A new Mac for 3D Coat

[Lawless]

Hello everyone,

I am going to buy a new computer. One of these two:

27 inch iMac

2.8GHz quad-core i7

ATI Radeon HD 4850 512mb

16GB ram

Mac Pro

2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

12GB ram

Nvidia GeForce GT 120 512mb

If I get the Mac Pro it will have Cuda technology, I assume.

Would it benefit me to get 2 Nvidia cards? Meaning, would that

give me 1024mb instead of the 512? That would help 3DC if

I use bootcamp/Windows 7 64bit.

EDIT - I just read about Cuda in the 3DC Manual, two cards will

not benefit me.

I know the Mac Pro line will be updated this year, but I don't know

if I can wait. Also, I am really leaning to the i7 iMac. It is less

expensive and almost as powerful, and all the screen issues have

been resolved.

I'll be running 3D Coat, Zbrush, and this year Modo 64bit and CS5

when they come out.

Thanks for your insight,

-Brandon

[ifxs]

unfortunately, just as with Z Brush: MAC users of 3DC DONT get much love; OSX 3DC doesn't get 64-bit support, or CUDA/OpenCL. But guess who does(windows)?

You might want to check out www.barefeats.com for benchmark comparisons of the 2 cards you're looking at. The MacPro for more many reasons would be my suggestion, system bus speed, ram speed, expandability, #of PCIe slots, etc...

On a side note: hopefully the Radeon 5970 will have mac drivers soon, its less than half the price of the new NVidia GTX480 cards, CONSUMES FAR LESS POWER(i'm talking a ton of power) and nearly matches the GTX480 in every way but tessellation. For your MacPro, I would go with the ATI 5970 when the mac drivers are released, which rumors way might be in this year Q1. You also might need to get a suped-up new power supply just to run the new NVIDIA cards, over 600w of power looks to be needed for them so far, WOW!!! The new NVIDIA cards coming soon are very expensive in relation to the performance boost they offer for gaming, NVIDIA however hasn't released the CUDA/OpenCL benckmarks for the new cards, which is likely where they will shine(with all those cores), so we'll see.

Hopefully us OSX & Linux 3DC users get some of that CUDA love some time soon, so we dont feel like the neglected ones(similar to the 3.5 ZBrush release thats still not out for OSX after MANY MONTHS of the Win release being out :-().