Customizing Mac Pro with large budget...

#1

Hello,

I am looking into purchasing a new Mac Pro with an $7-8K budget. My studio is mac-based (with some research I saw a lot of folks recommend PCs for the performance/value). I use maya 2015 and will be modeling/rendering high res images and scenes of products used in place of commercial photography (I am in the packaging design industry). I also render with mental ray using raytracing/final gather/global illumination/hdri and want something that will handle these render times very quickly and efficiently.

Looking at the new mac pro’s options, I can either purchase the 3.0 GHz 8-core with 25mb of L3 cache and 64gigs of RAM ($7000), or the 2.7 GHz 12-core with 30mb of L3 cache and 32gigs of RAM ($7699). I am not sure which I would benefit from regarding the processors/RAM so if anyone could suggest the better option for me I would appreciate the help.

Thanks!

#2

The new Mac Pro simply doesn’t make sense for people looking for ray tracing rendering performance. With only a single processor socket it just can’t compete with the competition that has dual socket systems in the same price range. It especially doesn’t make sense in your case since the software is available on other platforms.

If you’re going to get a new Mac Pro no matter what then the 12 core option will provide the best ray tracing rendering performance but even that’s only on par with the 12 core Mac Pro from 2010. :curious:

#3

the new 12-core is faster than the 12-core from 2010. It’s the 8-core that matches the old 12-core.

He’s running mental ray - so he’s better off with OS X for that anyway.

#4

Or you can simply buy a machine with only few fast core(much more important than many slower core while working) and add some cheap render slaves(I count 64core on my desktop while rendering and most cores are running @4.2ghz).
My setup is faster and cheaper than dual Xeon machine(including the brand new 18core).
Just filmed a video yesterday for another guy who was telling people that the new machine can’t handle big scenes/fast render…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfRn1fAreVM&list=UUON9LaQTyC5Ie0JEWiunxhw