Setting up a new mac office

[marcg]

Mikef and Buffalo - interesting and valuable advice, many thanks. I've looked into graphics cards, narrowing down the comparison based on the NVIDIA 95/6/7/80 cards vs the iMac we have.

The 2013 iMac comes with an integrated Intel Iris Pro 5200 GPU. According to wikipedia, the spec of this is
40 execution units, 128mB eDRAM, 1200MHz clock speed and performs 832 GFLOPS
By comparison the GeForce GTX 980 is
?? execution units, 4gB DRAM, 1216MHz clock rate and performs 4612 GFLOPS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Gr... (find "intel iris pro 5200")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graph...

Assuming I'm looking at the right comparisons, I think I should see a huge improvement by fitting a new GPU. 980 seems to be around £350 secondhand. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NVIDIA-GEFORCE-GTX-980-4...

So any comments on my final specs:
2.6+ghz CPU mac pro around £300, fitted with 500gB SSD
8GB RAM minimum
NVIDIA GPU at least 960, ideally 980

[marcg]

So conclusions - I like to put the results of conversations up to help others who are googling the same issues.

Have set up Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of the file server to a dropbox folder at midnight every night. I considered just having all the files on dropbox but I think we'd end up with multiple versions of everything as we worked on the files through the day. By backing up outside of working hours, we get a snapshot of the end of the day only. CCC also does incremental backups so it is only uploading the day's changes rather than the whole data set. 1TB of dropbox is costing £80 a year as a personal account. Business account would be more like £50 per month and we have no need.

The 2013 iMac will be the file server and the one-day a week staff's workstation. We will see whether it is useable as such. I think it will be fine as sketchup loads data to a local temporary folder and only autosaves to the server.

We have bought two Mac Pros http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/262874883921?_trksid=p20... which will be coming with ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards. I've taken a blunt approach to graphics card performance - more GFLOPS, better? The iMacs currently use the Intel Iris which is supposed to operating at ~830 GFLOPS, the ATI 5870 apparently does 2800. It also has 1GB vs 512MB on board memory. I did want to go with a NVIDIA 680/950/960/970/980 set up but the linked computers turned up on eBay at a good price (£500 for two) so we will see. I also wanted to get SSDs but again, we will see if they are necessary. I'm pleased that upgrading seems a fairly simple process.

Have bought two Samsung monitors https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01HRYELC4/ref... for £105 each.

Also completed the apple set with some wired keyboards.

Total cost for the mac pro set up then £375 each.

[marcg]

I'm working on the comparison with what we have now, not what could be. Our 21.5" imacs do fine for all but the biggest projects so I think what I've bought should feel like a significant improvement.

Look at it this way- 4 or 5 years ago the equipment I've bought would be nearly top spec?

[marcg]

So a couple of weeks in (?) I reckon the new Mac's are about 60% faster. So not many multiples faster but definitely an improvement. Navigating around the models is quicker. Still not seamless but faster. I'm not sure what's limiting them now though. Opening files off the server is still slow but then we are limited by the speed of the server hd. The server is the 2013 Mac, btw. Overall, I'm happy with the setup. The bang for buck is good.

[marcg]

Thanks Mike. I will have a look tomorrow when I'm back in the office. Can you elaborate a bit on how to diagnose the bottlenecks? I know where to find activity monitor but what am i looking to check?

[marcg]

Apple Mac Pro 3,1 2 x 2.8 GHZ XEON Quad 8 Cores 500GB HD 8GB RAM, AMD radon 5870. El capitan. Not SSD

[marcg]

Ok, so have run the activity monitor and attach screenshots. When sketch up is on, I seem to be using 7 out of 8gb RAM. Which suggests a bit more might help. What is more confusing is that OSX mail seems to be using 125% of CPU at times. And safari, listening to BBC radio6 seems to be using nearly a gb of RAM?

[marcg]

[marcg]

[marcg]

Actually, Mail was going off on one... I restarted it and things look a lot more normal.

Playing about with Sketchup, I'm getting ~6gb RAM being used, CPU at around 50% and disk usage negligible. There's a spike when a file is opened or saved but nothing in the normal operation of the program.

In terms of the feel of the program, its slightly (and only slightly) stuttering in navigating - zooming in or out happens in steps, orbiting causes textures to need to be rerendered which takes about a second. I'm guessing the only way to improve that would be a more powerful graphics card?

[marcg]

Webmail was for a personal account. iplayer had been left running over the weekend. I don't know why that should have taken so much RAM though? Its not as if you can review three days of radio.

[marcg]

Yes, was listening to radio6 online through a webpage. Maybe I should download a web radio app...

DMS - Thanks but no thanks!

So it sounds like mission accomplished - not maxing out anymore as compared to the iMacs, could maybe do better with better graphics cards but working well enough and all in £500 per workstation. Adding RAM seem unnecessary, SSD would improve the startup experience but once working wouldn't make much difference. CPU couldn't really be improved as clock speeds are all ~2.5-3.2ghz and sketch up won't use multiple cores.

I must say thanks to the PH forum for all the help!