best hardware

[davehu]

totally new to this.

I currently work for a housing company on the design staff. My role is concept design and I predominantly present 3D models with site modelling and all the trimmings. Using 12.5 on a HP laptop with 1GB ram and a 2.00KHz processor. The thing is uhg slow to open and save files. Rendering (final RWks quality) seems to take forever. I am discussing hardware upgrade with the company ownwer.

Some advice please ... (not from sales reps!) Should I consider switching to a Mac G5 or similar. Or just a more powerful PC desktop? What is the best hardware package to run 12.5 (Architect) with Renderworks etc.? Thanks

[Christiaan]

The Power Mac G5s have been superseded by the Mac Pros (which have Intel processors, and run both Windows and Mac OS X). If you're looking for the "best hardware" then you can't go too wrong with the 8 Core 3GHz Mac Pro, filled with as much RAM as you can afford and an ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB graphics card (and the AppleCare extended warranty).

http://www.apple.com/macpro/

I can't see any point in restricting yourself to a Windows-only PC unless you can find something that gives you much more bang for your buck, which I doubt exists.

[Dexie]

We have recently changed our Vectorworks PC users over to Mac Pro's which seem to have far better graphics capabilities than the PC's.

Also you get the benefit of being able to use the invaluable layer transparency settings, something lacking on the PC version.

[davehu]

Thanks for your help.

Looks like a switch to Macs.

Now to convince the boss!