Okay, so I’m looking at buying a new mac Pro and I’ve only got 5000 GBP to work with and I don’t have Unity Pro currently either so would the 4 core, dual GPU model going for 2500 GBP be okay or is it just a rip off? Any help would be great,
Thanks
Affection56k
We had opportunities to evaluate them closely, as our creative director is ex-apple staff. Here’s our findings:
the 4-core mac pro is not better nor faster than a kitted out imac 27"
the 6-core mac pro is required at minimum to make it worth purchasing, at at present it is only worth purchasing one if you will either stress 6 cores constantly (ie Logic or 3D Rendering) or you use Final Cut Pro X.
The GPUs are largely wasted for nearly all purposes.
It’s a great machine but the software just isn’t there to take any advantage of it. In addition to this you can get a 27% discount if you know apple staff, or you can get a 15% discount if in education, or have a family member in education.
Ultimately we went with the 27" iMac with 1TB ssd, upgraded everything in sight and it still came out cheaper (and arguably faster) than the entry level mac pro. I just can’t see any sane reason to recommend one unless you’re going to use 6 cores.
As for me, I went for a scan.co.uk 3xs system pre-overclocked to 4.5ghz, hydro cooled etc - all hunky dory with classic shell. I don’t even miss my beloved mac any more.
It’s good if you’ve got your heart set on a mac pro for some reason, but we are going to wait until it’s most important feature - the dual gpus - are actually used. Which I’d imagine would be a couple of years. Scan’s pcs are way, way faster than the entry level, but not faster than the 6 core mac pro if you’ll be doing 6 core tasks (which unity won’t).
I’d recommend a serious Gaming PC (it’s not for gaming, but the specs are ideal for it) from 3xs - something with 16gb ram, 4.6ghz overclocked haswell 4770k and pre-installed with 8.1 and classic shell - you can configure it then to your exact visual behaviour on the os side. Get yourself a 500gb Samsung SSD (their 3xs systems page makes it as easy as apple to configure). It’s kinda the apple of the pc universe.
I use my mac mini for any remaining ios phone tasks, but I can’t see myself missing out on this bang for buck tbh - even though our creative director will only use macs. He chose a fully loaded iMac this time round.
Depends what you’ll be doing with it though!
Buy a normal Mac,
replace the Core i7 CPU with a Xeon E5-2697 v2 @ 2.70GHz,
replace the hard disk with Raid SSD.
Zoooom
fiddling with bits isn’t everyone’s cup of tea tho
I’ll never get a mac pro. I can already do everything on my Macbook Pro late 2011 edition so I see no reason to move up. Plus at the time I needed the firewire port for my audio interfaces I owned.
If you absolutely want a mac pro I’d recommend waiting for at least the second gen.
I think the mac pro’s are generally just unnecessary unless you need the 4k video output, or the additional GPU compute power. Really the only people who need these things right now are people doing 4k video editing.
I use the current top of the line macbook pro retina with the 750m in it and that is more than plenty fast enough for anything I do. Which can be quite intense, just last week I was using it to retopolgize million+ polygon meshes exported from Rhino to Modo.
You know you have to keep in mind that computers are really damn fast today. My new top of the line retina macbook is actually a little faster than my old professional workstation from 5 years ago which was an octocore xeon workstation with fancy nvidia GPU. Which is why I personally have moved all to the macbook for all my work, it is a little faster than the the 3D workstations I have been using for the past decade for professional work, and I didn’t feel I needed more speed, more portability benefits me more. The need to go to like the bleeding edge is just not necessary anymore. Just the $2000 iMac is actually faster than than my macbook pro retina I have, and would be great for any and all 3D work. A $3,000 iMac is really quite a good way to go (everything maxed with 512 ssd).
I’m a big mac fan, but my latest PC with win 8.1 + classic shell actually does convert me back to windows. It took this particular combination of performance and os tweakability to do it now. I have an incredibly minimalistic os with not a metro in sight, and its nicer than even osx - does take tweaking it though! Of course I use my apple keyboard.
I think Apple need to think long and hard about their current lineup. They can’t improve the imac any further without doing a dump on their mac pro entry level, and that’s a bit of a problem when you think about it. In any case, PC for me, for next 3 years.
just install mac into a VM on a cheaper more powerful PC. its legal, and cheaper, more versatile, and you can custom build your computer. Now you can test you builds on mac, linux, and pc. just saved you a couple grand right there. unless you need a computer that looks like a wastebasket:roll_eyes: seriously just put your computer in a corner, look at the screen and save the money for investments on your game.
Correct me if I am wrong but this is not legal and in addition takes quite a bit of hackery to get a “hackintosh” up and running in this fashion with quite a few bugs. One of the original reasons I switched from Windows PC to OSX for desktop couple years ago as it was just such a pain to keep checking out my unity project to my crappy macbook to test on Apple devices.
I have been using and buying Macs for the last 22 years and bought me a “Windows” machine a few weeks ago. I am currently very happy with that move and I think Apple would really have to do a lot to convince me to come back. Lately I feel that you get smaller screens and mediocre hardware but pay 100-200 dollar more than previously. The Mac Pro doesn’t tempt me at all. I’ve spend good money and hand picked components to build my own PC. You can read about it on my blog if interested:
Thomas
I think for unity all you need to be happy is a Mac mini with 16GB RAM and SSD.
If you need a machine with more GPU power to test your games on it then build yourself a 2nd windows machine for that task.
A Mac Pro makes sense if you are a professional audio user as you always can need more CPU power for the realtime DSP stuff. Compared to the other audio equipment a Mac Pro is one of the cheapest parts anyway.
I also switched to hand selected fast PC Hardware for some time but I never could get used to windows (I’m a Mac user since 1991 and used it mostly as a hackintosh), for me windows is still a no go. Recently I’ve switched to a mini (the last one that had a radeon) and it was just great because over the years I’ve found out that my PC hardware just sucked in overall quality (troubles that had nothing to do with the main usage as a hackintosh). I will never ever return to PC hardware although I know I could make a faster and cheaper “Mac” with it. Beside that my power bill went drastically down, my PC hardware had costs of 50-60 EUR a month for power only. (you could buy a mac mini for that after 10 months) - the power consumption of a Mac Pro is also extremely high, so you will rip yourself off just because the machines (Mac Pro or great windows rig) wastes so much energy. Power consumption of a mac mini is excellent (11 watt when idle, usually peaks of 38 watts when working) you will save money each day. If a mini is not good enough go with an iMac, I haven’t seen a new Mac Pro at all yet, but what hippocoder said was already always true over the last years so I doubt it will change with the new one.
Yep we use both here at Simian Squared - horses for courses. We actually went for the iMac fully kitted out for the artist because:
So sometimes your choice to use a mac probably isn’t going to be about the special build or whatever, but about using what makes sense for your business. In my case as lead programmer, the fastest PC money can buy (within reason) and an iMac for him. A mac mini will always have truly dismal 3D performance though. We use my mac mini as the project’s server, it’s always on and costs nothing to run 
My opinion: It usually makes sense to mostly test on low end iOS devices and it also makes sense not to use the fastest machine for (mobile or not) development (if something has a huge impact on performance then it’s nice to feel that already on the development machine) - for game development the only task I see which needs a machine as fast as possible is stuff like calculating light maps. On the other hand it’s clear that it’s always more fun to work with the fastest machine you can get, but possibly you will waste some time when you find out late that you are running into performance issues on your desired low end hardware.
Do you really feel you can be more productive in Windows than OSX? That was always my deal breaker for Windows as a primary OS. Perhaps though we use the systems too differently for this to be properly answered. I could understand how if your just in an IDE all day coding away, different OS’s make no impact on productivity because it’s all dependent on the IDE. Conversely though I handle everything, coding, 3D modeling, texturing, sound, emailing clients, sending files back and forth all around the office. It always seemed to me OSX has these little things in it here and there that make crazy multi-tasking, and managing tons and tons of files, and multiple projects, through multiple applications much more manageable. I don’t know if your as crazy a multi-tasker as me and work with as many people collaboratively for the benefits OSX offers in this department to appear as prevalent. But still would like to hear your comparison of productivity and workflow in windows vs osx.
yep its legal, you can use your copy of osx in up to 2 vm machines.
There are certain things I use my mac for but I mostly use my windows.
My research tells me otherwise, can you post a link to the license agreement on apple’s website?
I think you are misreading that, you are allowed 2 vm copies on a Apple computer already running OSX.
Found it, apparently you can install it up to two apple computers provided you bought the OS. Never mentions windows computers. I could’ve accidentally read over it though.