Mac render node

[Tommy L]

My girlfriend needs to buy a mac (because she likes pretty things) and I told her it may be worth her buying a top spec one, Ill chip in some (probably most) of the money and use it as a render slave.

I know nothing about Macs. Now they are able to run windows, is it possible to buy one with like 4 gigs of ram and a kickass processor? Am I blind to an obvious reason why this is a very stupid idea?

[jackb602]

I don't know what your budget is, but an 8-core Mac Pro is quite likely the fastest rendering machine you can buy today. A Mac Pro can take up to 16 GB of RAM, if you can find a use for that much.

 

To get the most for your money, I recommend buying the base model of whatever Mac you want (http://www.macconnection.com and http://www.macmall.com have the best prices), and upgrade the hard drive and memory on your own as needed. OWC has great prices on Mac upgrades and excellent service.

[Tommy L]

Thanks Jack, the macs are fairly competetive in the price area at the top end. My question is, would there be any compatibility problems rendering with a mac on backburner if my workstation is a pc?

[jackb602]

I can't answer that one specifically, as I haven't used Max since about 1995. But a Mac Pro, once booted into Windows, is basically a very nice looking Windows machine for all intents and purposes. Another option is to use Parallels for virtualization, but I don't know how that would work. Maybe others will chime in.

[AJLynn]

Bootcamp would be better than Parallels - Parallels is much more efficient than VirtualPC but you still take a CPU hit and have to split the RAM between Windows and MacOS.

[Tommy L]

Thanks Andrew, so would you consider this a good idea?

[AJLynn]

Yes. The Macs are well-designed and built, they have great customer service, and of course they're good looking Also, comparing OSX to Vista or even XP, OSX is just better. For your side of it, it will give you the same performance as a PC with the same spec, for approximately the same cost (at the high end you may even find it a bit less expensive), but there's no promises about a timeline for Win64 support (I'm assuming this would happen with the full release of Bootcamp in OSX 10.5, though there are forums out there where people have already figured out how to make it work).

 

If you're looking at an iMac instead of a Mac Pro, there have been a bunch of rumors floating around, I'd take an educated guess and say 75% odds that they're right, that there's going to be an update in the next couple of weeks that will include a new motherboard, other hardware updates, discontinuing of the 17" model and a redesign of the case making it brushed aluminum.

[Tommy L]

Many thanks Andrew, just the info i needed.

[Geoffc]

Tommy,

 

I know very little about bootcamp and macs, BUT, I am fairly certain that using the mac for a render node will be far from 'plug and play' compatibility. I would make sure to do as much research as possible about possible driver and software version conflicts before going this route.

 

Just my wary $.02.

 

 

 

edited to add: OTOH, if you get this to work fairly easily, let us all know, it is an option I'm sure many have thought of!

[Tommy L]

Sure thing. Its a pipe-dream at the mo'. Also, Im having second thoughts about sharing such a nice computer with the missus!

[AJLynn]

Geoff-

 

I don't know about the other models, but I've got a Bootcamp MBP Core Duo that I've used as a node for both mental ray Raysat and Vray distributed, and it's worked... as well as a PC would have (Which is to say, both those distributed systems have their issues, but I didn't have any issues caused by it being an Apple instead of, say, a Dell.)