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hello eveyone

I've got an early 2008 mac pro 2,8Ghz octo core with 10Gb RAM, I was just reading a post on macrumors about late 2012 mac mini (2.6Ghz i7) being faster than my old cheese grater according to geekbench score (!). (it appears to be true !)

I was just wondering what fellow mac users are using to power their seat(s) of MXWR?

My workflow is usually solid works > export MXS to studio, switch to OSX open in studio, setup and render on my machine (3,1 mac pro) or use the ranch for larger, high res images. Is anyone using iMacs or mac minis? If so how is the benchwell time? I would love to hear real world usage stories.

It would be kinda nice to ditch the big aluminium box, as much as I love the ID, it is big and heavy and power hungry. The only worry I have is being able to dual boot into win7 for solid works but I'm sure I can do that.

any comments appreciated,

david

p.s. yes I am also thinking about a hackintosh as well / instead of this. But I could also do with a new home mac for itunes sharing, apple tv sharing etc. A mac pro 'equivalent' i7 3770k based rig will cost me about £1k in the UK.

It's probably better to ask this in the Off Topic section, the hardware buffs hang out there

Maybe rendering is not your only concern but also what graphics card you can have on that Mini, for Solidworks usage?

I have a newer (mid 2010 5,1) 12 core mac pro, plus the previous dual core mini with discrete graphics. The mini is 3 times slower with bench well (understandable 12x2.93 vs 2x2.7). However it handles light modelling fine which is why i bought it. The big difference is the mini gets hot when rendering the fan is constantly on. I wouldn't recommend it for sustained use like maxwell i suspect it would drastically shorten it's life span. I am currently hoping for open cl support with maxwell as it seems that's what the new mac pro does best.


PS i see a lot of comments over at macrumours of hackintosh users being frustrated with constant fiddling and setbacks. Many of them are coming back to real macs. There's nothing wrong with having windows or even linux nodes to do the rendering for a mini which just exports the jobs.

xenophya wrote:hello eveyone

I've got an early 2008 mac pro 2,8Ghz octo core with 10Gb RAM, I was just reading a post on macrumors about late 2012 mac mini (2.6Ghz i7) being faster than my old cheese grater according to geekbench score (!). (it appears to be true !)

yes, sad but true... here are some benchwell scores:
Intel Core i7-3615QM 2.30GHz | 16m39s | 279.43 | OSX
Intel Xeon E5462 2.80GHz | 18m43s | 248.59 | OSX

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu ... Hz&id=1237

otherwise it shows that there has been some performance gain over the last years - at least from Harpertown to Sandy Bridge (-E) !

xenophya wrote:p.s. yes I am also thinking about a hackintosh as well / instead of this. But I could also do with a new home mac for itunes sharing, apple tv sharing etc. A mac pro 'equivalent' i7 3770k based rig will cost me about £1k in the UK.

If one Hexacore or Quadcore is enough for you, the processors with best price/performance ratio at good speed (especially when overclocked ) are the i7 3930K (hexacore) or 3770K (quadcore) - or the upcoming 4930K and new 4770K.
From what i've read about hackintosh and 3930K it should be possible even though there is no real Mac using this processor. It will be recognized as Xeon.
But i'm absolutely no expert for Mac or Hackintosh...

Thanks so much for the input, apologies for the slow response, I've had a crazy busy week at work. ( I thought I had ticked notify of responses - duh)

Good points about killing a mini quickly ! (thanks chedda). I do wonder about the stability of a hackintosh, might just build a win7 box to use as a SWX / MXW workstation and get a mini to replace mac pro. I had costed a 3770k hackintosh with possibility of getting 4.5Ghz out of it

I'm not in a hurry so I could wait to see how much the new mac pro is? Some interesting speculation about the single CPU, double GPU architecture - the speculation being that one GPU for graphics, the 2nd for intensive calculations, Apple claimed 7 teraflops for both - so 3.5 Tflops each? (how quick would Maxwell Fire be if optimised to use that?)

oh well, time for bed, busy week ahead - graduate show for london to finish!

thanks again for the comments

dave