I’m planning on purchasing either a new iMac or iMac Pro, and am looking for suggestions as to which might be a wiser purchase. I will be using it for 3D modeling as well as architectural rendering using the Maxwell plugin. I won’t be rendering daily, but there will be key times in the project where I may need to generate 5 distinct renderings within a week.
Is it better to purchase 2 iMac’s in order to dedicate 1 for rendering during “crunch-time” and keep the other for general daily tasks?? Or should I consider a single computer with 8 or more cores? Would a system like that be able to handle 3D modeling and other applications while rendering?
For Maxwell, if you intend to use GPU rendering, you need an Nvidia GPU.
For far less cost of an iMac Pro, you can build a 3D modeling/rendering box with AMD’s 32 thread 1950X and smile all the way to the bank, while losing less time on CPU rendering. We use dumb render boxes without monitor and keyboard as Maxwell render nodes, just chugging away in the corner. If you really must use a Mac for some reason, at least gain speed and save money on additional render boxes.
PS: Eduardo from FASTRENDER render farm just wrote: “The best price/performance point at the moment is the AMD Threadripper 1950X and the accompanying X399 chipset supports 128GB of RAM.”