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How good will a 21-inch iMac 2.9ghz model be for 3d Modelling And animation
- Thread starter dosit
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Depends on the usage.
If it is for education / training, perfectly. The students / teacher will not miss the extra 2 seconds per render.
If it is for production / professional work; not so good. 2 seconds per frame * 16 - 24 frames per second * 90 minutes = a lot of wasted time / money.
Having said that we just bought 18 for a Maya training lab.
If it is for education / training, perfectly. The students / teacher will not miss the extra 2 seconds per render.
If it is for production / professional work; not so good. 2 seconds per frame * 16 - 24 frames per second * 90 minutes = a lot of wasted time / money.
Having said that we just bought 18 for a Maya training lab.
It'll handle well given 16GB of RAM, i7 (very crucial in rendering) and perhaps an SSD.
The 21.5" i7-4770S is almost as powerful as the i7-4771 in the 27" non retina iMac.
The base model will not handle it well at all, since it's only got a 1.4GHz dual core i5. Think of it as a baseline MacBook Air in the body of an iMac.
The 2.9GHz i5 will do the job fine, but if you're doing this for professional work, the i7, 16GB RAM and SSD is a must-have.
First, how much is your budget?
The ATI GPU here is really awful, even worse than the GT 750M in the iMac.
And you should never have a HDD in your Mac. Go for SSD.
Do you qualify for education discount?
PS I highly recommend refurbs.
$1600 isn't going to get you anywhere for a decent machine for rendering, unless you don't mind buying older hardware (if you're doing this professionally, that is).
If you don't render often, or just render for your own usage, then I guess that old Mac Pro is fine. But the GPU is really lacking.
Having done some Cinebench 3 tests on the iMac quad core i5 2.9 with 8 GB RAM and the GT-750M and a mac pro 2008 with the Radeon 2600 I can tell you that the iMac's 750M blows the Radeon out of the water.
Radeon maybe 9-10 Frames per second
750M 45+ Frames per second <----Winner!
My vote is for the iMac with a SSD of course. And a Quad i7 would also be a good choice. But on it's own merit the Base iMac 2.9 is a decent choice.
Stay away from the base model iMac...Treat it like Ebola!
Just my 2 cents worth.
Radeon maybe 9-10 Frames per second
750M 45+ Frames per second <----Winner!
My vote is for the iMac with a SSD of course. And a Quad i7 would also be a good choice. But on it's own merit the Base iMac 2.9 is a decent choice.
Stay away from the base model iMac...Treat it like Ebola!
Just my 2 cents worth.
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Having done some Cinebench 3 tests on the iMac quad core i5 2.9 with 8 GB RAM and the GT-750M and a mac pro 2008 with the Radeon 2600 I can tell you that the iMac's 750M blows the Radeon out of the water.
Radeon maybe 9-10 Frames per second
750M 45+ Frames per second <----Winner!
My vote is for the iMac with a SSD of course. And a Quad i7 would also be a good choice. But on it's own merit the Base iMac 2.9 is a decent choice.
Stay away from the base model iMac...Treat it like Ebola!
Just my 2 cents worth.
I'd treat that old Radeon Mac Pro more than just Ebola. Ebola, H1N1 and MERS combined.
The i7 is fairly faster than the i5 in rendering because of hyper threading. Totally worth the extra cost.
I've got a 21.5" i7/16/256/750M and love it. Performs almost identically to my non-retina 27" (i7/32/512/780M) except for graphics, but CPU-only rendering performance is almost identical.
Different story though for my retina iMac (i7/32/512/M295X). In OpenCL rendering, it blows the hell out of the other two iMacs.
Yeah the i7 is a great chip. What I didn't like about the quad i5 was no hyper threading. Heck my 2010 i3 has hyper threading. I can imagine your Retina setup is quite a beast. Once some money catches up with me. I might be getting one. Or at least something similar to you 21.5 setup there! But for now my 2010 will do.
Intel made it such that the i3 and i5 could only have 4 threads, regardless of core count. This is to differentiate them from the i7s, which can support more than 4 threads.
The 21.5" itself is already a beast even for light 4K work. My non-retina 27" and retina 27" are mainly used for medium 4K editing and running lots of VMs, while the two nMPs in my basement are used for full-time 4K rendering.
You'll be very happy with the 21.5" i7/16/256/750M configuration, I'll guarantee it. The GT 750M in the 21.5" is already more powerful than the GTX 660M, and only about 5% below the GT 755M. It can handle quite a fair bit of work thrown at it.
Yeah just need to recover from holiday spending. Kids & grandkids and such!
Saw your sig block 12 Mac's Wow
Me: 1 iMac 2010 1 Mac mini 2009 1 Mac Pro 1,1 and 1 power Mac G5
Saw your sig block 12 Mac's Wow
Me: 1 iMac 2010 1 Mac mini 2009 1 Mac Pro 1,1 and 1 power Mac G5
Yeah just need to recover from holiday spending. Kids & grandkids and such!
Saw your sig block 12 Mac's Wow
Me: 1 iMac 2010 1 Mac mini 2009 1 Mac Pro 1,1 and 1 power Mac G5
Yup. I'm a videographer and software dev, and need quite a number of computers to help me make a living.