NEW PC

[Anonymous]

im not convinced that the Mac is what i want weighing up the pros and cons. Ive never had a mac so im no expert. Would anyone say that a Mac is a must when it comes to archicad and other rendering packages?

the second question i have. When i got this laptop it was one of the best overall performing laptops at its time, but not knowing it is terrible when it comes to graphic performance. What do i need that would benifit if from if i was to get the best of..

e.g.

processor, do i need the fastest possible processor
1gig DDram at least?
what kind of graphics card do i aim for, (best)
and will any specific mother board aid me, or shall i just get any..

thanks if your patient enough to answer all that lol

[stefan]

BryanRichards wrote:
im not convinced that the Mac is what i want weighing up the pros and cons. Ive never had a mac so im no expert. Would anyone say that a Mac is a must when it comes to archicad and other rendering packages?

Not necessarily. I'd go with a PC. It has more software available and a lot of programs aren't available for Macintosh. There are a few exceptions (where there is no PC-version), but unless these are exactly the programs you want to use everyday, I'd say that a PC gives you more flexibility.

BryanRichards wrote:
the second question i have. When i got this laptop it was one of the best overall performing laptops at its time, but not knowing it is terrible when it comes to graphic performance. What do i need that would benifit if from if i was to get the best of..
e.g.processor, do i need the fastest possible processor

Intel is goin to stop naming processers to their clock speed. And AMD is also proving speed is not the only factor.

BryanRichards wrote:
1gig DDram at least?

That would be nice. Unless you are fulltime doing renderings in high-end software, you don't really need more at the moment.

BryanRichards wrote:
what kind of graphics card do i aim for, (best)

If you're on a PC desktop, a Quadro FX.
If you're on a laptop, there are "mobile" versions of both Nvidia Quadro and ATI Radeon. For ArchiCAD you don't need the very, very best. A good decent OpenGL-supporting card is all you really need. If you fancy a game from time to time, then you'll need good DirectX support and support for all the latest pixel-shaders.
Oh, you don't need to do games. It also helps for VR-applications.

BryanRichards wrote:
and will any specific mother board aid me, or shall i just get any..
thanks if your patient enough to answer all that lol

I'm not busy buying a new PC, so I wouldn't really know.

[Eduardo Rolon]

I have both macs and wintel pc's. Both run AC with no problems and I can do all my renderings and animations in them. The Thinkpad pc has a P4 1.75 GHz processor and 756 ram, the Powerbook has a 1.25 Ghz processor and 1Gb of ram, both have ati mobile radeons with 64Mb ram.
Right now I am more partial to my Powerbook it is more stable than the pc, more secure, more fun and has more features than the pc also it is lighter to carry it around which i do a lot.
Anyway you can consider the above the minimum requirements for your choice in hardware. If you want my opinion I would tell you that you should consider a mac either a PB or a G5 with dual 1.8 processors but this is a biased opinion...

[Anonymous]

I had a similar issue when I was shopping for a laptop this last September and I found after about a month of looking that pc is the way to go the compatibility issues just aren’t their like with apple if you are going to be doing allot of cad work and graphics I suggest the new laptops from dell with the new hyper threading chips they are comparable if not faster than the new apple laptops they also have some very cool things such as the modular bay drives which you can swap while running and excellent battery life. Last they have the highest resolution screen for a laptop. the apple has a 17" screen but pixels my friend are low dell Inspiron 15.4 screen has 3 resolution available the highest is 1920 x 1200 pixels all your pallets fit with an enormous workspace left over and everything is crystal clear. I am always astounding people as to how crisp the image on my laptop is. I hope this helps you with your search. The available processors are 3Gh+ and up to 2G of ram and I would recommend at least a 128bit graphics card.

[Anonymous]

As many here probably already know, I have used both Macs and PCs about equally over the years and have a strong preference for the Mac. I have loved my ThinkPads nearly as much as my PowerBooks (though I will probably go for an HP 17" for my next PC laptop) but I have found Windows to be a tremendous time sink.

If I were able to charge for all the hours I have spent configuring, fixing and reinstalling Windows I could afford an extra top of the line Mac every year (or an extra week's vacation with the family). Also, the time I spend working on the Mac is consistently more productive than on the PC.

I make a point of keeping my PCs as clean and free of any non-critical software as possible (due to the maintenance headaches) but I load up just about anything on my Mac with no problems. As a result I can do a lot more with the Mac than with the PC. And this isn't even counting the effortlessness of the i-apps and the .mac account.

I think the Mac clearly leads Windows for overall productivity & TCO. It will be interesting to what new advances are in store for us in 10.4 (Tiger).