G5 Imac?, How will it cope? Options

[bloodychoir]

Does anyone have any idea how the new imac might measure up speed and track capacity wise, using say Logic Express? Would it be a good or a bad decision to buy a g5 imac loaded up to the gills with ram and a 1.8, or a powermac g5? That's considering the fact you then have to buy display etc. with the PM.

[enygma]

Well, Maya is what I use Mainly. It is suggested these days that you look at an Athlon64 system for use with Maya. If you can afford it, go dual Opterons. They just seem to perform better than the Intel processors when it comes to rendering in Mental Ray, and when they release a 64 bit bersion of Mental Ray, you will be smokin. If you are dealing with high resolution textures, or just large ammounts of textures, then it wouldn't hurt to have a couple gigs of RAM sitting in the machine. Keep in mind that if you go with dual Opterons, the RAM will be more expensive as you will need ECC registered buffered memory. For a video card, I highly suggest something from nVidia for Maya. Either the best QuadroFX card you can afford (the FX 1100 is nice) or, because those are very expensive, the best GeForce you can afford. The GeForce 6800 is a very nice card to look at. As for an operating system, the best one I would suggeest is a Redhat based operating system. Maya just runs much more snappy on a Linux based operating system. Either Redhat 9 (Which is unsupported now) or Fedora Core 1. SuSe 9.1 is also nice, but it has some stability issues... at least it did for me with Maya 4.5. Maya 6 is supposed to be much better under Suse, which is also my favorite distribution of Linux.

Hope that helps. If you have any other questions regarding it, don't hesitate to email me at chris (at) enygma (dot) tv, or you can spot me around the www.3dbuzz.com hardware forums and such. Great site for learning 3D.