iMac

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I would like to ask for some advice, as I am looking to buy a new 4k iMac 21.5".  I am currently looking at the 3GHz i5, Radeon 555 graphics with 8gb Vram and I was thinking of adding an SSD as an extra because I was told the HDD at 5400rpm is really slow. The primary usage would be design using Fusion 360 but I will also do a bootcamp on it and sometimes run CFD Autodesk on it and Matlab. Does anyone have any feedback if this is enough for specification and it works well with these Programs? I currently have a 2016 MacBook Pro running Fusion 360 but it does sometimes slow down a little and its slow to work with so therefore I am looking for something I can use at home for everything for a long time.

Thank you in advance,

Istvan 

[lucasliraAU · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous

I'm in the same situation too. I am in search of a new machine to execute my activity within the 3D modeling platform.

I have come to the following conclusion, to make an investment in machines with the profile focused to game up because these machines presentation characteristic good performance for three-dimensional elements what I mean is that we should focus on these criteria:

A powerful processor, high RAM and FHD screen, the most important component is the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

The alternative is to focus on hardware enhancements

Install more system memory. Upgrade your CPU to a multi-core / multiprocessor. Get faster memory, up to the limit of the motherboard of your PC.

Operating system configuration Increase the processing priority of Fusion360 through your operating system. Increase your swap file space used by the operating system for memory swapping, also called virtual memory paging file size, up to the size of your physical memory.

These are the conclusions I am taking as a priority for my next steps.

Hope this can help you!

Greetings.

[lichtzeichenanlage]

I cannot say much about iMac configuration, but it should be preferable (if possible) to  replace the HD with a SSD. This should speedup startup times (OS / programms), caches etc. 

Edit: Perhaps system requirements might help you.

[lichtzeichenanlage]

@lucasliraAU:

• Powerful CPU? Frequency is more important than core count (unless you're doing tones of local renderings). 
• High RAM? What does that mean for you?
• FHD? Might be small
• Why is the GPU so important?

[Anonymous]

Well I will order it with the ssd because its crazy slow without it. I am just not sure if the i5 is enough or not because by looking at the geekbench results it does very close to the macbook pro 2017. I will be doing renders sometimes but i will also use Autodesk CFD which requires the cpu.

[lucasliraAU]

@lichtzeichenanlage

Hello! 

Good for my knowledge ...

If you find slow 3D performance, for example, it's good to check how much of your GPU is being used. If it's 100%, investing in a more powerful GPU will probably help. However, if usage is significantly lower, you may be wasting your money and it is better to buy a higher frequency CPU.

I recommend understanding where the bottlenecks occur, for the flow of your jobs ...

On a workstation, you should always point to a high-frequency (GHz) CPU. This is good for overall system performance and modeling, since most operations are single-chained. that is, they only use a CPU core.

Multithreaded operations can use multiple CPU cores (and virtual CPU cores). Rendering is the best example. As a general rule, doubling the number of cores reduces the rendering time by half.

(RAM memory)

You should always have enough memory so that you never run out of power, since performance can be significantly slower if your workstation has to send page data to your SSD.

Memory requirements always change over time. Your data sets will grow larger and application memory consumption will increase with new releases ...

These are some concepts that I use for this analysis, if I'm wrong at some point we can talk more about it ... Certainly I'm here for progressions in this area ...

Greetings to the South of Ecuador!

[chrisplyler]

Is it much more to get a good I7 over the I5?

Sorry if I'm out of line. I've just never been able to stand at a car dealership and think to myself, "I want the middle trim level with only some of the horsepower."