Mac Pro for Civil 3D, Map 3D and Infraworks..?

[RDunkley]

We are looking to upgrade our workstations, which would mainly be used for Civil 3D, Map 3D and Infraworks. I have heard that the Mac Pro performs significantly better and would not cost a great deal more if we were to have a similar specced HP (Our current workstation provider)...

We typically do a lot of medium to large scale projects. With a fair amount of 3D viewing & overlaying aerial images etc.

What do people think of the following options?

HP Z440 Workstation

- Intel® Xeon® E5-1630 v3 (3.7 GHz, 10 MB cache, 4 cores, Intel® vPro™)

- 256 GB HP Z Turbo Drive (PCIe SSD) + 1TB SATA (7200 rpm)

- NVIDIA® Quadro® K4200 (4 GB)

- 32 GB DDR4-2133 ECC RAM

- 1 x HP Z Display Z24i 24-inch IPS LED Backlit Monitor

- 1 x HP Z Display Z27i 27-inch IPS LED Backlit Monitor

Apple Mac Pro - Running Bootcamp

- Intel® Xeon® E5 (3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache)

- 512 GB PCIe SSD

- 32 GB RAM

- Dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM each

- 1 x 28" HDMI screen

- Microsoft Mouse, Keyboard

Both would be on a 3 year upgrade cycle.

Regards.

Ross.

[neilyj666]

I'd go for a bigger SSD in the HP (and it has the dual screen advantage) but my main concern would be running Civil on a non native OS via bootcamp - just something else with the potential for disaster...!!!! I know nothing about how a Mac performs in general.

[Pointdump]

Ross,

I have a friend that uses C3D on a Mac, and he reports no problems, works just fine. But I gotta say that the HP will give you more bang for the buck. Apple is overpriced.

Dave

[cwitzel]

After years of Dells Precision workstations, (We are in Austin TX) we just switched to Boxx (also made right here in Austin!!)

Couldn't be happier!!  These things smoke! Literally a couple times faster than some Dells we bought just a year ago.

Conan Witzel

GICE Inc, Austin TX

Civil 3d 2015 SP1