Buying Mac Pro for 3D mod/anim

#1

I’m gonna be working with Maya, Mudbox, Zbrush, on animation shorts and so. Need to configure a Mac pro to work with it(I’m sticking to Mac, no PC discussion pls).

So, I would like to know which pro works well with what. Meaning, should I get quad core or higher? D500 D700? How much storage(since it is flash it doesn’t come with quite a lot, maybe working with external drives will make it slower for texturing… I don’t think it is wise to work with external drives at all when rendering)? How much ram is enough?

As you see I need an overall insight in what enhances what and what would be absurd to purchase without having this other thing.

I’m not looking for pretty fast rendering, I rather model comfortably and let the computer do the work at night, or maybe let it render while I model. That kind of things.

Also, here they say that the Pro is on caution for being relatively old. Should I wait? for how long?

Thanks in advance.

#2

The Pro is indeed a beast. The video cards are very good(And I’m not an AMD fan). From what I understand, the system is rather upgrade friendly in that everything is easily accessible so you could upgrade it yourself if its cheaper for you.

As far as the external drive issue, with Thunderbolt 2 I don’t think speed is a problem. You could probably use external drives for your cache and not notice a slow down.

The Pro may be nearing the end of its cycle but it may be another year before a new one is released so I guess it depends on your needs. Personally, the Pro is on my list of must haves(I currently use an iMac) and if I were in a position to purchase one, I wouldn’t wait. Of course, if it were April 2015, I might wait a little longer. :wink:

#3

Wait for the mac pro refresh, which should be available by christmas time, if not sooner.

#4

I really doubt we will se a refresh in time for christmas, of course I may be wrong about this but Apple proved to be extremely unreliable about release time frame for low selling item like MacPro or Mac mini and there’s also a chance they will skip Haswell EP and wait for Broadwell later in 2015.
So if you need it now buy it now.
There will be very little benefits in terms of performance if they want to go for Haswell, core for core/money for money you will see no more than 10/15% improvements over actual line of IB.
If your main target is to model and depending on your budget you can choose a 4core(very slow rendering) or 6core. D300 should be enough, but if your model are very heavy then better to go for the D700.
Don’d waste money on Apple RAM, buy as low as possible and then upgrade with Crucial memory, 32GB(2x16GB) upgrade cost about 300$.
If you can fit all your software and OS on 256GB then go for the smaller 256SSD or the 512GB(BTW you can also upgrade it later), for mass storage buy an external Thunderbolt enclosure with a couple of big HDD in RAID.

#5

Don’t hold your breath. The Mac Pro at one point went three years with the only update being the processor options. Get what you need when you need it. There will always be something new around the corner but whether it’s two months or two years out we have no way of knowing.