3D Max 6, Maya or Combustion 3


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Building a new high-end PC would be cheaper than buying a decent PowerMac I guess.

CPU: P4 3.0GHz ?217(P4 3.2GHz ?315)i>

Mobo: ?100

1GB Memory: ?Total: ?(?565)5)i>

iMac 1.25GHz: ?1,499 (LCD inc.)

PowerMac 1.6GHz (256MB DDR): ?1,399

PowerMac Dual 1.8GHz (512MB DDR): ?1,899

PowerMac Dual 2.0GHz (512MB DDR): ?2,299

I take issue with your numbers - they seem a little unfair.

You're buying a CPU, motherboard, and some RAM and comparing it to apple systems with the same plus:

- Hard drive

- DVD-RW

- Video card

- 10/100/1000 mbit networking

- Wifi

- Keyboard/mouse

- LCD-display

If you're upgrading your PC that's one thing, but to compare a full new system with the price of a few upgrades really isn't fair.

Your pricing looks a little high too - maybe people in the UK are getting jacked, but over here these are the prices I'd pay through the apple store online (converted from $CDN to $GPB using XE.com). You can buy a Mac for less than the cost of your upgrades - or at least it looks like you can.

- eMac: ?420

- 15" iMac: ?608

- 17" Powerbook: ?1494

- 20" iMac: ?1100 (including upgrade to 1gb of RAM from pricewatch)

- Dual 1.8 G5: ?1280 (including 1gb of RAM)

For approximatly the price you quoted for a dual 2.0 I was able to spec:

dual 2.0 (?2450) + 20" apple LCD, +BlueTooth, +802.11g - modem. + .5TB sata disks. + 2gb ram (buying extra from pricewatch.com)

try it yourself

In the end I'd still say go for the x86 upgrades if you really want to use combustion and 3ds max, I'm partial to maya, fcp, and shake on os x - but obviously you should go with what you know/like. I don't think you'll be disappointed with a mac - but the choice is yours.

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I see where you're coming from. With the prices for the Apple desktops - I copied and pasted directly from their website: http://www.apple.com/ukstore/

I understand the unfairness on my part, sorry about that - but yeah, I was talking about an upgrade. Here's the full prices to be fair:

* prices taken from scan.co.uk

CPU P4 3.0GHz: ?217(3.2GHz: ?315)i>

Mobo: ?100 (average)

RAM 1Gb: ?120

HDD 160Gb (SATA): ?88

CD-RW / DVD Player: ?54 (LG Combo 52x24x52x16)

PSU 450W: ?35

Graphics ATi Radeon 9600 Pro: ?120

Sound/Ethernet (onboard option)

Case: ?50

Keyboard/Mouse: ?30

WinXP Pro: ?200 ?

To(?1112)>(?1112)

PowerMac Dual 2.0GHz ?2,299<Q: Why'd I put Dual 2GHz above instead of single 1.6GHz.

A: Because the dual system is closer to the performance ratio than the single (3rd party benchmarks)benchmarks)

So an upgrade of my current system is the cheaper alternative, but having an iMac aswell will def. come in handy. I'll get the intensive s/w for the PC (Maya/Rendering) and the non-intensive s/w for the Mac (Photoshop and everything else).

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Does your school provide a render cluster or server farm to handle your heavy lifting? I'm not sure how complex the scenes you're going to be working with are, but if you start doing film-quality CG (which I would expect in a university program) then it quickly becomes impracticle to do rendering on your home computer.

Compositing is a different matter, and shake performs very well on G5 systems compared to AE or combustion on x86 processors. A dual 1.8 should perform very - it's only 10% slower CPU wise than the dual 2.0 but costs $500 less - still not cheap, but every little bit helps. Subtract the DVD-RW (looking at your PC config it looks like you don't need it) and the modem and you can get a dual 1.8 for 1,104.71 GBP, Add 150 gbp for and additional 1.5gb of ram from a 3rd party and you make out pretty darn good.

G5 systems seem to have a major performance increase if they have 2gb+ of memory (some photoshop filtes go from 10 seconds down to <1 second for example). I'm not really sure about the reasoning, but it is fairly well documented - which explains my preference to spec with 2.0gb+ rather than 1gb.

Just thoughts, I still think an x86 computer is probably a more practicle system for your needs.

It seams funny to talk about price when the software you're looking at can cost more than a new car:

- Maya unlimited costs 3000+ usd

- shake is 5000 usd

- combustion is $1000 usd

etc.

Granted they're cheaper with educational discount, but software is still the major purchase for your new machine. If you've already bought _any_ of the above you're better off sticking with your current platform because any one peice is 25-100% of the cost of a new machine even after edu. discount.

Edited by the evn show
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The systems in uni are awful:

- WinXP Pro (sooo many restrictions it's amazing we can actually do anything on them).

- Win2K Server to sort out the accounts.

- Intel PIII 933MHz.

- 256-512MB SDR.

- No user space available.

- 3D Max License problems (not enough to go around).

- 250MB Internal Zip Drive (I don't use those, I prefer the cheapness of a simple CD).

I tend to do 99% of the work at home anyway. We've only just started Max and basic animation on a path, but I wanna' learn all that I can - so I do this in my own time, and that's why I started this thread about 'what's best for my needs'. There will be a lot of personal work that I'll do in my own time, so I want to make the right decision.

P.S.

Shake is over ?3,000 - I doubt I'll be buying that any time soon;))

I'll most likely end up with a low end mac, an iMac to start off with - and see if it grows on me (I'm sure I'll love it). As the course progresses and my savings increase, in a couple of years I may get a new PowerMac at that time...which would be good timing. x86 & iMac sounds like a good plan:))

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edited my above post.

I understand the state of school networks. Ours consist of P4-2.0 -> dual 2.6 machines with rack mount harddrives (every cis student is assigned one for trying out new OSs). They're painfully slow all the same - too many services, crap software, and bloat. I have a p2-300 I use to write VS.NET code and it actually runs faster than any machine at school! The one neat thing we have is a networking lab. All machines are networked to each other, but they also have extra NICs to form smaller networks inside the room. Sign out half a dozen 3' cables and a few hard disks and you can setup a temporary 6-node/12CPU cluster to some big calculations or run some simulations over the afternoon.

For a low-end mac you might want to check out an iBook G4: cheap, small, light, durible, excellent battery life, and wifi range is good. then just use RDC to connect to your home machine whenever you want to use your 'big' applications at school.

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I wish we had systems like that in our uni.

Hey, I've always wanted to know how to merge two or more systems together. Please let me know how to setup a 3-node/3CPU cluster. And what can this cluster do - run every program as one program spread over multiple machines..?

P.S.

I'm looking into the iBook & PowerBook specs aswell :)

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