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Ultimate mac spec for Afx
Hey,
Done a search and couldn’t see anything so apologies if this has been asked before.
We are a video production house and have a range of Quad Core G5’s and an quad intel Mac Pro.
I am looking to purchase at least another MAC Pro as an upgrade. This machine will predominantly run After FX, but would also on occasions run Cinema 4D amd Final Cut Pro.
I am speccing it up on the Apple Website and obviously you can go stupid on the spec and although budget isn’t really an issue I would rather not throw money away on spec that won’t even be utilised.
The main questions I have is, which CPU, how much RAM? and which Graphics Card.
The jump between Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon and Two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon is £500 – is this worth it..?
The jump between 8gb and 16GB of RAM is £1700 quid which seems quite a large jump and not sure if the programs would need or utlise this amount.
Also the difference between an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 1.5GB is also £1700 quid. Does After Effects fly with this card or again does it not really utilise the advanced specs and RAM of the card.
Really not looking for bragging rights so just want the best spec that really makes our creative guys rendering fly..
Thanks for any help or advice that can be offered..
Cheers
Rob
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1 Reply
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since ae and cinema 4d will utilize all processing cores, the 0.2ghz difference in core speed is multiplied by the 8 cores, so it’s really more like 1.6ghz, so there should be a noticeable difference in performance. however, if that extra money meant sacrificing extra ram (you’d like 2gb per core) or a speedy esata2 disk array, then i’d spend it on the ram or the disk array.
i would not buy my ram from apple… as you mentioned it’s pricey and you can get good quality ram from much cheaper sources. otherworldcomputing.com test all there products on macs and offer good deals for qualified ram that meet or exceed the specs from apple, i’ve bought ram there and have never had any issues. the only small snag is they don’t sell cpus, so you’ll be installing the ram yourself… not that it’s difficult, but the macpros are rather specific about how you go installing the ram.
also, now that ae can more effectively use as many cores as you can get, i’ve started to find that the hard disks are frequently the cause of poor performance. i recommend a sata2 pci-e card and external sata2 array, particularly if you are using a lot of uncompressed hd. the reason i would go external is to have more than one bus for the data to flow through. by having 2 fast buses (the internal sata2 bus and the external sata2 bus) you can reduce the data bottle neck as ae reads/writes the disk cache, reads any composited footage and writes the render. i don’t recommend apple’s expensive raid card, here is a benchmark for a better card for 1/4 the price, and there are other too.
for internal drives there are 2 new choices that would make very good boot drives and disk cache. the first is the pro drive, which is actually 2 notebook drives in a raid config. either of these would provide fast disk caching and help speed up after effects renders.
as for the video card, i can’t speak for cs4, but it will be of little use in cs3. so i wouldn’t buy the quadro for ea. c4d may get better benefit, though.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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