iMac Recommendations for AC17?

[David Norman]

I'm about to purchase a new 27" iMac to use with AC17. I'm somewhat confused as to whether an i7 versus an i5 will be good value. Does anyone know if the i7 can take full advantage of 8 threads when processing in Archicad? Does multi-threading work only for rendering, or is it effective for other processes as well (rotating large models, generating sections, etc.)

Also, any advice on Fusion versus SSD drive?

Thanks, Dave

[Link]

Regarding the multiple cores part of your question, it may pay to read about multiprocessing on the ArchiCADWiki. It is over a year old and I would imagine AC17 is even better in this regard.

This may also be of interest to you: www.graphisoft.com/ftp/marketing/us/05-archicad_dream_machine/05-archicad_dream_machine.video_frame?x=800&y=500

I'd be going for the i7!

Cheers,
Link.

[David Maudlin]

David wrote:
Does anyone know if the i7 can take full advantage of 8 threads when processing in Archicad?

In addition to Link's advice, see: Industry-first Background Processing

David

[David Norman]

Thanks for the info. I realize that in theory multi-core processing should speed things up. Just wondering if in real life the i7 with hyperthreading will make a difference over the i5 without. Is anyone aware of benchmarks for Archicad that could demonstrate this? Or even any hands-on experience from Archicad users?

[Laszlo Nagy]

Graphisoft is recommending 4-8+ cores now with ArchiCAD 17 because it improves performance with AC17's developments:

http://www.graphisoft.hu/support/system_requirements/

Note: Processors with 4-8+ cores are recommended to fully exploit ArchiCAD 17's performance capabilities.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Somewhat related... Bare Feats just posted a benchmark comparison of the top i7 iMac vs the entry level new Mac Pro which might be of interest:

http://www.barefeats.com/tube03.html

The main place that the iMac falls down there - in comparison - is OpenCL, but as far as I know, ArchiCAD does not utilize OpenCL at all. (This is a means of having processing done on the graphics card and has nothing do do with OpenGL.)