What specs am I looking for in a nMac Pro?

[pokestuff]

I'm looking to upgrade my current set up of three iMacs to something that can render faster and with more cores...I use Blender an open source piece of 3D software...

The confusion comes here, I have two fairly recent iMacs one a 3.4 Ghz i7 with 16 GB 1600 DDR3 ram ( this is early 2013 ) the other a 2.8 Ghz with 12 GB of 1067 DDR3 ram...in rendering 3D scenes, with both computers using 8 threads the 3.4 is almost exactly 2x as fast as the 2.8. So what in the specs account or is responsible for this? It can't be Ghz or Ram alone...

As a side note the 2.8 runs like an oven, the 3.4 is barely warm when at full pelt.

So in upgrading to pro's apart from more cores what is going to create a rendering speed boost?

 

[Anim]

With CPU's and Hz ratings, I am not entirely sure what the correlation to speed factor is. Usually the higher clock rate (cycles per second) determines speed but then I guess there are other factors from different architectures that would come into play. Also, modern CPU's can throttle the Hz back if the chip starts to get too hot. You can run a CPU monitor to see if your 2.8Ghz chip is dropping back to say 1.7 Ghz under prolonged rendering for example.

I think the best way for you to determine which nMP would offer a rendering boost is by uploading a blender file and asking current owners if they could run a timed render test for you. There are plenty of people in the forum willing to run benchmarks on their new mac pro's. I guess you would want to test against 8 and 12 core if you want to replace 2 machines.

You should give a step by step for users that haven't used Blender before. e.g. Download here, install, open this scene, click render....

As for the GPU side, only rendering engines designed to use OpenCL would show how the Dx00 cards perform for you otherwise they have no affect on CPU based rendering.

Anim

 

[pokestuff]

Thanks for the reply.

How do I find the actual GHz my processors are running at when in use?

 

[VirtualRain]

Thanks for the reply.

How do I find the actual GHz my processors are running at when in use?

You can use the Intel Power Gadget.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-20