Setting up a new mac office

[marcg]

Thanks to both. My thinking is we are on fairly old imacs at the moment and coping fine. As I'm buying a new Mac, how cheaply I can buy a secondhand one that will see a serious performance improvement over the ones we have. Clearly buying the best would do that but given our starting point, how cheaply can we do second best?

[marcg]

As in, would a 2012 pro out perform a 2013 2.7ghz i5 iMac? Given that we could put in a ssd, more ram, better graphics card...

[ZesPak]

Good to remember is that an iMac is laptop hardware where an old Mac Pro is more powerful desktop hardware.
If you can find them, a cpu benchmark is a good first start, although of course not telling everything.
http://cpubenchmark.net

[dmsims]

marcg said:

As in, would a 2012 pro out perform a 2013 2.7ghz i5 iMac? Given that we could put in a ssd, more ram, better graphics card...

That depends whether your app is disk, ram or cpu bound !

[marcg]

Sketchup and vizualizer? Both involve rendering 3d geometry. SU suffers with big models, viz is more of a traditional renderer so would probably just work quicker with a better graphics card. But I'm making stuff up now, we are well past the boundary of my IT understanding...

[Bikerjon]

marcg said:

As in, would a 2012 pro out perform a 2013 2.7ghz i5 iMac? Given that we could put in a ssd, more ram, better graphics card...

For most uses I would expect an upgraded 2012 Pro to be faster, however for a specific task like rendering in Sketchup then it's much less clear as I believe that particular software prefers a single fast processor to multiple processors/cores. I know a customer who mentioned the same issue and in the end they went for some gaming PC rig just to perform that one task. Machine was eye wateringly expensive and ugly as sin, but it solved the problem. I don't know if Sketchup system requirements have has changed since then though.

[ZesPak]

Bikerjon said:

I know a customer who mentioned the same issue and in the end they went for some gaming PC rig just to perform that one task. Machine was eye wateringly expensive and ugly as sin, but it solved the problem.

Everythings relative. An "eye watering expensive gaming pc" will outperform a new dustbin Mac Pro at half the cost.
As for ugly as sin, pick a discrete case and shove it under a desk. Doesn't have to be any uglier than a cheese grater pro.

[steveatesh]

ZesPak said:

Good to remember is that an iMac is laptop hardware where an old Mac Pro is more powerful desktop hardware.
If you can find them, a cpu benchmark is a good first start, although of course not telling everything.
http://cpubenchmark.net

Interesting, I thought an iMac had a desktop CPU in it but a laptop GPU?

So a bit of a hybrid as far as hardware?

[mikef]

ZesPak said:

An "eye watering expensive gaming pc" will outperform a new dustbin Mac Pro at half the cost.

To be fair, a Mac Pro 2010-2012 with a couple of affordable upgrades will perform as well as a 2013 Mac Pro at halt the cost, if you don't need twin graphics cards or Thunderbolt ports. I have both that and the expensive (but not eye-wateringky so, as I built it myself) gaming PC and both are very capable machines

[marcg]

Been reading about specs on sketchup forums. It is indeed a single thread program so multi cores will have no effect. I need to monitor how much ram we are using on the imacs we have but my guess is the slow navigation around the models is graphics card limited rather than CPU. Someone wrote textures are CPU, polygons are GPU.
Faster Xeon's seem to be only £3-400 so it would be a case of looking for one with a decent graphics card already installed.

[dmsims]

As a pure business decision why not unshackle yourself from the Mac platform ?

[Buffalo]

OP, if you need a bit more info on what specs you may need, it may help you to look at a recent thread of mine, from early January. I run an engineering consultancy that uses Macs, but also need windows for various modelling software that doesn't have a Mac alternative. I ended up self building a pc. All up price was around £5k but I had to buy everything including additional monitors (I can be more specific but would have to refer to the bill, which I don't have to hand). The specs are listed in the thread; although I haven't yet carried out full benchmarking of it, it cut my modelling time down to under two days from over 7.

Im very disappointed in the current Mac line up. I use them (outside of the norm for most engineering consultancies) because I prefer the software considerably, but this reluctant journey into pc ownership has really opened my eyes. The pro laptops need a way of accessing more than 16Gb RAM but they won't do it because they'd need to be thicker to use desktop spec RAM sticks and battery life would be marginally worse. The (desktop) pro is simply too expensive to be a viable option.

My current 2014 MBP absolutely flogged on my last job (c. 34 days running non-stop, flat out at 100% memory usage and greater than 75% cpu) before I got the custom build pc finished to complete the work. It feels like I could do with a refresh, but I just can't justify a new MBP with touch bar yet. If things don't improve i think my future may lie in Linux with an EFI boot loader to get me into windows when necessary.

[Vaud]

@Buffalo - how distributable is your workload? Are all your projects rechargeable to the customer? I was just wondering if some of the AWS "supercomputer" apps might help to spin up multi-clustered instances?

[marcg]

Buffalo - the imacs we are currently using are fine for what we do (architecture for 20 odd flats at a time) but when we get excited about textures or import too many components the models slow down. So we need better but not to the level you do.
After 15 years, I'm scared to go back to pcs. Every one that I use (belonging to other people) seems clunky compared to our 6 year old Mac's. Clunky as in needing cleaning up, not working like new. Our Mac's work well. And, secondhand, Mac's are good value IMHO.

[klootzak]

If you're using an Airport Extreme to run you WiFi why not just plug a biggish hard drive into that and configure it as a NAS (supported within the Airport firmware and OSX)?

It seems a bit hokey but actually works pretty well, and is probably better than using one of your iMacs as a server. It's also cheap and easy to experiment with.

k

[Leithen]

Marc, for the sake of a phone call / 30 mins meeting, I'd consider giving your local AppleStore Business team a call. They'll want to sell you new kit, but they probably also have experience with other clients running your software and might have perspective worth listening to. Even if you were able to speak to some other clients directly it might help.

[mikef]

marcg said:

Buffalo - the imacs we are currently using are fine for what we do (architecture for 20 odd flats at a time) but when we get excited about textures or import too many components the models slow down. So we need better but not to the level you do.
After 15 years, I'm scared to go back to pcs. Every one that I use (belonging to other people) seems clunky compared to our 6 year old Mac's. Clunky as in needing cleaning up, not working like new. Our Mac's work well. And, secondhand, Mac's are good value IMHO.

Given what you do and your requirements I'd spec up some old-style Mac Pro's here: https://create.pro/configure, unless you want to save a third and source the mac pro's and upgrades and build them yourself

[marcg]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/192109532910

Am I missing something or would this be ideal?

3.2ghz 16gb ram, 512gb ssd, NVIDIA Geforce 8800GT 512MB

[marcg]

The create link doesn't seem to do anything costing less than £1600. Being limited to one core CPU, the eBay link seems like it would do the same job?

[mikef]

Worth checking, but my recollection is that pre-2010 Mac Pro's came with a more basic video card; there may be other limitations