OK, VERY basic computer question

[Cleetus]

I'm a Mac guy. I have been looking in to taking the Westlawn courses and I have decided to replace my old Mac with a new PC. My issue is twofold:

First, I don't know how many of the modeling programs are opened at one time during a given work session. For instance, while doing graphic design for a webpage I might have both Quark and Photoshop open...a big drag on my system.

Second, keeping the above in mind, how much "oopmh" should my new computer have? What sized processor? I have heard it said often amongst Mac people that when it comes to comparing Macs to PCs, a gig on one is not equal to a gig on the other. Do I need a graphics card? how much ram?

Thanks in advance for any input!

-cleet

[antonfourie]

Depends on how much you want to spend

[hansp77]

Without starting another platform war...
I feel sorry for you.
I am also a 'mac guy'
and the move you are talking about sounds to me like swapping a bueatifull big sailing boat, for little rubber ducky...
Damn.
Do you really have to?
Why not just get a new intel mac?
Best of both worlds maybe.

[marshmat]

If you like Macs, do consider one of the new Intel-based ones. Spend a bit for Bootcamp or Parallels Desktop, and you'll be able to run Windows on it as well as OSX.
With Windows machines, it's best to shop by first setting a budget.... it's possible to spend five or ten grand on the computer of your dreams, but if you're restricted to, say, $2000 and know what software you'll be using... the quest becomes a lot narrower.

[SeaSpark]

A basic system would look like this:

1600 mHz processor
500 mb Main memory
128 mb Graphics card

If you want to run many programs at the same time first invest in more memory.

If you are on a budget concider buying second hand.

If you are on a really low budget pick up a 1200mh, 256mb, 64 graphics card comp second hand, this will run any software needed by a westlawn student and also quark and photoshop if the documents you want to work with are not to big. You wont be able to run many prog's at the same time in this case.


If you want a comfortable, fast computer:


2200 mHz processor
1000 mb Main memory
256 mb Graphics card

Computers with this spec also are available second hand at more than double the price of the 1600mh one.

What exactly do you mean with:


First, I don't know how many of the modeling programs are opened at one time during a given work session.


Hope this helps,

Jeroen

[SeaSpark]

A LCD Screen makes CAD work much more comfortable.

[Jeff]

Ram is not that expensive and makes a big difference... 512 MB I consider a browsing/word processing machine. 1 GB I consider entry-level now, and 2 GB is what I'd want for graphics.

[antonfourie]

Have a search on the net, for example you can get a Dell for $500 with a 3.2GHz chip with 1GB RAM it all depends on how much you want to spend, being that most design programs are RAM intensive then maybe try for 2GB or even 4GB if you are going to have loads of things open. BTW todays PC's are just as fast as a Mac if not faster if you are comparing to any Mac older than 1 year.

[Cleetus]

Wow thanks for the input everyone.

Jeroen, what I mean is, if I am working on a project, do I have three applications open at once, therefore requiring more RAM? Sometimes while doing web projects I know I move between several RAM hog apps at once and thus need more RAM

As for the intel Macs, my wife (also a Mac person) suggested that last night. Problem is, like mentioned above, a decent Dell can be had for $500 while a brand spanking new mac cost a fair amount more.

I'm going to need to be on a budjet if I am shelling out 8800 for school.

[SeaSpark]

Your very basic question is quite a difficult one.

As mentioned by most in this thread budget and memory needs are the important factors in the choice you have to make.

When you want to use several graphic intense applications at the same time 1gb of main memory will be sufficient. The 256mb main memory computer i proposed as the really low budget option will run software like Rhino, Maxsurf and Freeship comfortably if you keep your computer as "clean" as possible, with no unnecessary processes or applications running, no easy task with XP.

Most "high end" personal computers are sold to gamers, not to CAD or graphics professionals. Modern games are very demanding applications.

My advice: If you are on a budget and want the most capable computer for your money, buy a 2 year old ex "high end" PC from a gamer for 10% of what he originally paid for it. When you look on ebay or equivalent marketplaces in your area you will see you have a myriad of choices for systems like this.

New computers lose their value even more fast than new cars.

[Andrew Mason]

I would seriously consider an Intel based Mac Mini. If you are doing graphic design, web design or hull design with programs such as Maxsurf, Rhino or Freeship, the graphics will be easily good enough. The graphics power provided by the high end graphics cards is not really necessary for the sort of work you are doing as these cards are aimed at rendering high polygon count models with texture maps applied.

The Mac Mini has basically got laptop internals to make it small, but with 1Gb of memory and a reasonably big hard drive it should do all you want, and will run both Windows and OSX.

The Mac Mini also uses a socketed CPU, which means it is upgradable in the future. The Intel Merom core 2 duo chips will be available in the next 2-3 months and according to various articles on the web, will drop into the Mini for about a 20% speed increase.

[SeaSpark]

Andrew,

Do not know what the new Intel Merom core 2 duo chips are going to cost but i doubt if the 20% performance increase is going to be worth it compared to the speed potential of a good second hand PC.

Utter respect for the software you are supplying.

Jeroen

(edit)

Quote from the founder of this thread:

I'm going to need to be on a budget if I am shelling out 8800 for school.

[ludesign]

I'm a Mac guy. I have been looking in to taking the Westlawn courses and I have decided to replace my old Mac with a new PC. My issue is twofold:

First, I don't know how many of the modeling programs are opened at one time during a given work session. For instance, while doing graphic design for a webpage I might have both Quark and Photoshop open...a big drag on my system.

Second, keeping the above in mind, how much "oopmh" should my new computer have? What sized processor? I have heard it said often amongst Mac people that when it comes to comparing Macs to PCs, a gig on one is not equal to a gig on the other. Do I need a graphics card? how much ram?

Thanks in advance for any input!

-cleet

Why change if you prefer Macs? The new IntelMacs allows you to run Windows applications at more or less the same speed as a "real" Wintel. I compared a MacBook Intel Core Duo 1.8 with my old portable, an AMD Athlon 1.4, running TouchCAD for Windows. The Mac was 3.2 times faster, running Windows under OSX / Paralells. A bit slow on the video, though Paralells says it is going to get better in the next edition. If you prefer running generic Mac applications with a real Mac feel, check out TouchCAD and VectorWorks. Both are cross platform licenses and run as generic programs on the respective platforms. Both also run the respective Windows versions under Paralells on a Mac if you prefer that.

[SeaSpark]

For most people having to live with one operating system is hard enough.

Suggesting someone should stick to the mac platform and run windows to use software that is unavailable for it is making life much more complicated than needed. It also implies you will have to buy two licences for the operating systems. I have worked for several engineering and design companies, both as a designer and as beeing responsible for the computer systems and the software running on it. Two of these companies used macs and pcs in the same network. This lead to all kinds of higher costs and people struggling with deadlines and two different operating systems at the same time.

I am not biased towards mac or windows, i hate both by now.

I agree there are many excellent software packages available for the mac, for the engineer and the naval architect the choises are limited on this platform.

On the low end side there are two good and free applications running under windows, Freeship and Maxsurf academic. Nothing like this exists for the mac.

On the high end side there is VectorWorks for the Mac but nothing that comes close to Solidworks, Catia or ProEngineer, to name a few.

Andrew, nice of you to make clear in your signature you are working for Formation Design Systems, Claes, it would be nice to do the same in your signature since you are the developer of TouchCAD. I really appreciate how far you have come with the development of this software.

Jeroen

[Andrew Mason]

Seaspark

I agree with your points, my suggestion of the mac mini could be achieved by getting a used core solo machine and upgrading it in the future - the performance improvement of the core 2 duo chip over the original core solo would be much greater than 20%. It's a cheap machine for right now with an upgrade path, so I would not rule it out.

As far as the dual OS problem goes, I agree it is not ideal. I agree that most of the available marine design software runs on the PC, so it makes sense to go that way, but if Cleetus needs to keep running Mac applications it is one way of doing so with a single computer.

Andrew

[Jeff]

the performance improvement of the core 2 duo chip over the original core solo would be much greater than 20%.
1.) Quite probably a silly question, but from a programming standpoint is there a difference between coding for a dual core chip and coding for the previous generation of multiple cpu (e.g. dual xeon) machines?

2.) are the great majority of osx applications fully multithreaded to fully utilize dual core cpus? It still frustrates me how many windows applications are only partially multithreaded frequently leaving me waiting for operations that are running on only 1 cpu with the rest of the physical/virtual cpu's essentially idle.

[Andrew Mason]

1.) Quite probably a silly question, but from a programming standpoint is there a difference between coding for a dual core chip and coding for the previous generation of multiple cpu (e.g. dual xeon) machines?

As I understand it there is no difference, the programmer just writes for multiple threads where appropriate and the OS and hardware arbitrate how those threads will get executed. Note that writing apps with multiple threads is not simple when the function being performed is required to be executed synchronously.

2.) are the great majority of osx applications fully multithreaded to fully utilize dual core cpus? It still frustrates me how many windows applications are only partially multithreaded frequently leaving me waiting for operations that are running on only 1 cpu with the rest of the physical/virtual cpu's essentially idle.

I don't know about OSX, but I agree that Windows is atrocious at multitasking and multithreading, I seem to spend half my life waiting for applications such as Outlook and Excel to do something while some trivial background task dominates the CPU. With luck it will improve as multi-core architectures become the norm.

[marshmat]

Not sure if I'd say the "great majority" of OS-X kit is fully optimized for the Core Duo... but high end Macs have been dual processor for many years and the developers who work with them are getting very good at making the most of the architecture. I gotta agree with you guys about Windows though.... it's amazing just how much useless bloat it runs in the background, bogging everything down all the time.

[Jeff]

Is the useless bloat you observe from windows itself or off-the-shelf computers that load them down? Have you tried a clean install with just windows yourself? I was a bit shocked to see how bogged down and slow a brand new dell notebook was yesterday as a year ago dell was delivering very clean machines compared to the ugly compaq and hp installs I've had to clean out. I don't mean that as an insult, just don't want microsoft programmers to get the blame for VAR's loading down computers with bad third party apps (extremely bloated security suites come to mind beginning with both N and M now :()

[Crag Cay]

I remember the halcyon days when you could get yacht design software on a Mac and being reassured by Andrew at a MacSurf users conference that it would always be the case. On the strength of that I invested heavily in a lot of high end Mac gear and persuaded a couple of boat yards to go computerised with Macs.

Ironically, neither myself nor either of these yards regrets the decision. All are still Mac based for all the quoting / admin / email / web and brochure production, plus I have a PC purely to run Maxsurf. Keeping the PC free of any other software and not connnected to the internet has had its advantages. We only use 2D and have stuck with Ashlar Vellum/Graphite which followed ClarisCAD sometime in the distant past.

We were also early adopters of Acrobat as a way of communicating with 'the great unwashed' and have found it a key component of our comunication and workflow.

Perhaps the dual boot Macs will prove Andrew's prediction right, even if there has been a little hick-up along the way.

[marshmat]

'Tis a heavily cleaned up and tweaked 2004 toshiba, Jeff... with a 3-month-old fresh load of XP. It truly is amazing just how much crap can be turned off in msconfig, and how much speed that gains ya.
I second the remark about the security suites... we recently installed a well-known one on a three-year-old XP machine, and it promptly took up 65% CPU at idle, cutting response times on darn near everything by an order of magnitude.
< / rant > .....

[Jeff]

Dual booting seems too clunky to interest me except maybe when traveling with a portable, but if Paralells is problem free and can run windows as fast as a windows system for only say $500 more than an equally fast pc box, that is very exciting to me. Just saw this in late July but didn't see any heavy lifting to compare side by side. Speaking of which, is there a parallel paralells program that can run osx on slightly more economical pc hardware?

[timplett]

Hi

I know very little about Mac, and not necessarly a whole lot useful about Windows, but I will suggest a few things.

Check the front side bus speed on your processor. You can have a high speed processor and a large amount of RAM but a low front side bus speed will severely limit your speed.

If you get a Windows PC, no matter what it is, find your local computer geek guy, and get him to set up your computer properly. Proper setup of your computer will make huge differences.

If possible, use your existing computer for internet access, and don't connect your new PC to the internet. The reason is viruses, spyware, etc. Viruses and spyware will ruin your computer's performace, and an anti-virus that actually does anything will also slow your computer down significantly. Example, Norton complete takes over your computer, eventually making it completely infunctional. I had to reinstall Windows to get rid of Norton.

I can run Adobe Photoshop CS and several other programs at once (such as Winamp, Firefox, MSN Messenger) without causing any problems for my computer (a 2 year old totally worn out computer: 2.4ghz, 512 RAM). If my computer can handle it, pretty much any new one will too.

Hope I have been of help.

Tim Plett

[Andrew Mason]

I remember the halcyon days when you could get yacht design software on a Mac and being reassured by Andrew at a MacSurf users conference that it would always be the case.

We continued to sell and support Maxsurf on the Mac until last year, and it is now possible to run Maxsurf on Mac hardware, but using the Windows OS. So my prediction has come true, just not in the way I expected it.

Apple still makes excellent products and the OS makes Windows look like a primary school project, but unfortunately Apple all but abandoned the engineering/technical market years ago to focus on media and education. It's highly likely my next laptop will be a Mac just because the hardware is so well designed, but unfortunately I'll be running Windows on it.

Andrew

[Cleetus]

It's been a while since I answered so I apologoze for the bump but I wanted to thank everyone for their input, I'll let you all know what I buy in (hopefully) a couple weeks!

-Cleet

[ABoatGuy]

Marshmat et.al.

Does anyone know if software dongles (and their software) like used by GHS, AutoShip, Hydrocomp etc.etc. work on an intel mac running Parallels or Bootcamp? I'm getting tired of running around with two computers too.

[Andrew Mason]

The USB dongles used by Maxsurf will work fine on an Intel Mac under Bootcamp, this is probably true of other vendors USB dongles as well. Serial or parallel port dongles may or may not work, but few vendors use these anymore.

Maxsurf users with parallel port dongles can upgrade to a USB dongle for a small fee.

[marshmat]

To date I have yet to encounter a dongle that works on one architecture but not the other. I have, however, encountered a great many that are a royal pain in the behind on both systems; in general I'm not a fan of hardware locks as I've had very poor luck with them. One parallel port dongle even screwed up the printer that was plugged in through it. And they don't get along too well with laptops that are carried around all the time; it gets really easy to lose the dongle that way.

[ludesign]

TouchCAD HASP USB dongles are certainly cross platform and TouchCAD for Windows runs fine under Paralells / XP on a Mac. Unless you prefer running the Mac version on the Mac ;-).

[mxsailor]

Having been a Mac user since 1986, and currently a user of a Mac Mini dual core, i have used a beta version of Crossover to run Windows programs without having Windows installed.

If you think you won't have a steep learning curve trying to keep your Windows OS functional, most users will tell you that that's a mistake. I wouldn't want to have to learn a new operating system and keep up with my studies at the same time. As a student, you can get a good deal on a Mac, and concentrate on learning naval architecture and not computer architecture.

[Verytricky]

The best bet IMO is to plan the programs you are going to use, see how much RAM each one uses, and calculate the minimum amount of RAM that you will need to run the programs you want to run. Then install 2 GIG of RAM.

[mxsailor]

I agree with the 2 gig of RAM. RAM is cheap.
Stick with Mac OS X. It's been a 64 bit operating system for years and automatically allocates RAM to active applications. So you can have a dozen applications open, and the RAM is used for the app you're working with. Switch apps, the data is saved to a cache file on the hard disk and the memory is available for the active app. Mac OS X is Ferrari compared to any Windows OS.
I run a small publishing company and do all my design, production, image processing, finances, marketing and a 400 page website with a Mac Mini Dual Core with 2 gig of RAM and a 19" monitor. I also do music recording (I'm a jazz guitarist/keyboardist) and digital film with the Mini (movies of my sailing adventures).
The thought of trying to do all this with a Windows box riddled with viruses gives me the shakes.

[Cleetus]

Well
I bought a PC. But don't fear Mac folks! I kept my Mac. I did figure that a PC would be easier so here's what I got:

OptiPlex GX620 DT with Int Broadcom® GbNIC
Intel® Pentium® D Processor 820 (2.8GHz,DC,2X1M,800MHz FSB) 628DD
Operating System(s)
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2, with Media XPP2E
File System
NTFS File System for all Operating Systems NTFS
Memory
2.0GB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM,533MHz, (2DIMM) 2G2N52
Monitors
No Monitor NMON
Video Card
256MB ATI Radeon X600, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA, low profile 256DVI
Boot Hard Drives
160GB SATA 3.0Gb/s and 8MB DataBurst CacheTM 160S2
Dell USB Keyboard, No Hot Keys, English, Black EUSBK
Mouse
Dell USB 2-Button Optical Mouse with Scroll, Black USBOK
Audio Solutions
Integrated AC97 Audio INTSND
Speakers
DellTM A225 Speakers, Black A225
Removable Media Storage Devices
16X DVD+/-RW,w/Sonic SoftwareTM andCyberlinkPower DVDTM,no Media DRM16N
Lead Free Motherboard
RoHS Compliant Lead Free Chassis and Motherboard ROHS
Hardware Support Services
3 Year Limited Warranty plus 3 Year NBD On-Site Service U3OS

Now, some of this is greek to me but most makes sense and considering I used a friend, cashed in on some favors and managed to keep it at just a hair over 1k I think I did OK. I'm away at work this week but it's sitting in my house waiting to be set up and taken for a test spin

Lets keep our fingers crossed!

[Tim B]

Take it for a test-spin in Windows??? That's like taking out a sports car with a rev limiter.

Since you're a Mac boy, have you considered Linux? We are slowly getting more software for design work, and there is a huge amount of general software around too. Not to metion the obvious fact that KDE 3.5 is faster and more stylish than Win XP. I have just installed Mandriva 2007 (which was released at the start of the month) and I must say, It is VERY impressive. smooth, slick, fast, and it lets me do all the software developement I want to do. Much better than MSs latest offering in my opinion.

Cheers for now,

Tim B.

[jim lee]

We run everything with Macs, it just makes life easier.

We keep one isolated PC for running the few (Maybe 3) programs needed that only run on PCs. Solidworks, PCBexpress.. That machine is kept isolated and not allowed on the internet exept for a very limited set of sites it needs. (Like ordering custom PC boards etc.)

Watch out running Windows on the Intel Macs. From what the geeks are telling me, this could open up your door to the wonderful world of windows virus. (Yeech!)

-jim lee