Which Mac should I purchase

[Anonymous]

I am an intern architect and I need to learn the Archicad program 8.1.2. I will need to buy a new Mac to run the program and am considering the new 20"
iMac G4. Specs are as follows 1.25 Ghz PowerPC G4, 512MB of PC2700(333Mhz.) DDR SDRAM, 80GB hard disk drive, 4XSuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce
FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, 56K modem, 10/100BT Ethernet, Firewire and USB connectivity and AirPort Extreme ready. Is this going to be
a good machine for Archicad? Should I consider a G4 PowerMac and Cinema display? Will the iMac need to be upgraded in the near future, and can that be
done easily? Any suggestions would be helpfull.

[Anonymous]

L. wrote:
I tested both by using the same model, and same rendering method.
The p4 out perform the g5. it wasn't to my expectation that the p4 performed better.

I have been curious about ArchiCAD performance comparisons between G5 and P4 Xeon machines. I am a bit dismayed to hear that your experience is that the Pentium is still faster. Have you done controlled testing? Could you post the files (or images of them) used and the results?

This adds to my concern that Graphisoft is neglecting their Mac users. Clearly, based on processor or system performance, there is no reason that the Pentium should be able to outperform the G5.

There are also many little things that used to work well on the Mac that no longer do (they now work like Windows) and there are lots of little glitches in the interactions with system resources (like the open/save dialogs) that should not be getting through basic QC. (They are not killer bugs, just annoying glitches which I have not had the time to document and report myself. If I get the time I'll try to come up with a list.)

I continue to wonder whether there are ANY Macs being used to develop ArchiCAD anymore. It is one thing for the management to say that they care about their Mac user base, but if none of the programmers are using them then the Mac version of the software feels more and more like an afterthought. It feels like there is the danger that ArchiCAD is going the way of MS Word and Excel. They were also originally Mac only products which, after being ported to Windows, slowly became less and less usable and more Windows-like until Word 6 was so bad that Mac users were reverting to Word 5 (sound familiar?). (Curiously, since MS responded to this by creating the MacBU, Office has been consistently better on the Mac.)

Perhaps I'll add this to my wish topic for AC9.

[Anonymous]

well, first of all, i m not using Xeon,
i m using an one year old processor, p4 3.06, it is not a dismay to you, to me too.

i had done everything during the test. and the result, about 25 - 30% faster, it's a 250++mb hotel file, dont think i can post it.

i have got no idea that Graphisoft is neglecting their Mac users. as far as i m concern, pc is rather a faster platform, still.

as what i told everyone, i m not a pc user, but, the machine that i used really out performed a dual 1.8 g5.

[Djordje]

L. wrote:
well, first of all, i m not using Xeon,
i m using an one year old processor, p4 3.06, it is not a dismay to you, to me too.
////
as what i told everyone, i m not a pc user, but, the machine that i used really out performed a dual 1.8 g5.

3.06 is almost twice 1.8, so 20-30% is not so bad ...

In ArchiCAD, the graphics card also does make difference.

Money/speed ratio is definitely on the PC side, even with high end brand machines that are anything but cheap.

Just IMHO, of course.

[Anonymous]

Matthew wrote:

L. wrote:
I tested both by using the same model, and same rendering method.
The p4 out perform the g5. it wasn't to my expectation that the p4 performed better.

I have been curious about ArchiCAD performance comparisons between G5 and P4 Xeon machines. I am a bit dismayed to hear that your experience is that the Pentium is still faster. Have you done controlled testing? Could you post the files (or images of them) used and the results?

This adds to my concern that Graphisoft is neglecting their Mac users. Clearly, based on processor or system performance, there is no reason that the Pentium should be able to outperform the G5.

Djordje wrote:
3.06 is almost twice 1.8, so 20-30% is not so bad ...

In ArchiCAD, the graphics card also does make difference.

Money/speed ratio is definitely on the PC side, even with high end brand machines that are anything but cheap.

I am sorry for given out a slight wrong information, according to my IT technician, the water cooled P4 3.06 was hyper threading enabled, and Overclocked to 3.6 Ghz, using very high speed ram modules.
That is one of the reason why it is so fast.

Agreed to what Djordje mentioned, the graphics card.
The second factor is definately on the graphics processor itself. I was told the 9800 XT from ATI is the flagship model at the moment. Therefore, cant really compare the dual 1.8's fx 5200, as graphics processing plays a big role in Archicad.

I did the test again upon receiving replies from both of you.
Tests were performed on the Dual 1.8/fx 5200 and Single 3.06/9800xt. Both systems with 2 x 512 ram modules.

test 1: Archicad 8.1, cutting section on a complex hotel model.
dual 1.8: 3 min 25 sec
overclocked 3.06: 2 min 35 sec.

test 2: archicad8.1 3d rendering.
dual 1.8: system died/halt after +- 5 minutes.
overclocked 3.06: 11 min 50 sec.

Art lantis rendering. All set to the highest quality@1600x1200.Same view.
dual 1.8: 5 min 25 sec
overclocked 3.06: 3 min 05 sec.

I do not wish to include the custom built dual P4 3.20Ghz@1mb cache/2gb ram/asus 9800xt system in this test, mainly because this rig outperformed the 3.06 desktop by a big leap. i like macs, i dont want mac user to be deeply hurt anymore.

I hope this will make clear on our discussion.
I felt like overclock my G5 now.
Anybody got a clue?

[Anonymous]

L. wrote:
I am sorry for given out a slight wrong information, according to my IT technician, the water cooled P4 3.06 was hyper threading enabled, and Overclocked to 3.6 Ghz, using very high speed ram modules.
That is one of the reason why it is so fast.

Thanks for the correction/clarification. It seems more consistent with my own experience. The fact that the Mac is dual processor makes little difference since AC doesn't make use of the second one. So it seems reasonable that a souped up P4 could outrun it. The graphics cards shouldn't be much of a difference between the machines since the tests you describe are almost all processor work; the graphics card mostly affects OpenGL.

I do wonder if there is something wrong with the Mac. You say it froze in the middle of a rendering? I have never (that I can recall) had ArchiCAD freeze during rendering, and I have run some very large files with all the settings maxed out.

You may have some bad RAM. I had some serious performance problems with a brand new Dual G4 1.42GHz machine w/2GB RAM because the vendor had installed some no-name flaky DIMMs. Once I replaced them with new memory from Crucial, I had no further problems.

[JCovarrubias]

Matthew wrote:

L. wrote:
I tested both by using the same model, and same rendering method.
The p4 out perform the g5. it wasn't to my expectation that the p4 performed better.

I have been curious about ArchiCAD performance comparisons between G5 and P4 Xeon machines. I am a bit dismayed to hear that your experience is that the Pentium is still faster. Have you done controlled testing? Could you post the files (or images of them) used and the results?

This adds to my concern that Graphisoft is neglecting their Mac users. Clearly, based on processor or system performance, there is no reason that the Pentium should be able to outperform the G5.

hello LS Chew:
What Build version of ArchiCAD 8.1 are you using with these test,
i.e. 1410 or 2256 or 2275?

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Dear JCovarrubias,

I am using Archicad 8.1 r1. 1307.

[Anonymous]

Matthew wrote:

L. wrote:
I am sorry for given out a slight wrong information, according to my IT technician, the water cooled P4 3.06 was hyper threading enabled, and Overclocked to 3.6 Ghz, using very high speed ram modules.
That is one of the reason why it is so fast.

Thanks for the correction/clarification. It seems more consistent with my own experience. The fact that the Mac is dual processor makes little difference since AC doesn't make use of the second one. So it seems reasonable that a souped up P4 could outrun it. The graphics cards shouldn't be much of a difference between the machines since the tests you describe are almost all processor work; the graphics card mostly affects OpenGL.

I do wonder if there is something wrong with the Mac. You say it froze in the middle of a rendering? I have never (that I can recall) had ArchiCAD freeze during rendering, and I have run some very large files with all the settings maxed out.

You may have some bad RAM. I had some serious performance problems with a brand new Dual G4 1.42GHz machine w/2GB RAM because the vendor had installed some no-name flaky DIMMs. Once I replaced them with new memory from Crucial, I had no further problems.

Thanks for the ram advice. i got them replaced from apple center. it seemed well enough to handle more files without crashing as before.

[James B]

My computer at work has just been upgrade from a dual 867 to a dual 1.8 G5.

I'm noticing things to be alot faster, however in my first day with ArchiCAD I had 5 crashes, and not just your normal crashes but computer freezing and an error log being displayed on screen. Seems to only ever happen when ArchiCAD is being used.

Has any one with a G5 experienced anything like this? As I'm not sure if it's the computer or purely coincidental that ArchiCAD is running when it does crash.

[Anonymous]

James wrote:
My computer at work has just been upgrade from a dual 867 to a dual 1.8 G5.

I'm noticing things to be alot faster, however in my first day with ArchiCAD I had 5 crashes, and not just your normal crashes but computer freezing and an error log being displayed on screen. Seems to only ever happen when ArchiCAD is being used.

Has any one with a G5 experienced anything like this? As I'm not sure if it's the computer or purely coincidental that ArchiCAD is running when it does crash.

Five crashes is not normal. I would be surprised if we have five crashes in a month through the whole office. It's probably a lot less than that - I can't remember the last time I had a serious crash - in fact, we may not have had a single crash since upgrading to Panther a few months ago.

What you describe sounds like a kernel panic. It's possible that you have a system or software problem, but I suspect, once again, that it may be bad RAM. The crashes being more frequent in ArchiCAD is probably because it is likely the most demanding application you are running; especially when PlotMaker and BGArchiCAD are also working.

If you have access to TechTool Pro, try the hardware tests. Alternatively try running as many memory hungry programs as you can to see if you can crash the machine (Photoshop with a large file and whole bunch of complex filter operations could do the trick all by itself).