Shoulf I get a retina macbook pro?

[cgbeige]

I borrowed a mid 2010 mbp and I managed to get roughly 2 hours of modeling in 3ds max (bootcamp). Im not sure if that’s good though. Anyone has any idea if dell/lenovo would give me much more than that?

OS X is better for battery life than Windows (this is known) but it’s possible Apple’s Windows driver isn’t as tuned as some other company’s for Windows and battery life. Dunno.

[technokill]

I guess the battery life is more about how new your laptop is and what kind of battery it is.

Macbook pro are not bad at all with battery life but the best thing with any laptop is to plug it!

You plan to work in a coffee or what??

I agree but even though I wont be working in a coffee shop, I would like to do my modeling and CG stuff in college, trips etc. Having to be near an outlet just kills the mobility factor for me. Of course, heavy rendering and other heavy duty jobs Ill probably have no options but for zbrush, regular 3ds modeling and some photoshop I would love to be free from cables haha.

Damn I wish I didnt have so many choices in this case.

[cgbeige]

You’re not going to find any laptop that’s going to let you do sculpting and modelling for more than an hour and a half to two hours. ZBrush uses all CPU cores while sculpting so it’s basically like rendering.

Another option: get the laptop you want and buy an extra battery.

[ThE_JacO]

ZBrush is actually not that fierce on the battery in my experience.
It depends what you do with it, but so much is single threaded and relatively idle-y that the iN CPUs tend to cope really well with it power wise, and on top of that you can run it off the primary, cheap arse intel graphic unit if you have a double unit laptop, since it does exactly 0 with the videocard other than drawing the widgets and canvas at the bottom of the process.

It’s definitely not a scratch compared to things like encoding or flat out, all cores, memory capped rendering.

[technokill]

You’re not going to find any laptop that’s going to let you do sculpting and modelling for more than an hour and a half to two hours. ZBrush uses all CPU cores while sculpting so it’s basically like rendering.

Another option: get the laptop you want and buy an extra battery.

Alright you convinced me to stop worrying about batteries BUT the issue is I really do not know which laptop I want.

Speaking about specs, I think the only one is geforce 650m VS K2000m. But as most of you said the 650m will handle it pretty good.

That leaves me with the form factor itself. I cant seem to think of any pros of dell/lenovo except the 3 button touchpad and maybe 1920x1080 res (mbp would be 1680x1050).

Do any of you guys see any major real raw advantage of regular notebooks over a MBP?

[cgbeige]

which MBP would have that low resolution? The 15" retina displays are 2880-by-1800

[technokill]

which MBP would have that low resolution? The 15" retina displays are 2880-by-1800

If I really choose the apple way, ill be going with the regular 15" mbp but antiglare high res display. Ill also replace the optical drive for an hdd.

that way im free from bootcamp resolution issues, no eye strains and no lack of storage.

[cgbeige]

ah - ya, I have a 2011 17" and did an optical HD swap with a cheap kit I got on eBay. Works great. Just make sure that you can get a kit for the current lineup.

[technokill]

Yay alright, I think I finally decided to go with the mac then!

Now, should I get the ssd from apple or I could save some cash by getting it from somewhere else?

Also if the mac comes with a regular HDD, will there be any trouble swaping that for a SSD?

[cgbeige]

also, you should opt for the 1GB GPU/2.6GHz option for the MBP. The base model is 512MB/2.3. It comes with a HD by default so buy the SSD separately. Is the RAM upgradeable later? I don’t know if these are like the retina internals, where it’s not.

But this might be a bad time to buy, with Haswell just around the corner.

[hvanderwegen]

Yay alright, I think I finally decided to go with the mac then!

Now, should I get the ssd from apple or I could save some cash by getting it from somewhere else?

Also if the mac comes with a regular HDD, will there be any trouble swaping that for a SSD?

Wait before you buy. All macs are approaching or are close to their end-of-life cycle, so if you can: wait for the update.

I always check this: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

[technokill]

Yes, the ram is upgradable and I also have the option to customize it and include a SSD straight form apple. What Im not sure is whether getting the SSD from them is mandatory or I can replace the regular HDD for a ssd later. Maybe they have some kind of special mount for the ssd, dont know.

And I was hoping to buy it by the beginning of July, but really, if they release the next gen before August, I’ll sure wait!

[cgbeige]

ya, I’m sure the new machines will be out before August. As for their SSDs - they are standard

[phaedarus]

Techno,

What sector within the CG industry are you servicing?

Is it film/visual effects? Architecture? Real time gaming? Product visualization?

[technokill]

Im still studying/building a portfolio but right now im aiming towards gaming. However if anything in other areas show up I wont hesitate in doing it.

So an all-round notebook is what im after. I think the mbp will do it fine.

[cgbeige]

well, if you’re looking to get into gaming and realtime assets for game engines, I don’t recommend you get an OS X machine. While OS X has Unity, Windows has more game engines like Unity, UDK, Cryengine, etc. If you were looking at doing architectural visualization or character animation, OS X would be fine.

You can develop game assets on a Mac though, if you’re dead set on it.

[technokill]

well, if you’re looking to get into gaming and realtime assets for game engines, I don’t recommend you get an OS X machine. While OS X has Unity, Windows has more game engines like Unity, UDK, Cryengine, etc. If you were looking at doing architectural visualization or character animation, OS X would be fine.

You can develop game assets on a Mac though, if you’re dead set on it.

Actually I was already going to use 3ds max most of the time and I still ended up choosing the mbp after all these 9 pages of discussion. The real problem was the retina resolution in bootcamp but since im getting the regular one, I dont see any other issue that might get in the way when running windows in a mac.

[cgbeige]

well, as I noted previously, you will be getting limited SSD disk speed in Windows because Boot Camp loads with IDE mode for all disks, not AHCI mode. I’m a Mac guy but if you’re going to run Windows, get another machine because that cuts your disk speed in half.

[ThE_JacO]

well, as I noted previously, you will be getting limited SSD disk speed in Windows because Boot Camp loads with IDE mode for all disks, not AHCI mode. I’m a Mac guy but if you’re going to run Windows, get another machine because that cuts your disk speed in half.

As noted previously though I’m curious to know if you tested that.
IDE mode isn’t enough to drop SSD performance significantly for common app use on a single SSD.

Sequential read and artificial cases between two top shelf SSDs? Yes, it will cap you lower than the 400+ MBps an 840 pro can do.

Actual app use, paging and random fetch an SSD is worth using as a system/app drive for? You seldom get anywhere close to a 170-180 average and 280 spikes, and IDE can cope with sequential reads in the 250s, and will actually slightly outperform AHCI in page writing.

The performance loss would be unnoticeable IMO, and all tests I found of IDE vs AHCI indicate as much (in those common cases, I’m making no argument for where you can actually peak out two SSDs consistently, or if there are genuine issues with bootcamp’s handling of IDE mode).

Point in case, I had my SSD on IDE for the longest time and only took notice when benchmarking some time ago, switching to AHCI did improve the sequential read benched considerably, pointing to the switch being successful and not culled down the pipe, but general performance and handling in dealing with day2day use was absolutely and completely unaffected unless I was hammering the controller by hogging 130MBps off it with a big move from my online to my NAS.

[cgbeige]

As noted previously though I’m curious to know if you tested that.
IDE mode isn’t enough to drop SSD performance significantly for common app use on a single SSD.

ya, I only discovered it after testing 3 drives (one over Thunderbolt with the proper driver loaded, one over eSATA, and one on internal SATA 3) and wondering why all were performing way under in Windows. I loaded Samsung’s software in Windows for my 840 Pro SSD and it showed that it was running it in IDE mode, which lead me to me read about this limitation. The whole reason I found the technical info was because I benchmarked it for an article about ExFAT.

I was using commercial cross-platform disk benchmarking software called QuickBench. The performance is significantly worse for all read/write speeds:

OS X :

Seq. Read	Seq. Write	Ran. Read 	Ran. Write
   4 KB	39.139	64.152	26.29	75.704
   8 KB	88.541	96.483	40.88	131.478
  16 KB	157.842	159.39	73.222	214.971
  32 KB	233.567	221.87	122.004	298.154
  64 KB	299.304	277.587	188.819	374.214
 128 KB	313.626	289.947	248.953	421.801
 256 KB	364.823	350.19	292.326	404.607
 512 KB	404.311	394.429	374.917	450.632
1024 KB	424.754	416.462	428.553	474.305
Standard Ave	258.434	252.279	199.552	316.207

Windows:

    4 KBytes    	013.067 MB/sec    	013.099 MB/sec    	016.663 MB/sec    	028.684 MB/sec    
     8 KBytes    	022.410 MB/sec    	024.020 MB/sec    	033.809 MB/sec    	070.918 MB/sec    
    16 KBytes    	041.692 MB/sec    	042.619 MB/sec    	058.866 MB/sec    	099.266 MB/sec    
    32 KBytes    	071.311 MB/sec    	070.698 MB/sec    	099.836 MB/sec    	142.423 MB/sec    
    64 KBytes    	126.793 MB/sec    	129.636 MB/sec    	160.867 MB/sec    	241.861 MB/sec    
   128 KBytes    	198.192 MB/sec    	184.029 MB/sec    	194.913 MB/sec    	270.551 MB/sec    
   256 KBytes    	241.253 MB/sec    	231.010 MB/sec    	230.217 MB/sec    	240.809 MB/sec    
   512 KBytes    	263.783 MB/sec    	258.423 MB/sec    	200.748 MB/sec    	255.080 MB/sec    
  1024 KBytes    	278.284 MB/sec    	273.096 MB/sec    	207.127 MB/sec    	239.889 MB/sec    

Test Average:      	139.643 MB/sec    	136.292 MB/sec    	133.672 MB/sec    	176.609 MB/sec    

It’s not just ExFAT either. NTFS, FAT32, etc. all have this limitation.