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Hi everyone! In September, I'll be doing Product Design in uni which entails a fair bit of CAD/design work. I currently have the Mid-2011 21.5" iMac with the 2.7GHz i5 processor and 8GBs of RAM but realise that at uni I will need a certain degree of portability. Which of the following combinations would you go for since there are pros and cons to each? Or can you think of an even better solution? 1) Keep my iMac (which I absolutely love) and use it as my main machine seeing that is beastly in terms of performance Get a decent spec Windows laptop/ultrabook <£600 for when I'm around the uni campus/away (budget doesn't allow for a Macbook Pro in this situation unfortunately). 2) Sell my iMac and buy a Macbook Pro which would then be my primary machine. I was thinking of going for the 13" 'classic' Macbook Pro since I can then add an SSD and boost the RAM up then also connect it to a monitor when I'm in my room so that I get the same screen 'real estate' as the iMac but still retain the portability of a laptop. The biggest catch is that it isn't as powerful as the iMac. What do you guys think? |
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Given the two options keep the iMac... if you plan to do CAD work you will need a larger screen then 13 inches... Also, most CAD applications are made for windows, it is best to ditch your MAC if this is what you want to do with your life. |
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If you're going to be designing large scale or highly detailed projects; you should invest in machine made for CAD. Ray tracing is hardware intensive enough to be used (and often is) for benchmarking. This is not a job for a workstation or a gaming rig because the processors central and video are designed more with rasterization in mind. You may be able to use a high spec board with Winfast or Firepro cards, but it still wouldn't have the RAM volume and rendering capabilities of a CAD machine. Use what best suits your needs, but I would suggest a GPU that is made for ray tracing like the Leadtek Winfast (NVidia) or the Firepro (AMD) at least. |
