Arrghgh! I don't know what to do

Bouncer

Bouncer

Bouncer

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2 Jan 2008
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88
Having a really tough time choosing my options here!

I've got £1500 (ex VAT) to play with.

Do i either:

a) Buy a Mac Pro with 2GB, upgrade the Video card to an 8800GT, downgrade the processor to a single 2.8GHz Xeon Quad core chip and buy an extra 750GB (a 250 and a 500) HDDs and one 20" monitor

b) Build myself a Q6600 overclocked machine with 8GB of RAM, 8800GT, 1TB of storage and two 20" monitors. And have a bit of money left over, possibly to buy an ASUS EEE laptop :D

I run Maya a bit of CS3 and edit on Final Cut atm.

I know 'everyone' does design work on a mac but these days, especially in the 'animation' world you'd be surprised how much PCs are used.

What would you guys do in my position? Am i just tying myself up in knots over the sake of £300?
 
What exactly are you using Maya for?

Is it intensive 3D work or just simple design stuff

If it's the former, going from previous experience, Mac Pro all the way
 
I would get a Mac if you can, I love my MacBook mainly because leopard is a really nice OS to use. Also a Mac will probably last you longer and run better in the long term. Buy you could also get a cracking windows PC with your price range. Don't forget run can run bootcamp if you need windows on a mac ;).
 
using maya for digital set design. I'm not doing character animation. I model sets and build my textures for them with Photoshop. I would say my sets have upwards of 500,000 polys.
 
i know about bootcamp - gosh i wish it was the otherway round! mac os x when you needed it on a windows machine. I was considering a hackintosh only for final cut (maya and CS3 on windows), though from what i've heard it really isn't worth the hassle of messing about with system files.

The other option is i have a G4 ibook atm which currently sell for about £300 on ebay at the moment this would bring my budget up to a more comfortable £1700(ish) which would put me squarly in the reach of a mac pro and one screen with enough left to buy a second in a few months and some more RAM.

I'm waiting for tuesday (MacWorld) where i'm hoping Jobs is going to announce new products. The mac pro took me by surprise a bit this week (i was expecting it at macworld)

I'm thinking he's going to release this new slim macbook thing. If that is good enough (and cheap enough) to run final cut i'll get one of those and then build a cheaper windows box to run maya and CS3. All coming in at about £1500 (£750 each say)

Hurry up Tuesday!!
 
Bouncer said:
using maya for digital set design. I'm not doing character animation. I model sets and build my textures for them with Photoshop. I would say my sets have upwards of 500,000 polys.
Click to expand...

With poly counts like that, depending on the quality of the rendering you are doing, especially if you are using things like mental ray etc, it would definitley suit you to get a Mac Pro

The speed at which they are able to render complex scenes is frightening. I'd imagine now Leopard can now utilise 64bit floating point calculations, it would be a little bit quicker too. Last time rendering with Mac Pros was last year when they just bought out the new 2x Quad cores, and that was lovely ;):)
 
i love it!!

"Defo option a)"

"Defo option b)"

only kidding - thanks for the input seriously.

It kind of suggests to me though, that at the end of the day, with opinion split like this - does it really matter which i go with!

Or whether i shouldn't go for both:

a) Macbook + Powerful desktop
b) this new slimbook S. Jobs is bringing out + Powerful desktop
c) mac mini + Powerful desktop
d) Mac Pro

The editing work i do is infrequent, but is of professional standard and needs to be done on a deadline.

I'm now thinking about a mac mini for my 'home' pc and editing, and building a desktop for my maya/cs3 work.

I need to look at how final cut runs on a mini - HDD is my main worry.
 
I wouldn't go for two dekstops (IE Mac min + Gaming rig) I'd eiither go for a decent rig + notebook/eeePC or just an overpowered dekstop.

I have a decent PC for gaming and a MBP pro and everything is dandy. Love both of them (although if push came to shove I'd pick my MBP)
 
Buy the Mac Pro. I'd never use some potentially unstable O/Ced PC for Maya use and the Pro will severely cut down on rendering times. I'm buying one soon and I'd rather have one Pro and just run everything from that one computer. Adobe CS3 runs on Mac OSX of course, aswell.
 
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £55.99
(£65.79)
OcUK Value L2442W 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Glossy Black £419.98
(£493.48)
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £142.99
(£168.01)
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2 (OCZ2G8004GK) £109.98
(£129.22)
BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail BFG £147.99
(£173.89)
Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD501LJ) £105.98
(£124.52)
Samsung SH-S203D 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer ReWriter (Black) - OEM £14.99
(£17.61)
Thermalright Ultra-120A CPU Cooler (Socket AM2/LGA775) £21.99
(£25.84)
Yate Loon D12SL-12 120mm Case Fan - 4 Pin ) £11.96
(£14.04)
Lian Li PC-A05B Aluminium Midi-Tower - Black £65.99
(£77.54)
Corsair VX 450W ATX PSU (CMPSU-450VXUK) £37.99
(£44.64)
Sub Total : £1,135.83
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
City Link Parcel Next Day (Delivered Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £26.04
VAT is being charged at 17.5% VAT : £203.33
Total : £1,365.19

1tb storage
Quad core (can OC a fair bit, 3.4-3.6ghz being pretty normal).
8gb RAM
8800GT
Dual 24" monitors with M-PVA panels

All for less than the Mac Pro. If you got one 24", a cheaper case etc. you could get it down by around £300 leaving enough for a Mac of some description.

Chimerical said:
Buy the Mac Pro. I'd never use some potentially unstable O/Ced PC for Maya use and the Pro will severely cut down on rendering times. I'm buying one soon and I'd rather have one Pro and just run everything from that one computer. Adobe CS3 runs on Mac OSX of course, aswell.
Click to expand...

The Mac Pro with 8 cores, the only one that will be a lot faster starts at about £1750. Or the same spec as the PC (one quad core) it's £2700+. That's without a monitor.

If you don't include the monitors you could get two of the above systems for less than one mac pro, that's 8x the ram, 8x the storage, same amount of cores and the possibility to OC :p
 
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get some ok case that you can water cool get maximus mob watercooled edition get parts for watercooling 2 gigs of good ddr3 ram get 300gb 15000rpm harddrive and wait for 3870x2 or just get 8800gts and water cool it to
 
Raikiri said:
The Mac Pro with 8 cores, the only one that will be a lot faster starts at about £1750. Or the same spec as the PC (one quad core) it's £2700+. That's without a monitor.
Click to expand...

Exactly, the op can only afford the single xeon one, which isn't any faster than the quad c2d. Though it may be possible to build a dual quad-core xeon pc for £1500 using something like the E5335.
 
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