MacMini 2012 External Thunderbolt boxes for FCPX

Question

Level 1

5 points

MacMini 2012 External Thunderbolt boxes for FCPX

This was discussd here and there last year but here we are again. We left this subject with the following collective thoughts with some varations and name callings :

- MacMini is OK to run FCPX when maxed out with RAM and editing are done in Proxy.

- MacMini quad server has advantages over the standard MacMini but the GPU ( if there is such thing in MacMini ) is not really up to the task.

- The bottle neck is the GPU and the slow drives generally.

A year has passed and manu vendors are displaying thunderbolt boxes in ranges that could take an express card to all the way up to Two PCIe2 cards and FibreChannels and 10GB ethernetcards .... . Any of thesee boxes could help the MacMini to rise to the battle for FCPX performance ?

Is it possible to put a high-end PC video card in Sonnet thunderbolt box and get a real GPU out of the combo for example ?

Mac Pro Quad 2.6, Mac OS X (10.6.5), Mac Classic II , PB 180C , ..., iMac G5

Posted on Apr 20, 2012 2:08 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

woodmeister50

Level 6

19,765 points

Apr 21, 2012 3:29 AM in response to Ai-Max

Ai-Max wrote:

Is it possible to put a high-end PC video card in Sonnet thunderbolt box and get a real GPU out of the combo for example ?

The current situation is that if one sets up a Mini to

boot into Bootcamp with Win7 that pretty much any

PCI-E card will be plug and play as if it were an

internal PCI-E bus on a PC.

However, the way that OSX has been set up to utilize

Thunderbolt devices, the vendor of the card must create

a "Thunderbolt aware" driver for the card to be used in

OSX. Not sure if any video card vendors at this point

have created modified OSX drivers.

Reply