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The "Official" C612 (aka lets built the machine Apple never gave us)

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Hi fellow digital media friends !

we are several member looking for informations on the C612 platform and there are quite a good amount of post regarding either C612, XEONV3, and ECC DDR4.

I do understand that the vast majority of the members just look to build a "cheaper than original" mac whatever, this is good !

But for some of us, we are just trying to build the machine that apple never issued = a real professional reliable and expandable work station.

so some of us send "message in a bottle" to figure out if C612 could be doable or not, and all what we get back is the inevitable "build a X99, that is plenty enough, you overkill snob" ...

the thing is that professional world need some stuff that 99% of the enthusiast dont need.

we can't be on windows because of Apple ProRes codec and quicktime.
we need Nvidia graphic card because 99% of the OSX imaging software rely on CUDA acceleration.
we need at least 40 gen 3 PCIE lane to deal with the raid cards and multiple GPU.
we need thunderbolt because the vast majority of fast professional ingesting ciné dock and external hard drive are in thunderbolt.
we need stupidly high internal power redondant PSU for the raid cards an the GPU at full throttle.
we need ECC memory for stability and for not having glitches on an export that take 6 hour...
we need more than 64 Gb of memory to use all the cores at their full potential and still have some room for ram disk to put scratch and cache files.

by the time you do a maxed out X99 you still not breaking the barrier of 40 PCIE lane and you actually comme close to the price of a used 12 cores 2012 MacPro which would be the same speed except it won't have thunderbolt...

All the feed back that i have regarding maxed out X99 mother board look like the X99 mother board were never designed at the first place for the amount of stress that we put on the xeon with 4 K raw debayering, and they just fry one after the others.
I guess they where never realy designed for being 120% maxed out with big ultrafast raid array AND multi very high end GPU... any how from an investment point , a maxed out X99 won't be so much cheaper that a resonable but yet very expendable C612 config.

this is what i am talking about :

super micro SYS-7048GR-TR = 2000$
2 x E5_2630_V3 = 1000$
128 Gb of DDR4 ECC ram = 1600$
total = +/- 4500$

high end X99 mobo = 600$
high end chassis = 400$
high end 1200 redondant PSU =800$
high end I7 cpu = 1000$
64 gb of hi end DDR4 non ECC= 900$
total = 3700$

The xeon configuration have 80 PCIE lane, twice more ram and still can go up to 768 Gb, the processors can be upgraded later, you can fit 7 double with PCIE cards, etc...

the way I see it is that for most of the work, the 1000$ difference in price tag is just shouting for = DONT DO A MAXED OUT X99 and go straight to the point = if you need a MAXED OUT X99 just buy a C612 period.

Single core performance won't really matter versus being able to run 4 high end GPU along ultrafast raid cards, with the peace of mind of having a very reliable quality hardware designed to work 24/7 on very high stress.
and if you absolutely need more power you can step up to two 900$ CPU that will give you 18 cores...

I dont mind spending 2K if I can have my job done faster and without having to make pause to let the system cool down...

Apple will eventually upgrade the trash pro with XEON V3 and then we would even have support for stepping/sleep/hyper treading/ etc...

we could all work in the same direction trying to make that thing happened !

who is in ?
 
+1. I'm with you, man, only I've already bought a C612-based motherboard, Supermicro X10DAX. I need help!
 
Calling on Stinga11... any possibility of creating a patch for the C612 chipset like you did for the X99 chipset? Or should the X99 patch for Haswell-E work also for the C612? Is Clover's HaswellE patch the same or equivalent to your X99 patch?

Thanks in advance.
 
Regarding raid : I am successfully using a 16 drive 48Tb raid 6 array in my Z77 built on maverick .
the card is a Areca 1680 XI 16 , I have also tested a ARECA 1680XI 12 and it works as well.
the web interface is correct to use and the Bios setting is quite good.
I get 1200 Mb/s read/write speed and raid rebuilt works flawlessly. never had a crash or a freeze.
if i move the card back on the second slot to put the GTX in the data rate gets down to 600-700Mb...

i'd like to have 40 lane lci just for that : I have this extra 1680XI12 that would play wonderfully with 12 x 60Gb SSD.... i think I could get around 2Gb/s of read/write with crazy IOP for my scratch disk.

also i think Yosemite can handle just as much Ram you can throw at it : the TrashPro can handle 128 Gb of ram, so normally if you are able to go over 32 and your processor can address 1,5Tb there is no reason why it won't work.

just being realistic, having 256Gb of ram allow to do a 120 / 150 Gb ram disk for all the caches and render files... that would just be stupidly fast.
 
I'm really interested in this build. I'm starting to research building a machine for 3d rendering but all of the "off the shelf" builds don't have a dual cpu option.
 
yes I know, and now 2009 Mac Pro can be have for 1000€ used... drop a couple of X5690 128Gb of ram a couple of SM951 and a pcie expender box for GPU and you overrun any of the curent trash can.

I just finished one for a friend, and he is very happy with it. silent rock solid and for 7000€ that thing smoke anything I have seen so far on davinci resolve or scratch.

I like my hack, but now my next machine will probably be a 2009 Mac Pro maxed out. if you are patient and shop carefully you in USA you can do this for 3000$....:thumbup:
 
am also waiting for this. I am very hesitant to start with the X99-E WS and a single Xeon. If someone here can tell me if Z10PE or X10DAx can be booted up with solid performance, I will jump in. I dont want audio since I get it out of Decklink card. I get Areca and that takes care of my RAID(would love to do a 24xSATA this round). I still have no access to money yet and hopefully this week I get to try it out.

Its either that or get 2010macpro and buy X5690's off ebay and max it out and live on it for a while till C612's can be hacked into.

I still havent seen a post on X99-E WS doing a Xeon 2690 minimum to go with that. Either way, I want to see 40000 on geekbench.
 
Seems like I've found some like minded individuals.

I took the plunge last month and built the Mac Pro we've always wanted. Specs are:

Supermicro 7048 GRTR (x10DRG-Q Mobo)
2x Xeon 2697-v3
128 GB DDR4 ECC RAM (2133mhz)
1x GTX 960 4 GB
3x GTX 980ti 6GB
1x Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD
8x Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB

Happily boots Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 7, but no luck yet with OSX. I've tried every possible boot arg and boot loader, and have now moved on to attempting a DSDT fix. If anyone has any ideas I'm happy to test!
 
So how far have you guys gone with this cause I a want to build one... if it works?
 
Seems like I've found some like minded individuals.

I took the plunge last month and built the Mac Pro we've always wanted. Specs are:

Supermicro 7048 GRTR (x10DRG-Q Mobo)
2x Xeon 2697-v3
128 GB DDR4 ECC RAM (2133mhz)
1x GTX 960 4 GB
3x GTX 980ti 6GB
1x Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD
8x Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB

Happily boots Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 7, but no luck yet with OSX. I've tried every possible boot arg and boot loader, and have now moved on to attempting a DSDT fix. If anyone has any ideas I'm happy to test!

Wow a 28 core machine? I'd think you definitely need a specially edited Voodootscsync kext in order to run OS X. Also, you need NVIDIA alternate graphics drivers for the graphics cards.

Try this version I've edited it for 56 (2 x 28) threads:
 

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