amazon from a company called Vava and sadly it only supports one external monitor with macs. Just use two cables. Not sure why everyone is obsessed with daisy chaining
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Oct 4, 2020 18:28
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nitsuga posted:I think I'd give the Caldigit a try personally. But maybe the other Amazon dock will do the trick. This one looks really good. If the one I just ordered doesn't work I'll return it and get the CalDigit.
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Oct 4, 2020 19:26
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Anyone here also have awful battery life for the first few weeks on their 2019 16in MBP. My battery only has 3 cycles on it right now and I've been averaging 3-4 hours on battery just doing light browsing/watching youtube videos. I looked at some guides online and was as per their recommendation reset the SMC and the NVRAM but the battery life still isn't great. Reading around on threads most people seem to get 9-10 hours after using the laptop for a few weeks and putting 10-20 cycles on the battery. Anyone have a similar experience with this? It just seems a bit odd that the battery would dramatically improve like that just with general use.
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Oct 4, 2020 23:10
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My wife's mid-2012 13" MBP is on its last legs, with some trackpad related KPs recently, and other shenanigans, so it's time to start thinking about a replacement. She only browses and watches videos on it, so I'm hoping it will last long enough to replace it with an ARM macbook at some point. However, if it does die before then, is the base MBA trash? Would it at least be noticeable faster and snappier™ than her current MBP? Hard to quantify I realize, and it appears the MBA is nominally faster based on geekbench scores, but "1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i3" seems like a regression.
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Oct 4, 2020 23:38
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64bit_Dophins posted:Anyone here also have awful battery life for the first few weeks on their 2019 16in MBP. I've had the 16" MBP since it first came out and have gotten nowhere near the advertised 10 hours ever. At 78 cycles on the battery now. I usually get around 5 hours.
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Oct 4, 2020 23:48
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Brain Issues posted:I've had the 16" MBP since it first came out and have gotten nowhere near the advertised 10 hours ever. At 78 cycles on the battery now. I usually get around 5 hours. Sounds about right. I've just heard a lot of different things online. Some people are claiming to get around 9 hours. I don't know if it has anything to do with the firewall program, and the 5 or so utilities I have run at launch along with discord, textual irc, and mailplane running all of the time. I imagine you would get better battery life with Safari?
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Oct 4, 2020 23:55
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mik posted:My wife's mid-2012 13" MBP is on its last legs, with some trackpad related KPs recently, and other shenanigans, so it's time to start thinking about a replacement. She only browses and watches videos on it, so I'm hoping it will last long enough to replace it with an ARM macbook at some point. However, if it does die before then, is the base MBA trash? Would it at least be noticeable faster and snappier™ than her current MBP? Hard to quantify I realize, and it appears the MBA is nominally faster based on geekbench scores, but "1.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i3" seems like a regression. I’d consider the mid-tier Air: i5 quad core. Otherwise, maybe consider the cheaper 13” MBP ($1200~) Or, yeah, do what you can to wait a month or two and see what the ARM Macs look like.
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Oct 4, 2020 23:56
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64bit_Dophins posted:Sounds about right. I’ve always used chrome so maybe safari would improve it, but I highly doubt it would double it from 5 to 10. I do use GfxCardStatus and can confirm 99.9% of the time I am not using the dGPU. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me because I mainly use it like a desktop where it’s always docked, and 60W GaN chargers are tiny and lightweight. I would probably have returned it if I cared at all about battery life.
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Oct 5, 2020 00:02
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Brain Issues posted:I’ve always used chrome so maybe safari would improve it, but I highly doubt it would double it from 5 to 10. I do use GfxCardStatus and can confirm 99.9% of the time I am not using the dGPU. I'm probably going to use this docked 90% of the time as well. I am kind of insulted by this so if the battery life is still this lovely in two weeks I'm going to return it.
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Oct 5, 2020 00:12
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64bit_Dophins posted:Sounds about right. And yeah Safari should get you some more battery life. Just curious, what other utilities? Discord is an Electron app so might not be the best but eh.
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Oct 5, 2020 00:25
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japtor posted:Get a CPU meter and see if anything seems to be sucking more CPU than it should. I've been watching it and other than Discord helper which occasionally will stop responding (it's done this on every machine I've ever installed discord on) nothing seems to be sucking up power. The utilities I have running are BetterSnapTool, NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software, Sound Control, iStat Menus, Little Snitch, and Express VPN.
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Oct 5, 2020 00:41
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64bit_Dophins posted:I've been watching it and other than Discord helper which occasionally will stop responding (it's done this on every machine I've ever installed discord on) nothing seems to be sucking up power. Apples battery runtime is at 80% brightness surfing using Safari. What level screen brightness are you at? Can you screenshot the energy tab in activity monitor? Anything that uses the dGPU is going to murder your battery. Even something that keeps your cpu at like 50% of one core will drain it pretty good as well
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Oct 5, 2020 01:16
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64bit_Dophins posted:I've been watching it and other than Discord helper which occasionally will stop responding (it's done this on every machine I've ever installed discord on) nothing seems to be sucking up power. AIUI, it not responding per Activity Monitor is just part of the way it's architected and doesn't indicate that it's malfunctioning.
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Oct 5, 2020 01:25
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Bob Morales posted:Apples battery runtime is at 80% brightness surfing using Safari. Brightness is at 80%, and I have gSwitch installed to force it onto the iGPU. I am using the largest scaling (most space) setting for the display if that makes a difference. I will post a screenshot of the energy tab when it's done charging up to 100%. Subjunctive posted:AIUI, it not responding per Activity Monitor is just part of the way it's architected and doesn't indicate that it's malfunctioning. That's good to know. Pretty weird stuff.
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Oct 5, 2020 01:40
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64bit_Dophins posted:That's good to know. Pretty weird stuff. I think it's a mistake in terms of optics, but they're adamant that it doesn't reflect impaired performance, so what are you gonna do?
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Oct 5, 2020 02:38
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