The thing was that a few years ago I was working with my 12" G4 1.5 powerbooks and I needed to complete a project and I got a regular G5 machine for the rendering.
My surprice was that the G5 was in no way faster than the Powerbook, The G5 had 1GB of ram and the PB 1.5. I had to do a render farm with both in order to complete the After Effects render. Of course I returned the G5 to the Apple store for a refund. Reason: overrated.
A year later I got the quad G5 because I believe I could get something at least from 4 processors. And I have been happy since then.
With the intell processors I have been giving time for Apple to settle down the technology. I do not like to do small jumps but big ones.
A few moments ago I was thinking about putting my 17" MBP to work as a side machine. It was never that fast but it was ok, some renders were faster in the G5 still.
But the 17" has Leopard and I got the latest Light wave trial version that works fully featured for 30 days.
I left the G5 doing a render overnight and it took 9 hours. I wouke up and was rendering still, about 10 minutes left.
I transfered the animation to the 17" because I need to render the same scene but with a different object (one is the Smirnoff Ice bottle and the other one Smirnoff Black, same thing different lable).
My suprice is with the preview render.... right away! And now is doing the entire same animation plus some other stuff and is taking 3 hours and 5 minutes to finish with 43 minutes already done.
Is amazing this machine. And I was planing buying a renderfarm with PCs.
I believe January is gonna be good, imagine 6 cores and 1.5GB video card!!! if not anything is better of what I am using now.
