What to upgrade too - PC or an intel Mac ?

[ryanb]

I am looking for opinions on which system to upgrade to PC or Mac for the best performance, currently I am running lightwave 8.5 of a dual processor G5 with 6 gig of Ram and Fprime, - I love Fprime it fits really well with my processes, I do mostly print rendering with high resolution. and I would like to speed up my rendering

I am looking to upgrade to make the preview rendering of Fprime faster, Fprime does not work as fast a thier demos on worleys website. I would really like to buy a 8 core intel Mac and upgrade to LW 9.3 but Fprime is not ub compatible.

So the question is should I buy an dual or quad core Mac and hope Fprime will come out with a UB version or Should I buy a PC dual core just for Lightwave.

Although I use both systems I use Mac about 90 percent of the time so the investment of a new intel mac with benefit a lot more than lightwave were as a new PC will only benefit my lightwave work

Any opinions would be appreciated

Thanks

[Steamthrower]

I say go for the Mac. And don't look bac.

[iconoclasty]

6gigs of ram in a mac? Do macs not have the 2gig application limit?

[gerry_g]

Well I've six in one one of mine four in the other, but yes, full well you know it's the limit of any 32bit OS, though that's a short term limitation as MacOS will go 64bit in a matter of months, as to weather it will prove any more reliable than Vista or there be anything 64bit worth running on it another thing entirely, but I say kiss the Windows register goodbye once and for all something Microsoft should have done ten years ago

[G M D THREE]

Go with 8 core intel mac pro. We have 3 quad core intel macs at the studio. Running windows on two of them, one running win64. You can have the best of both worlds, booting in OS X or Windex. Once you have a LW and FPrime license you can run it on both with the same dongle. ... and last time I checked apple was selling the cheapest 8 core PC machine there is, outbidding custom BOXX and Dell machines with a 8 core config.

Just my 50¢ ///

[ryanb]

My gut feeling was to go with the 8 core Mac but just needed to check, as I am not familiar with high end PC and how much faster than a Mac might be.

Thanks all

[Captain Obvious]

6gigs of ram in a mac? Do macs not have the 2gig application limit?
Nope. The limit is 4 gigs per app, I think, and you can have just about any amount in the machine. It's sort of halfway 64-bit.


Also, the current eight-core Mac Pro is pretty much the fastest workstation currently on the market, at least when it comes to CPU performance.

[Scazzino]

I upgraded from a dual processor G5 to the 8-core Mac Pro and I love it. I use the LW 9.3 CFM under Rosetta when I need to use FPrime 301 and I use the LW 9.3 UB when I don't need to use FPrime. Even under Rosetta I get about a six times render speed increase over the G5 and even higher under the UB.

:D