GAS GAS: Please Share your Latest Acquisitions Big and Small

An XT3. Two gens down but still potent and reasonably priced especially when compared to the market pricing of older models.
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Upgrades have been completed. Dual X5690s, 48GB RAM. Such a wonderful bit of engineering. The dual coolers aren't installed, but they have variable speed fans (that can be controlled by MacsFanControl), and temperature sensors on the copper heatsink bases (and near each memory slot). 13 years old and still quite speedy.
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Looks like a fun project Randy. Makes me wish I had an old Mac Pro to play with.
They are quite cheap on eBay these days. There's some work involved, and some forum support is helpful to get some things going, especially things like running newer OSes. This thing actually runs Windows 11 just fine, too, despite being unsupported in both TPM and CPU.
 
Upgrades have been completed. Dual X5690s, 48GB RAM. Such a wonderful bit of engineering. The dual coolers aren't installed, but they have variable speed fans (that can be controlled by MacsFanControl), and temperature sensors on the copper heatsink bases (and near each memory slot). 13 years old and still quite speedy.
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Congrats, Randy. Have you had it up and running for practical use? Is there a huge difference in practical performance?

Good on you for getting more life out of this beastie, rather than consigning it to the scrapheap, like so many other Apple products that are specifically designed not to be upgraded in any way.

That latter reminds me of HP file servers in the 1990s. IIRC, there were 37 different ones, at one stage. Not one single one of which could be upgraded to the next level up!

And we wonder why the world's a mess ... !

Specs for your new CPUs:

 
Congrats, Randy. Have you had it up and running for practical use? Is there a huge difference in practical performance?

Good on you for getting more life out of this beastie, rather than consigning it to the scrapheap, like so many other Apple products that are specifically designed not to be upgraded in any way.

That latter reminds me of HP file servers in the 1990s. IIRC, there were 37 different ones, at one stage. Not one single one of which could be upgraded to the next level up!

And we wonder why the world's a mess ... !

Specs for your new CPUs:

Yeah, it’s my “daily driver,” as they say. About the only thing that is slow is when On1 loads a RAF for editing (a couple seconds sometimes), and when it applies any AI denoising and sharpening. Otherwise it’s still quite snappy. With the PCIe adapter, I get 1400 MB/s r/w speeds on the NVME, which certainly isn’t top end, but still very fast for anything not video editing. Currently my GPU is an RX 480 8GB, but I’m eyeing an RX 5600 XT as a potential upgrade. It’s about 165% of the performance as the old Polaris cars, and that might speed up some of the AI stuff since that uses the GPU for a good deal of those tasks. Usually more GPU memory bandwidth is your friend on that stuff.

Interestingly, many of these slowdowns are less noticeable to nonexistent on Windows 11. Perhaps On1 prefers Windows, or maybe it’s just much better/newer driver support for the AMD card.
 
Interestingly, many of these slowdowns are less noticeable to nonexistent on Windows 11. Perhaps On1 prefers Windows, or maybe it’s just much better/newer driver support for the AMD card.
Perhaps Windows 10/11 are just better optimised for the dual CPUs and multiple cores.

Windows NT was designed from the ground up to support and optimise multiple CPUs and multiple cores (see Helen Custer "Inside Windows NT" {first edition}). Dual CPU motherboards weren't common when Windows NT 3.0 was first released, but they were available. I supplied a couple to clients.

OTOH, Unix/Linux and Novell all employed kludges to support these.

Watching how the 20 cores work on my new PC is interesting and instructive. 8x dual cores plus 4x single cores in an Intel i7-12700 CPU.

Another interesting bit of info is that my relatively recent tablet runs a
Helio G90T Mediatek CPU with 2x cores plus 6x cores, 8 cores in total. How things have changed!!
 
Perhaps Windows 10/11 are just better optimised for the dual CPUs and multiple cores.

Windows NT was designed from the ground up to support and optimise multiple CPUs and multiple cores (see Helen Custer "Inside Windows NT" {first edition}). Dual CPU motherboards weren't common when Windows NT 3.0 was first released, but they were available. I supplied a couple to clients.

OTOH, Unix/Linux and Novell all employed kludges to support these.

Watching how the 20 cores work on my new PC is interesting and instructive. 8x dual cores plus 4x single cores in an Intel i7-12700 CPU.

Another interesting bit of info is that my relatively recent tablet runs a
Helio G90T Mediatek CPU with 2x cores plus 6x cores, 8 cores in total. How things have changed!!
Hard to say. I know Macs have had dual processor configurations for a long long time. I owned a Dual 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac ages ago, but I believe there were dual G4s before that, too. I think with On1, it's the way it handles non-destructive edits. It appears to render all your post-processing again when you come back to an older file, including the noise reduction, which can take 10+ seconds to complete, depending on which option you chose. That's mainly when browsing with edit mode active. There's a non-edit browsing mode that's much faster. Seems to just be a design choice from the developers.
 
Hard to say. I know Macs have had dual processor configurations for a long long time. I owned a Dual 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac ages ago, but I believe there were dual G4s before that, too. I think with On1, it's the way it handles non-destructive edits. It appears to render all your post-processing again when you come back to an older file, including the noise reduction, which can take 10+ seconds to complete, depending on which option you chose. That's mainly when browsing with edit mode active. There's a non-edit browsing mode that's much faster. Seems to just be a design choice from the developers.
Some interesting historical info here:

 
Yeah, I had the air cooled dual 1.8s. I remember playing Halo on it. Fun story about that game. It was originally developed for Mac, but MS bought the studio and had them rewrite/retool it to work on Xbox as the flagship game. It didn't get released on Mac until much later, as a port of the console game, so it was less optimized for the hardware. Macs have never been much for gaming, but MS kinda had a hand in that. Hard to say, since maybe Bungie's vision of the game wouldn't have been as successful.
 
So after years on an old 22" Dell, I finally bit the bullet and got a new monitor, the ASUS 27" PA278CV, which is calibrated from the factory. Oh my gosh I can't overstate the improvement enough. Sharp, bright, and knowing what I see is what I get is exactly what I wanted for edits.
Wait 'till you experience OLED, it will feel like you died and went to heaven.
 
I have it on my iPhone, and it is certainly nice. One thing I don’t like about OLED that can be problematic for editing is that colors can change depending on viewing angle. IPS is nice for good viewing angles.
A 6 inch screen is not the same as a 15 inch or a 30 inch. The viewing angles are just as good as IPS, speaking from experience of a first generation 15 inch OLEDs, we are in 3rd generation of OLEDs under TV sizes. And how many viewing angles you use on your desktop setup (compared to laptops, tablets or phones).
 
So after years on an old 22" Dell, I finally bit the bullet and got a new monitor, the ASUS 27" PA278CV, which is calibrated from the factory. Oh my gosh I can't overstate the improvement enough. Sharp, bright, and knowing what I see is what I get is exactly what I wanted for edits.
I picked up an ASUS PA329CV several months ago and the image quality is excellent. I'm seeing some subtleties in tonal range that I hadn't noticed before.
I have it on my iPhone, and it is certainly nice. One thing I don’t like about OLED that can be problematic for editing is that colors can change depending on viewing angle. IPS is nice for good viewing angles.
I found this too. My old 32" IPS has an incredibly wide viewing angle, the new OLED monitor not so much. It begins to look like there's a haze when my viewing angle gets about 60 degrees off axis.
 
A 6 inch screen is not the same as a 15 inch or a 30 inch. The viewing angles are just as good as IPS, speaking from experience of a first generation 15 inch OLEDs, we are in 3rd generation of OLEDs under TV sizes. And how many viewing angles you use on your desktop setup (compared to laptops, tablets or phones).
TVs are not "mission critical," as with moving and changing scenes, the subtle color shifts are probably not going to be perceived, or even a concern, as the high contrast wins over. In fact, OLED is probably ideal for such viewing, since you get near infinite contrast ratio since black is black without backlight bleed. It's going to wow you over with contrast and vibrance.

When you are editing photos (or videos), a display going from bluish white to yellowish white depending on a minor change in viewing angle can make quite a difference when you are looking for accuracy in a still image. And when you have a large monitor that you sit closely to, your viewing angle from corner to corner is not going to be the same as at the center, so you may not even have to move your head to see the effect. From what I see when shopping the best displays for photography and videography, it's LED-IPS. BenQ has a good reputation for these applications, and they are IPS. Even something like Apple's $5000 XDR display uses LED. Dell's best rated display is IPS. Apple has been using IPS displays in all their large screen devices, from Macs to iPads, and they are well known for their color-accurate, quality displays.
 
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