Maya on iMac: let's talk

[Kikokun]

Hi,

I've searched and read the forums, but got lazy so there it goes:
what's the best non-27 inch imac to run Maya on it?
with a tight budget, I'm looking at the Apple refurbished store and there's good stuff on offer.
Don't much care about screen size, I want fast performance when previewing animation in the Maya viewport (skinned characters with the FaceMachine plugin, lipsync, the works). My dual G5 is crawling, time to retire it:
should I go with the Geforce 120 equipped imac versus the old 24inch with the 9400?

again: I'm not into games, I use Maya, it's what I do. I'm ruling out the i5-i7 27 inch (reported issues with Maya 2010 and SL, big issues with my budget).

should I get the one with the Radeon 4670?
should I focus on getting faster processing speed? frontside bus? L2 cache?
should we get a sticky thread dedicated to Maya on Mac?

I look forward to your suggestions.

Kiko

 

[FieryFurnace]

Hi,

I've searched and read the forums, but got lazy so there it goes:
what's the best non-27 inch imac to run Maya on it?
with a tight budget, I'm looking at the Apple refurbished store and there's good stuff on offer.
Don't much care about screen size, I want fast performance when previewing animation in the Maya viewport (skinned characters with the FaceMachine plugin, lipsync, the works). My dual G5 is crawling, time to retire it:
should I go with the Geforce 120 equipped imac versus the old 24inch with the 9400?

again: I'm not into games, I use Maya, it's what I do. I'm ruling out the i5-i7 27 inch (reported issues with Maya 2010 and SL, big issues with my budget).

should I get the one with the Radeon 4670?
should I focus on getting faster processing speed? frontside bus? L2 cache?
should we get a sticky thread dedicated to Maya on Mac?

I look forward to your suggestions.

Kiko

I have never used Maya on MacOS, only on WinXP on a 24" iMac and it was running alright, but not the fastest compared to let's say a high-end PC/work-station.

Just get the best you can (are willing to) afford.
Graphic Card => better viewport performance
faster CPU => faster rendering

And better get at least 4GB of memory.

 

[iMac27]

I own one of the new 27 inch iMacs. Not the quad core, the 3.06GHz and I can tell you that Maya runs OKAY on it. I used to own a macbook pro until the logic board crapped out and Maya actually ran way better on that. The actual perfomance of the software works fine, its just the render times are a little slower. Funny because Apple advertises the hell out of these that their great for 3d work.

I'm also running bootcamp on it and running 3ds max. I started a render last night with the final gathering set pretty high, and the anti aliasing filter to 1/16 and its still rendering!!! going on 12 hours. YIKES!

If I was to recommend something I would say go with the quad core!