Imac for maya?

[Chase Harman]

I'm going to start getting in to 3d animation and wondering if a 5k imac could handle Maya. i know it's pretty underpowered,  but it has a great display and I wanted to stay in the apple enviorment as I have a serious dislike for windows and I also wanted to do some work in Logic Pro X. My only other option is a base model refurbished 2013 mac pro, or to get a 6 core 2012 mac pro and throw in an rx 480 (sierra is apple to run polaris gpus with a little fiddling because of the 455 in the MBP)  But If I have to i guess pc is an option and I'll use my mac book pro for logic. If only Mac OS was a standalone, or hackintosh was less illegal...

[SCHISCHKA]

Thats a good question. What GPU does the refurbished mac pro have? - i imagine it would be better than the intel GPU on the mac.

If you really hate Windows; I think Maya is available for linux

[Chase Harman]

Just now, SCHISCHKA said:

Thats a good question. What GPU does the refurbished mac pro have? - i imagine it would be better than the intel GPU on the mac.

If you really hate Windows; I think Maya is available for linux

The 5k Imac has a AMD Radeon R9 M390 2GB and the 2013 mac pro has dual amd firepro d300 2gb

[Inrix]

3 minutes ago, imnotchase said:

The 5k Imac has a AMD Radeon R9 M390 2GB and the 2013 mac pro has dual amd firepro d300 2gb

Why not build your own and put a mac os on it? That way your not throwing away money?

 

Notice now what you were referring to in relation to hackintosh, though still think this would be the best if you wanted to do apple and 3D design. But you'll be shooting yourself in the foot if your thinking of using their hardware with that kind of work. Seriously

[SCHISCHKA]

2 minutes ago, imnotchase said:

The 5k Imac has a AMD Radeon R9 M390 2GB and the 2013 mac pro has dual amd firepro d300 2gb

RAM is very important. 2Gb kinda sucks when midrange cards have 6Gb now. System RAM is very important too. I did a bit of rendering at uni and I remember I had to make sacrifices to get my scene to render with particles with the RAM I had back then. I would go for whatever hardware gives you the most RAM. That might end up being the 5k Mac

[itsMilan]

42 minutes ago, imnotchase said:

I'm going to start getting in to 3d animation and wondering if a 5k imac could handle Maya. i know it's pretty underpowered,  but it has a great display and I wanted to stay in the apple enviorment as I have a serious dislike for windows and I also wanted to do some work in Logic Pro X. My only other option is a base model refurbished 2013 mac pro, or to get a 6 core 2012 mac pro and throw in an rx 480 (sierra is apple to run polaris gpus with a little fiddling because of the 455 in the MBP)  But If I have to i guess pc is an option and I'll use my mac book pro for logic. If only Mac OS was a standalone, or hackintosh was less illegal...

My best guess is to get a refurbished Mac Pro 5th Gen and put a new and higher-end graphics card in from Nvidia. There are enough guides on how to do it.

 

(Then you can get something like a gtx 1060 with 6gb of Vram.)

[mbryant]

5 minutes ago, itsMilan said:

My best guess is to get a refurbished Mac Pro 5th Gen and put a new and higher-end graphics card in from Nvidia. There are enough guides on how to do it.

 

(Then you can get something like a gtx 1060 with 6gb of Vram.)

I don't think MacOS supports Pascal 

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, imnotchase said:

I'm going to start getting in to 3d animation and wondering if a 5k imac could handle Maya. i know it's pretty underpowered,  but it has a great display and I wanted to stay in the apple enviorment as I have a serious dislike for windows and I also wanted to do some work in Logic Pro X. My only other option is a base model refurbished 2013 mac pro, or to get a 6 core 2012 mac pro and throw in an rx 480 (sierra is apple to run polaris gpus with a little fiddling because of the 455 in the MBP)  But If I have to i guess pc is an option and I'll use my mac book pro for logic. If only Mac OS was a standalone, or hackintosh was less illegal...

For working with Maya anyone of those is probably sufficient. For rendering, don't get mac at all. Have you considered the option to build your own system and use some linux distro (if windows is so big problem for you) in it? You could also (if you have the money) get the mac to work with and build a separeted rendering machine running windows or linux just to get the job done faster (this is what many professionals who want to work with mac do, because you really don't get good rendering hardware on macs, namely the GPUs).

[itsMilan]

1 hour ago, mbryant said:

I don't think MacOS supports Pascal 

Nvidia brings out driver for mac every generation. (That's why hackintoshers prefer nvidia for the most part). You can use AMD but you'll have to flash the card which is not included in the warranty. 

[Chase Harman]

5 hours ago, Thaldor said:

For working with Maya anyone of those is probably sufficient. For rendering, don't get mac at all. Have you considered the option to build your own system and use some linux distro (if windows is so big problem for you) in it? You could also (if you have the money) get the mac to work with and build a separeted rendering machine running windows or linux just to get the job done faster (this is what many professionals who want to work with mac do, because you really don't get good rendering hardware on macs, namely the GPUs).

Yeah definitely, the mac was going to be as a workstation, and when I ned to render I was going to build a system. For a render machine whats more important cpu or gpu?

[Chase Harman]

7 hours ago, SCHISCHKA said:

RAM is very important. 2Gb kinda sucks when midrange cards have 6Gb now. System RAM is very important too. I did a bit of rendering at uni and I remember I had to make sacrifices to get my scene to render with particles with the RAM I had back then. I would go for whatever hardware gives you the most RAM. That might end up being the 5k Mac

System ram or vram? the 5k imac supports up to 32 gb and the 2013 mac pro supports of to 64gb ecc. And if vram the 2012 mac pro supports 32gb and with a 480 has 8gb of vram, the only thing with the 2012 mac pro im worried about its the outdated westmere xeon, do you think it will still perform well well in maya?

[SCHISCHKA]

yea 2012 is pretty old. When i used maya I used up my system RAM with particle effects, but i dont know if maya is now able to offload this to GPU. I do know that render farms do not do a lot of GPU processing because system ram is larger.

[Pendragon]

15 hours ago, imnotchase said:

But If I have to i guess pc is an option and I'll use my mac book pro for logic.

take this option.