27" iMac on order.

C

ChrisGarrett

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27" iMac on order.

Well I've just ordered my 27 inch iMac i7. Can't wait to get it and see what sort of rendering speed increase I get in Cheetah over my Late 2007 MacBook Pro.... I'm hoping to see 8 little rendering squares when I do a render. That and 8 gig of ram it should fly.

Now I just need to upgrade to Cheetah 5.0 but thats going to have to wait till next pay now... :)
 
arrrr :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:
//eaten up by envy//

it's exactly what i'd like to buy... but it seems all my clients have forgotten the difference between "freelance" and "free" :tongue:

BTW, i'm afraid you'll get only 4 little squares going 'round through your renders since you only have 1 i7 quad-core (or am I missing something???)... not too bad anyway!

have fun (no doubt here)
A.
 
Hi SurfingAlien

My understanding is that the i7 unlike the i5 has hyperthreading on each core so that it is capable of running two threads at the same time and Snow Leopard sees it as 8 CPU's. I won't be sure until I get it. I'm sure it won't be as fast as 8 true cores but the i7 wins in the speed stakes over the i5. I know what you mean about Free and Freelance. I still have a lot of people who think I'm doing them a favour.

And Margus16

And what we gain for this information is now a discussion on the tools that people use and possibly a bit of education... Oh and also I had to tell someone... :)
 
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ah, like my old P4 3.6HT... wasn't aware of that, anyway for the $$$ difference over the i5 the i7 is well worth the price for sure imho!

c'mon Margus, it's not the most useful thread in the forum but it's like when you buy a brand new car and take your friends to the pub for a drink... no? ;)
 
I got the email from apple the other day about the new 27" Imac's ...want! want! want! :tongue:

The i7 cpu's are super quick. They bury the Core2Duo's in most benchmarks ....even the C2D Extreme Editions.

The only thing that I think they should have done is put a more powerful gpu in than the radeon 4850. They should have put in the 1024Mb 4870 or 4890.
Having said that though it only really applies if you play games otherwise the 4850 is fine.

Maybe you should post some render times and benchmarks when it arrives. Im sure a lot of us would be interested ..my self included.
 
TankJon said:
The only thing that I think they should have done is put a more powerful gpu in than the radeon 4850. They should have put in the 1024Mb 4870 or 4890.
Having said that though it only really applies if you play games otherwise the 4850 is fine.

Maybe you should post some render times and benchmarks when it arrives. Im sure a lot of us would be interested ..my self included.
Click to expand...

Hi TankJon,

I'll definitely post some rendering times, might be a while though, as the Apple store delivery page for my order says shipping November... My luck it will be the end of November...

I'm pretty happy with the 4850, I do play some WOW and the new card is heaps quicker than the 8600MGT in the MacBook Pro. I like the fact that 27 inch iMac's now use desktop components so we don't get the lower power and performance Notebook versions...

Chris
 
Congratulations on your order. Let me know how it works out! I know there are plenty of people here considering ordering one, at some point.
 
I hope this is no stupid question:

Is RAM an issue when it comes to rendering? Do I get a benefit if rendering an 800x600 pixels 100 frames animation when using 1, 2, 4 or 8 GB of RAM?

I only have 1GB in my MacMini that I use for rendering and wonder if upgrading makes a difference. It only does rendering, nothing else.
 
Sure it does make difference. Computer can write important data to RAM and get it very quickly and doesnt have to write it onto hard disc, which is quite slow compared to RAM
 
RAM will only make a difference if you don't have enough to keep everything in (physical) RAM. So you'll either see a dramatic speed increase, or little-or-no speed increase.

Core i5 vs. i7 benchmarks

Also note -- it's not like the 4850 is a low end card. The second digit in a graphics card is "hoopiness", the third is just icing. Their performance is not much different -- and I'm guessing the heat dissipation on the 4870 is not workable for the iMac form factor.
 
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Hi,
I would be very interested in the power usage of the 27" iMac. I only found the idle power usage but not the full load power usage. If anybody knows that please let me know.

Bye,
Martin
 
Hi Martin,

I had a long read of Apple's EPA report on the 27 inch : http://images.apple.com/environment/reports/docs/iMac_27_inch_Environmental_Report_2009.pdf. You're right it doesn't give you any loads for 100% utilisation. The only thing it does say is

Power supply efficiency: Average of the power supply’s measured efficiency when tested at 100 percent, 50 percent, and 20 percent of the power supply’s rated output power.

So from the above statement and their matrix of efficiency I can only assume that the power supply is about 88% efficient. I too would love to know the wattage usage..

100% utilisation Seems to me to be a rather strange thing to leave out of a EPA report...

Chris.

PS: Oh I upgraded to Version 5 yesterday and although I had my reservations with the new material system, mainly because Blender changed to a node based system and I felt it ruined the work flow, I'm liking it. I love the new material presets. They save a lot of time... Thanks for all your effort.
 
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