I really like this idea. The $1500 price for the chassis shown is a pretty big investment if you aren't using the expansion solution professionally. Sonnet makes great stuff and this would be a nice addition.
Us old timers still drool over Sonnet's dual G4 processor upgrades that kept extending the life of old PowerMac G3/G4 systems back in the day. Sonnet is an awesome company!
I've a previous Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card with 4 x NVMe (Samsung 980 Pros) on RAID 0, running off maxxed-out 3.46Ghz MacPro 5.1... and I'm getting 4.8Gb/Sec READ / 4.0Gb/Sec WRITE, compared to this "evolution" on TB3 with maxxed out 2.75Gb/Sec output on a MacStudio M2. At least I've got something to potentially migrate the Sonnet M.2 PCIe Card to, with this Sonnet xMac,, when I go Apple Silicon soon. Will wait for the M4 Ultra in 2025 though.
Interesting video but why do you have that huge distracting banner permanently blocking the view. It's very annoying and i actually had to cut short watching the video because of that.
For the GPU that you inserted into the Thunderbolt dock, it wouldn't work, even if Apple allowed Thunderbolt GPUs on M series Macs, because it's an Nvidia Card. The latest Nvidia card supported by macOS is GTX 500/600 Series, or 10 Series with Third party Drivers and MacOS High Sierra as a Maximum OS. You'd only ever have luck trying an AMD GPU, RX 4xx/5xx, RX 5xxx/6xxx are officially supported, but probably disabled on the ARM build of MacOS. As for this Thunderbolt dock, this is very intriguing to me and i honestly wish they could find a way to use multiple Thunderbolt ports to increase bandwidth of the slots, so you're not limited to what looks like the equivelent of PCIE 3.0 x4 speeds, according to the NVME speed tests. Maybe have 3 Thunderbolt cables and each PCIE slot gets the full bandwidth of that individual cable or something. Would be neat
It would be awesome if there were a simple way to aggregate ports but I think that requires very specific ports. Maybe with Thunderbolt 5 we'll see an increase in speed?
Apple always puts the power button in stupid places. I have the Garbage Can Mac at work. It's hidden underneath a bunch of ports in the back. I fuss about it every time I need to use it. Nice walk-through!
I could see this become useful for something like a remote photo/video editing machine. Saves you money if it's sitting somewhere with a good connection and your content creators and video/audio/photo editors are remote. Maybe something like splashtop with multi-monitor. Could be anywhere and use the power of that Mac Studio without buying one for each editor. I like it. Next, you should color match it and paint it.
This is super cool. I'm working on a 2U rackmount workstation based on a 12 core ryzen chip. Since it only has a TDP of 105 Watts. It will be whisper quite. The rack chassis I'm going to use will have the top cover modded with a flow through mesh screen for added air flow. My graphics duties will be handled by the over priced Nvidia A2000.
btw, in a future video if you're planning to make one expanding a bit on this , would you please explain a bit bifurcation vs pci-e switching ? Because i looked up the nvme ssd you used in this video and these are using 4pci-e lanes each so that's 32lanes in total for the 8 ssd's , and your card/slot can only do 16lanes ... putting aside the TB and pci-e version limitations
PCIe switching is like your every day network switch, or an even even better explanation might be that it’s like a power strip for your wall outlets. It gives all available lanes to the one NVMe that asks for it, and balance it if there is activity over more. Bifurcation, that now are getting rarer on consumer motherboards, are a hard split of the physical lanes and the CPU/MB chipset are managing it.
@@alex.prodigy Correct! Just like in a network. You’re always limited by the lowest capacity part. In this case it depends on both the Thunderbolt maximum speed, the physically available PCIe lanes (x16) and then the switch chipset. Don’t know what Sonnet is using but I’d imagine it’s blazing fast in a PC with proper PCIe slots. In the system Tim showed it’s the TB3 connection that’s the most limiting factor.
Nice, but to bad it is just Apple, I didn't see any other hardware supported on the site when I did a quick look. I will change later if I do find something like a NUC or similar that it supports. But my "I need it" isn't meet by Apple right now.
hi there, are you still running the card in the echo iii? if so, are they playing nice with sonoma? i'm thinking of buying the echo iii (already have the m.2 4x4), but i've read some cases online that stated that quite a few m.2 pcie 4x4/8x4 are not recognized once the os is upgraded to sonoma or keep getting ejected. most cases were mac pro's 2019/2023 with internal pcie, but some were owc's thunderbay flex 8 with m.2 4x4 nvme connected with tb3. thought i'd ask, since this is also a pcie enclosure connected through tb3. cheers!
Bifurcation is a function of motherboard and pci slot. This card does opposite - it combines and routes pci lanes. Bifurcation makes from x16 pci slot 4 x4 or 2 x8. This card have some chip. Very powerful as I can imagine. 8 disks 4 ones each so it routes 32 lanes into 16. But probably it can divide 16 into 8 x2 lanes. Then it is very strange card :)))
Most newer generation boards doesn’t support that good old 16 -> 4x4 anymore. At least not consumer boards, perhaps Xeon and Threadripper boards still do. It’s unfortunate, since bifurcation cards are waaaay cheaper to buy. I bought an AliExpress dual NVMe NVMe PCIe adapter card with the ASM2812 chipset. It works ok but is maxed out at gen 3 x4 speeds upstream. Cost $80 and for that I’d easily have gotten a quad bifurcation card.
@@KS-wr8ub you mean two m.2 ports gen3x4 each (upstream from ssd to ASM chip) or upstream from ASM to motherboard is gen3x4 in total? Have same card with red radiator (actually 6 pcs) didn't tested yet
Would be more useful if Sonnet were to use all TB3 controllers on the Mac (up to 3 on Studio, 2 on Mini Pro) to increase the speed of their external appendages Say 1 connection to every PCI slot separately Instead of sharing 1 TB3 with 3 PCI slots, limiting performance You can get 2800 MBps from a single drive enclosure (and 8TB from a single drive) About twice that if you put 2 enclosures on 2 TB3 controllers then RAID-0 them
I'd love to see you testing that big chonking 8x M.2 card in an environment that isn't limited by Thunderbolt, i.e. a real PC. What kind of PCIe packet switch chip does it implement? Also, i don't think that PCIe bifurcation is the same as an actively switching bridge chip.
Thanks! Agreed! I will test it out soon in my Windows / Linux building coming up! Not sure about the switch, the docs just say "48-lane PCIe 4.0 Switch". I will open it up before that video and take a peek!
You don’t need a rack to get those Thunderbolt speeds. My Thunderbolt 3 external enclosure with 2 4TB NVME’s (8TB RAID) run at the same speed as your 8 1TB NVME’s. Yes, that’s as fast as Thunderbolt 3 will go.
got two of those at work, once it happened only 3 of 4 NVME SSDs were shown after reboot, sometimes front LED doesn't turn on randomly, apart from that 4x4 Sonnet card and RME HDSPe AIO audio card work great, so far only complaints are lack of more than one PCIe x16 slots in EchoIII box, and lack of enclosure for optical drive below Mac itself (yes it would fit)
For using a Mac Mini/Studio in a home lab, what would you recommend for managing the VMs? Even on x86 Mac Minis you’d need to run MacOS as the host to access the internal storage because of the T2 chip. So does that mostly just limit you to VMWare Fusion hooking into an ESXI system if you want to “connect” it back with other servers/VMs/management in a rack?
Fusion or another similar type 2 hypervisor is your only option on Apple silicon. However, later versions of ESXi did add support for local storage on the 2018 Mac mini with the T2 chip, so that is no longer a limitation on the Intel Mac side.
can you please do a video (or link me to someone else's video) on how to do anisble with windows hyper V in particular? im ready to use ansible for basic apt update upgrade on my linux VMs... but before i do that i like to take a snapshot in hyper V of the VMs first... and i've done some basic searches on google and youtube and can't quite find a resource that explains things as easily and straightforward as you do~
Gotta love the extent to which Mac users will go to get the solution they need when Apple is only concerned about the courageous pursuit of a e s t h e t i c s.
I’d also argue that they are on the pursuit of (and winning in most cases) of performance and efficiency 😅. Also, to clarify, I am a Linux, Windows, Mac user (in order of machines I use on a daily basis)
@@marcogenovesi8570 I wonder how many years of power bills could be paid with the price difference between a fully spec'd PC with a RTX4090 vs the mac.
Considering the TB bandwidth limitation and the price of the 8x4 card that I assume will be used elsewhere, I'm interested in seeing if the dual u.2 pcie3 card and used 4tb drives (lots of Intel options on eBay) performs the same.
Going to be testing with Windows and Linux soon! Be sure that if you do look for alternatives you make sure it does not require bifurcation or the motherboard you are using supports it. This card does not need a special motherboard.
8x4 is 100% oversubscribed. The config for max speed would be 2x 4x4 gen 4, but for capacity it is useful. Add a slot for GPU and another high-speed networking slot and your slot count is adding up, favouring a higher load scenario. I think the card has a pcie switch, so you might be able to put gen 3 nvme cards in but run at gen 4 speeds through the mobo. Not sure about that. You probably really want a server/workstation chip/mobo with pcie slots all going straight to the cpu.
Do Apple do something to block the use of external GPU's over thunderbolt, or is it just a matter of the driver being missing. If so I can't blame Apple for that, since it's be up to the vendors to write a ARM driver for their GPU's. Thanks for the video and I learnt that TB4 < TB3.
I remember seeing one of the Asahi Linux devs tweet about the lack of eGPU support actually being part of some ARM limitation and not just a lack of a driver 🤔 So it’s not something you’d even see on Linux running on Apple Silicon
I'm not a Mac fan but damn do they have the best unboxing experience ever!!! Of course you pay $500 for a fancy box you will look at once for two minutes 😂😂😂 my HP laptop just came in a brown cardboard box. But it was $400 and has the power of a $2000 Apple laptop 😂😂😂 I just can't understand why you wouldn't just use a mac pro with all of this built in? Or any other regular pc id you need pcie slots? I guess if you are balls deep in mac ecosystem you can't leave?
This whole setup is still like half the cost of the comparable Mac Pro version. Even less if you look at the rack mounted Mac Pro. They are stupid expensive seeing that you can get the same performance for 1/2 the cost.
the NVMe card is nice BUT far far far far far too expensive for just a nvme carrier with switch and raisd id not required for Truenas which is the only place this is needed in a home PC
I guess if you're going to spend $2700 for a Mac Studio what's another $1500 for a rack mount enclosure? Granted it does add some cool external connectivity options I think it's definitely targeted at more of the "pro-sumer" space than us normal homelab types.
Theres no Intel drivers for modern nVidia cards on modern macOS anyway either, AMD is at least supported on Intel, probably would have been a more apples to apples comparison 🙂 (regardless theres no arm drivers for macOS anyway, so its moot regardless)
The 8x m.2 slot card is neat but I'm offended, only 799.99$!?! It's too cheap for me. I don't buy cards that cost less than 1500$ because I'm not poor. (sarcasm)
@@TechnoTim Yeah I know. I'm still salty about the lack of high capacity nvme cards with a pcie switch onboard. I'm ready to bet that 600$ out of that is just the cost of the Broadcomm PLX chip doing the pcie switch job.
because that's what the sponsor sent and it's better than having to buy 8 m.2 SSDs. Not to mention that the whole card was mounted on a Thunderbolt adapter so that's x4 PCIe lanes too. Bottlenecks all the way down
Buy a car or buy a rackmount mac...hmmmm. I feel like this video was for the mac obsessed business that work within the mac ecosystem and not really for the regular audiance memeber.
I see what you mean but no one has to buy anything that I buy, not sure where that sentiment is coming from. I am just sharing what I am working on (like I always have) and everything I learned about PCIe, Thunderbolt, and about 5 other technologies I knew nothing about 😅.
A KVM switch from Wendell at Level1techs would work great for your setup with an Optical DisplayPort Cable. Also, take that NVMe AIC out of the enclosure and do a benchmark on a full PCIe 4.0 x16 slot to see the fastest drive speeds you have ever seen. Nice video!
You read my mind on both fronts! I have a new monitor coming and my PC and Mac both use display port now! My new monitor doesn't have USB C, otherwise I would use that. Also, that card is going to be tested in a Windows / Linux build here soon!
@@TechnoTim Nice, can't wait to see your next videos. Also, glad to see someone else that shares their affinity for both Mac and Windows/Linux. I try not to fanboy any of them and use all three. Each of their strengths.
Good eye! That’s a raspberry pi that’s running a bunch of code I wrote! It connects to notifications like youtube, discord, and twitter and prints texts and gifs!
Umm yeah no TB4 has 4pcie lanes per port it’s not limited 1 that includes docks. It can send usb 3 data over 1 pcie lane. TB4 provides 4x pcie 3.0 lanes for every port so no increase over TB3 other than 4 requires 32gb speed ie 4 lanes to be available at for every host port not the 2x some low power ports had available. Even if this information is wasn’t widely available some common sense will show you some things. Plug a nvme enclosure rather it be a single,dual or quad drive doesn’t mater as long as every slot is filled to either the host or a TB4 dock (docks other ports are empty so no host port bandwidth sharing. You’ll see read/write speeds that are 90-100 percent the bandwidth limitation of single TB port ie 2.6-3.1GB per second. Drive quality and system resources will cause these to vary slightly. Take a drive out of the raid enclosures and you’ll see a speed based on the physical lanes available to the remaining drives. If this wasn’t the case and they only had 1 lane you’d only see 800ish mb/second max at all times. And guess what you don’t. Lastly notice no matter how many drives you have hooked up you will never exceed that 4x slot speed. So yeah those are a waste of money if you’re after speed. You can raid two enclosures or cards to two ports. I get 4-5k read write speeds. Sonnet is still using tb3 for the benefit of their pocket same with owc and a few others. They just told you a story and got thousands out of you. All sonnet and owc did was take their existing boards slap them in a rack chassis and that 1-2k for for the convenience of one box. Also pcie gen4 anything doesn’t give a speed increase over 3.0 if they’re connected to the same 3.0 host interface. Gen4 will just operate at 3.0 limitations. Can’t make something that isn’t there. With that said gen 4 drive’s typically have a better controller so speeds will be more consistent.
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I really like this idea. The $1500 price for the chassis shown is a pretty big investment if you aren't using the expansion solution professionally. Sonnet makes great stuff and this would be a nice addition.
Us old timers still drool over Sonnet's dual G4 processor upgrades that kept extending the life of old PowerMac G3/G4 systems back in the day. Sonnet is an awesome company!
I've a previous Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card with 4 x NVMe (Samsung 980 Pros) on RAID 0, running off maxxed-out 3.46Ghz MacPro 5.1... and I'm getting 4.8Gb/Sec READ / 4.0Gb/Sec WRITE, compared to this "evolution" on TB3 with maxxed out 2.75Gb/Sec output on a MacStudio M2. At least I've got something to potentially migrate the Sonnet M.2 PCIe Card to, with this Sonnet xMac,, when I go Apple Silicon soon. Will wait for the M4 Ultra in 2025 though.
Interesting video but why do you have that huge distracting banner permanently blocking the view. It's very annoying and i actually had to cut short watching the video because of that.
Hey, Tim. What do you use the Mac Studio for? Has it replaced your 3090 machine?
Windows / Linux Rackmount build in a Sliger water cooled case coming soon!
@@TechnoTim ha, awesome 😎 you're braver than me. Looking forward to seeing it.
Shame they didn’t colour match it to Apples silver. Would have been a perfect addition to a Unifi’d rack with perfect colour matching 😊
I am a huge fan of white / silver if you can’t tell!
3:35 I like that mechanism for the power button. ...!!!
For the GPU that you inserted into the Thunderbolt dock, it wouldn't work, even if Apple allowed Thunderbolt GPUs on M series Macs, because it's an Nvidia Card. The latest Nvidia card supported by macOS is GTX 500/600 Series, or 10 Series with Third party Drivers and MacOS High Sierra as a Maximum OS. You'd only ever have luck trying an AMD GPU, RX 4xx/5xx, RX 5xxx/6xxx are officially supported, but probably disabled on the ARM build of MacOS.
As for this Thunderbolt dock, this is very intriguing to me and i honestly wish they could find a way to use multiple Thunderbolt ports to increase bandwidth of the slots, so you're not limited to what looks like the equivelent of PCIE 3.0 x4 speeds, according to the NVME speed tests. Maybe have 3 Thunderbolt cables and each PCIE slot gets the full bandwidth of that individual cable or something. Would be neat
It would be awesome if there were a simple way to aggregate ports but I think that requires very specific ports. Maybe with Thunderbolt 5 we'll see an increase in speed?
@spongeyperson - You said everything I was thinking but in a far more organized and thoughtful manner.
@@RichardJohnson-GW great minds think alike
Apple always puts the power button in stupid places. I have the Garbage Can Mac at work. It's hidden underneath a bunch of ports in the back. I fuss about it every time I need to use it. Nice walk-through!
looks a lot more elegant than the rackmac mini i have for my 2 mac minis, expensive for sure but if you’ve got the need there’s nothing else like it!
I could see this become useful for something like a remote photo/video editing machine. Saves you money if it's sitting somewhere with a good connection and your content creators and video/audio/photo editors are remote. Maybe something like splashtop with multi-monitor. Could be anywhere and use the power of that Mac Studio without buying one for each editor. I like it. Next, you should color match it and paint it.
we learn so much on your shoulder, thanks :)
Thanks for seeing this as “more than a video about a mac!”
@@TechnoTim a RAID0 on macOS xD
This is super cool. I'm working on a 2U rackmount workstation based on a 12 core ryzen chip. Since it only has a TDP of 105 Watts. It will be whisper quite. The rack chassis I'm going to use will have the top cover modded with a flow through mesh screen for added air flow. My graphics duties will be handled by the over priced Nvidia A2000.
Sounds awesome!
wow , i'm drooling after that NVMe adapter :))
awesome setup there , although i still wouldn't rackmount an Apple device
btw, in a future video if you're planning to make one expanding a bit on this , would you please explain a bit bifurcation vs pci-e switching ?
Because i looked up the nvme ssd you used in this video and these are using 4pci-e lanes each so that's 32lanes in total for the 8 ssd's , and your card/slot can only do 16lanes ... putting aside the TB and pci-e version limitations
PCIe switching is like your every day network switch, or an even even better explanation might be that it’s like a power strip for your wall outlets. It gives all available lanes to the one NVMe that asks for it, and balance it if there is activity over more.
Bifurcation, that now are getting rarer on consumer motherboards, are a hard split of the physical lanes and the CPU/MB chipset are managing it.
@@KS-wr8ub so basically you can't run all SSDs at full speed at the same time
@@alex.prodigy Correct! Just like in a network. You’re always limited by the lowest capacity part. In this case it depends on both the Thunderbolt maximum speed, the physically available PCIe lanes (x16) and then the switch chipset. Don’t know what Sonnet is using but I’d imagine it’s blazing fast in a PC with proper PCIe slots. In the system Tim showed it’s the TB3 connection that’s the most limiting factor.
Dang, that gave me an instant flashback to Marathon Computing rack kits.
super informative, thank you. great video
Getting the Mac Studio makes more sense in most cases over the Mac Pro, outside a few use cases.
Nice, but to bad it is just Apple, I didn't see any other hardware supported on the site when I did a quick look. I will change later if I do find something like a NUC or similar that it supports. But my "I need it" isn't meet by Apple right now.
Windows / Mac / Linux is supported for their PCIe and Thunderbolt devices. It’s listed as compatible.
hi there,
are you still running the card in the echo iii? if so, are they playing nice with sonoma? i'm thinking of buying the echo iii (already have the m.2 4x4), but i've read some cases online that stated that quite a few m.2 pcie 4x4/8x4 are not recognized once the os is upgraded to sonoma or keep getting ejected. most cases were mac pro's 2019/2023 with internal pcie, but some were owc's thunderbay flex 8 with m.2 4x4 nvme connected with tb3. thought i'd ask, since this is also a pcie enclosure connected through tb3. cheers!
Bifurcation is a function of motherboard and pci slot. This card does opposite - it combines and routes pci lanes. Bifurcation makes from x16 pci slot 4 x4 or 2 x8. This card have some chip. Very powerful as I can imagine. 8 disks 4 ones each so it routes 32 lanes into 16. But probably it can divide 16 into 8 x2 lanes. Then it is very strange card :)))
Most newer generation boards doesn’t support that good old 16 -> 4x4 anymore. At least not consumer boards, perhaps Xeon and Threadripper boards still do.
It’s unfortunate, since bifurcation cards are waaaay cheaper to buy. I bought an AliExpress dual NVMe NVMe PCIe adapter card with the ASM2812 chipset. It works ok but is maxed out at gen 3 x4 speeds upstream. Cost $80 and for that I’d easily have gotten a quad bifurcation card.
@@KS-wr8ub you mean two m.2 ports gen3x4 each (upstream from ssd to ASM chip) or upstream from ASM to motherboard is gen3x4 in total? Have same card with red radiator (actually 6 pcs) didn't tested yet
@@hpsfresh to motherboard
@@KS-wr8ub :(
Madlad tim is at it again. :D
And of course you asked a thing to our international vault of knowledege, wendell. ^^
Wendell is awesome, always willing to help!
Would be more useful if Sonnet were to use all TB3 controllers on the Mac (up to 3 on Studio, 2 on Mini Pro) to increase the speed of their external appendages
Say 1 connection to every PCI slot separately
Instead of sharing 1 TB3 with 3 PCI slots, limiting performance
You can get 2800 MBps from a single drive enclosure (and 8TB from a single drive)
About twice that if you put 2 enclosures on 2 TB3 controllers then RAID-0 them
How do you remote into the desktop? VNC isn't that snappy and back to my Mac... is long gone. Jumpdesk?
I will physically connect and use it and if I need to remote in a pinch I will use parsec
I'd love to see you testing that big chonking 8x M.2 card in an environment that isn't limited by Thunderbolt, i.e. a real PC.
What kind of PCIe packet switch chip does it implement?
Also, i don't think that PCIe bifurcation is the same as an actively switching bridge chip.
Thanks! Agreed! I will test it out soon in my Windows / Linux building coming up! Not sure about the switch, the docs just say "48-lane PCIe 4.0 Switch". I will open it up before that video and take a peek!
@@TechnoTim NOICE! 😘
You don’t need a rack to get those Thunderbolt speeds. My Thunderbolt 3 external enclosure with 2 4TB NVME’s (8TB RAID) run at the same speed as your 8 1TB NVME’s. Yes, that’s as fast as Thunderbolt 3 will go.
which enclosure are you running?
@@AlexTyson_ Sabrent Dual NVME RAID Enclosure
cool thanks. @@GaryWang
12:20 the black magic tool exists for windows too
got two of those at work,
once it happened only 3 of 4 NVME SSDs were shown after reboot, sometimes front LED doesn't turn on randomly,
apart from that 4x4 Sonnet card and RME HDSPe AIO audio card work great,
so far only complaints are lack of more than one PCIe x16 slots in EchoIII box, and lack of enclosure for optical drive below Mac itself (yes it would fit)
Thanks for sharing. What about the fan noise when all NVMe are on heavy load?
But can I connect 24 x 3.5" SATA HDD drives to it?
Sure, hba to a disk shelf
Put it behind bars!
For using a Mac Mini/Studio in a home lab, what would you recommend for managing the VMs?
Even on x86 Mac Minis you’d need to run MacOS as the host to access the internal storage because of the T2 chip. So does that mostly just limit you to VMWare Fusion hooking into an ESXI system if you want to “connect” it back with other servers/VMs/management in a rack?
Fusion or another similar type 2 hypervisor is your only option on Apple silicon. However, later versions of ESXi did add support for local storage on the 2018 Mac mini with the T2 chip, so that is no longer a limitation on the Intel Mac side.
can you please do a video (or link me to someone else's video) on how to do anisble with windows hyper V in particular? im ready to use ansible for basic apt update upgrade on my linux VMs... but before i do that i like to take a snapshot in hyper V of the VMs first... and i've done some basic searches on google and youtube and can't quite find a resource that explains things as easily and straightforward as you do~
Insufficient pcie lanes over thunderbolt, but it's ok for what it is
Yeah I agree, especially for fast storage, but it's definitely great for allowing me to connect my video capture cards!
@@TechnoTim why not use a pc?
What is that contraption on the right, with the raspberry pi and the light up play button?
It’s a Pi with an LED screen that prints my notifications from TH-cam, Twitter, discord, etc. I wrote all the code that runs on it!
@@TechnoTim neat! would love to see a video on it sometime. :)
Gotta love the extent to which Mac users will go to get the solution they need when Apple is only concerned about the courageous pursuit of a e s t h e t i c s.
I’d also argue that they are on the pursuit of (and winning in most cases) of performance and efficiency 😅. Also, to clarify, I am a Linux, Windows, Mac user (in order of machines I use on a daily basis)
@@TechnoTim "winning"
@@marcogenovesi8570 I wonder how many years of power bills could be paid with the price difference between a fully spec'd PC with a RTX4090 vs the mac.
Well thunderbolt 5 is coming so😊
Considering the TB bandwidth limitation and the price of the 8x4 card that I assume will be used elsewhere, I'm interested in seeing if the dual u.2 pcie3 card and used 4tb drives (lots of Intel options on eBay) performs the same.
Going to be testing with Windows and Linux soon! Be sure that if you do look for alternatives you make sure it does not require bifurcation or the motherboard you are using supports it. This card does not need a special motherboard.
8x4 is 100% oversubscribed. The config for max speed would be 2x 4x4 gen 4, but for capacity it is useful.
Add a slot for GPU and another high-speed networking slot and your slot count is adding up, favouring a higher load scenario. I think the card has a pcie switch, so you might be able to put gen 3 nvme cards in but run at gen 4 speeds through the mobo. Not sure about that.
You probably really want a server/workstation chip/mobo with pcie slots all going straight to the cpu.
Great video.
Do Apple do something to block the use of external GPU's over thunderbolt, or is it just a matter of the driver being missing. If so I can't blame Apple for that, since it's be up to the vendors to write a ARM driver for their GPU's.
Thanks for the video and I learnt that TB4 < TB3.
I think it’s driver only. I don’t blame them either and I suspect it will be supported in the future when TB supports PCIe4 or greater!
@@TechnoTim Let's hope that happens.
I remember seeing one of the Asahi Linux devs tweet about the lack of eGPU support actually being part of some ARM limitation and not just a lack of a driver 🤔 So it’s not something you’d even see on Linux running on Apple Silicon
What is that thing on your desk with what looks like a dot matrix display and a SBC in it?
but if its racked in your basement, how are you connected your keyboard, mouse and screen to it?
It’s racked in my studio!
It's so Purdey.
But, I think I'd rather just light my money on fire... 🔥
I'm not a Mac fan but damn do they have the best unboxing experience ever!!! Of course you pay $500 for a fancy box you will look at once for two minutes 😂😂😂 my HP laptop just came in a brown cardboard box. But it was $400 and has the power of a $2000 Apple laptop 😂😂😂
I just can't understand why you wouldn't just use a mac pro with all of this built in? Or any other regular pc id you need pcie slots? I guess if you are balls deep in mac ecosystem you can't leave?
I'm not an Apple fan but there's no way that your laptop is anywhere near as fast as the max studio.
@@dzltrondid I say that? Must be a miscommunication.
This whole setup is still like half the cost of the comparable Mac Pro version. Even less if you look at the rack mounted Mac Pro. They are stupid expensive seeing that you can get the same performance for 1/2 the cost.
What if you install linux and run egpu or something that way? Will it work?
I will test!
@@TechnoTim was literally my first thought when I saw Linus review tower mac pro. Best of luck.
the NVMe card is nice BUT far far far far far too expensive for just a nvme carrier with switch and raisd id not required for Truenas which is the only place this is needed in a home PC
That unifi pdu looks very cool, but they don't make them with EU sockets (
Thanks! I love it! Would love another on my mini rack, but then my mini rack wouldn’t be so mini!
I guess if you're going to spend $2700 for a Mac Studio what's another $1500 for a rack mount enclosure? Granted it does add some cool external connectivity options I think it's definitely targeted at more of the "pro-sumer" space than us normal homelab types.
For sure, the alternative is paying apple for more storage and still not get expandability. This is my software dev / video editing workstation.
@@TechnoTim If my channel ever takes off i may invest similarly, lol. But I just can't fathom needing that kind of horsepower yet.
Theres no Intel drivers for modern nVidia cards on modern macOS anyway either, AMD is at least supported on Intel, probably would have been a more apples to apples comparison 🙂 (regardless theres no arm drivers for macOS anyway, so its moot regardless)
300 bones. Is that a good price?
Hey! Which part?
@@TechnoTim the thing. Lol
The 8x m.2 slot card is neat but I'm offended, only 799.99$!?! It's too cheap for me. I don't buy cards that cost less than 1500$ because I'm not poor.
(sarcasm)
These are professional level cards
@@TechnoTim Yeah I know. I'm still salty about the lack of high capacity nvme cards with a pcie switch onboard. I'm ready to bet that 600$ out of that is just the cost of the Broadcomm PLX chip doing the pcie switch job.
So you put 8 gen 4 M.2 drives in a gen 3 card? Why?
because that's what the sponsor sent and it's better than having to buy 8 m.2 SSDs. Not to mention that the whole card was mounted on a Thunderbolt adapter so that's x4 PCIe lanes too. Bottlenecks all the way down
I will be testing this card in my new Linux / Windows build soon!
Great video, only downside is that I was expecting a home-lab topic but definitely expending ~3K isn't. Again, good content!
Thanks! I have always created no only homelab content :) Arguably someone could use it for homelab since it's rackable 🤣
Buy a car or buy a rackmount mac...hmmmm. I feel like this video was for the mac obsessed business that work within the mac ecosystem and not really for the regular audiance memeber.
I see what you mean but no one has to buy anything that I buy, not sure where that sentiment is coming from. I am just sharing what I am working on (like I always have) and everything I learned about PCIe, Thunderbolt, and about 5 other technologies I knew nothing about 😅.
A KVM switch from Wendell at Level1techs would work great for your setup with an Optical DisplayPort Cable. Also, take that NVMe AIC out of the enclosure and do a benchmark on a full PCIe 4.0 x16 slot to see the fastest drive speeds you have ever seen. Nice video!
You read my mind on both fronts! I have a new monitor coming and my PC and Mac both use display port now! My new monitor doesn't have USB C, otherwise I would use that. Also, that card is going to be tested in a Windows / Linux build here soon!
@@TechnoTim Nice, can't wait to see your next videos. Also, glad to see someone else that shares their affinity for both Mac and Windows/Linux. I try not to fanboy any of them and use all three. Each of their strengths.
Interesting
enough said
What is the framed LED matrix used for?
Good eye! That’s a raspberry pi that’s running a bunch of code I wrote! It connects to notifications like youtube, discord, and twitter and prints texts and gifs!
@@TechnoTimI’d love to see a video on that!
@@klos04 thanks! It makes an appearance in a lot of my videos but never did a video on it. I built it like 8 years ago and still going strong!
yes please, video on this subject would be awesome
Umm yeah no TB4 has 4pcie lanes per port it’s not limited 1 that includes docks. It can send usb 3 data over 1 pcie lane. TB4 provides 4x pcie 3.0 lanes for every port so no increase over TB3 other than 4 requires 32gb speed ie 4 lanes to be available at for every host port not the 2x some low power ports had available. Even if this information is wasn’t widely available some common sense will show you some things. Plug a nvme enclosure rather it be a single,dual or quad drive doesn’t mater as long as every slot is filled to either the host or a TB4 dock (docks other ports are empty so no host port bandwidth sharing. You’ll see read/write speeds that are 90-100 percent the bandwidth limitation of single TB port ie 2.6-3.1GB per second. Drive quality and system resources will cause these to vary slightly. Take a drive out of the raid enclosures and you’ll see a speed based on the physical lanes available to the remaining drives. If this wasn’t the case and they only had 1 lane you’d only see 800ish mb/second max at all times. And guess what you don’t. Lastly notice no matter how many drives you have hooked up you will never exceed that 4x slot speed. So yeah those are a waste of money if you’re after speed. You can raid two enclosures or cards to two ports. I get 4-5k read write speeds. Sonnet is still using tb3 for the benefit of their pocket same with owc and a few others. They just told you a story and got thousands out of you. All sonnet and owc did was take their existing boards slap them in a rack chassis and that 1-2k for for the convenience of one box. Also pcie gen4 anything doesn’t give a speed increase over 3.0 if they’re connected to the same 3.0 host interface. Gen4 will just operate at 3.0 limitations. Can’t make something that isn’t there. With that said gen 4 drive’s typically have a better controller so speeds will be more consistent.
Insane :)
1:09 answer: TB4 speed bottleneck
0:27 it doesn't make sense, TB4 speed is the bottleneck......
comment 2
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Dog goes woof
Cat goes meow
Idiot goes first
@@dominick253 I hope you live a life of luxury and ease.