Are Macs Better Than Pc's For 3d Work?

[malysha]

Hello all,

This is my first time posting, so thanks for reading.

I've been planning on building or purchasing a new computer for my 3d, composition and video editing work. I mainly do work in Maya, Adobe After Effects and 3ds Max. My main goal is among the masses: To get a job in the 3D industry. I'm still trying to feel out exactly what I want to do, but while I'm finding a focus I'm do as much work as I can to build my skills up, so I want the best computer choice. I was thinking on focusing on either a Dell Precision 690 or Mac Pro setup.

For a long while I've been debating on whether or not I was going to invest my hard earned money in a PC or a Mac. I've always used PC's, so I'm more comfortable with them. But I've heard much talk from different people that are creative professionals, telling me that getting a Mac is the way to go. Against their advice I went ahead and started buying components for a PC computer build that I'll complete when the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU's go down in April, but I'm still curious about why Mac's are so glorified with some creative professionals.

I guess my main question is, is the Mac (or Mac Pro) really that better of a choice? And why? I take graphics classes at my local junior college, when I asked my instructor the question he just said "I don't know why...they just give me less errors when I do my work and they look better."

And do most professional offices in the industry use Mac's over PC's? That's important to me because I don't want to focus on a workstation that's not widely used in the industry. Here's hoping that the answer to this is a "PC."

Any info would be great, thanks.

-3dNatic

[user_deleted]

QUOTE
they just give me less errors when I do my work and they look better

Unfortunately that's the most complete answer you can get !!!
The war Mac vs PC is going on for as long as I remember, starting with Bill Gates stealing the idea of desktop full of icons from Steve Jobs.

Back then, the graphic design community was Mac oriented, because the Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop) and Prepress software (Quark Xpress) were only for Mac. (I think they had a 10 years license with Apple).
All the pipeline (i.e Agfa scanner and printers) were for Mac.
To tell the truth, at this time Macs were not better than PC. There were also crashing all the time (the famous "couak"), were bloody expensive and not upgraded easily.

Now, Macs are using the same components as PCs (graphic cards, CPU), the price/performance ratio is more or less the same, and are based on Linux, which is one of the most stable platform for an OS.

The only difference is that, so far, the Macs users are still a lot less than the PC/windows based community, which can make a difference for few things (i.e. plugins, support on technical problems).
And no support for 3Dmax ...

Apart from that, the main difference is that you won't have to deal with Microsoft, which is always a good thing ! And guess what, I am using PC/windows and not Macs, so I can't be blamed for being unfair.

So my honest opinion is : if you don't see any reason to buy a PC, buy a Mac. You can always run windows applications (with bootCamp) if you really need to.

And I agree, they look really good ...

Guyb.

[malysha]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I was thinking of boot camp as well for a Mac.

I was also Yahoo'ing and found a really great post on the "Mac Vs. PC" debate. This guy gave a pretty detailed answer which killed my curiousity of Mac/PC industry standards. This dude is pretty much all for PC's on the professional level, but hopefully this helps someone out as well in their decision on which computer to pursue. I already bought some PC components for a build, so it eased my mind. Link:

http://www.rifftrax.com/smf/index.php?PHPS...g12413#msg12413

But he also talked about the fact that while professional PC's beat professional Mac's, consumer Mac's beat consumer PC's hands down:

http://www.rifftrax.com/smf/index.php?topi...g12711#msg12711

Does anyone oppose this dude's commentary? If so please post. I'd like to get both professional viewpoints from Mac fanatics and people committed to PC's.

So this makes me wonder if my future build is going to be powerful enough to be professionally superior to a Mac Pro. Or is it going to be powerful enough for the best 3d programs out there? Here are my future specs:

XFX PVT71JYHE9 GeForce 7950GT 512MB ExTreme Edition Video Card
Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gamer Case
Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply
ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel core 2 duo E6600 (2.4 GHZ)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB Hard Drive
Corsair DDR2 2GB XMS2-5400, 675MHz, Dual Channel 2x1GB 240-Pin Dimm Memory
DVD/CD-ROM

But I don't think I'm going to be in the same field as a Mac Pro, mainly because I'm not dishing money out for an Intel Quad Core, just a measly Core 2 E6600!

-3dNatic

[joojaa]

Base setup on macs are okay, and coupled with proprietary drivers on a platform with limited hardware choises thats going to be stabler. This is why a mac is good.

For consumers definitely mac UNLESS your primary concern is to get office, notes, outlook, games or some secific program to work.

Unfortunately thats also the same reason macs are bad. Lack of choise. While its true that macs are cheaper now days on the laptop front at least and are okay in sheer computational power. They lack flexibility of a pc. Now just blindly buying a mac workstation and a pc one you'd probably get a 50% chance the macs better (a good pc has better hardware on the mobo side). However if you plan well and get the best of best, and need something very specific. you can get easily a pc that beats this. But thing is buying the good workstation pc is costly and hard.

What would i choose. Well for my own laptop use a macs okay, but for my workstation NO WAY IN HELL