Ca & Mac

[ohBIM007]

Aloha folks,

 

I have been asked to put together a system for a potential collaborator (aka rainmaker) who does hi-end homes. I have been using REViT / formZ / Photoshop to put together my sets and presentation works for the past 4 years,  a combination of residential, commercial and retail.  Once i learned that CA finally ported out to the mac OS i was intrigued and looked at the powerful toolset, the range of parametric options, the linkage to actual products, the ease of schedules, roofs and all the rest and was really impressed with the CAx7 offerings.  In many ways it appears to be more powerful for residential than REViT so i remain tempted. 

 

So my question is ;  does anybody out there have experience running x7 on an imac loaded with as much RAM as the machine will hold and the fastest video card available for it?  Or does one have to go to a mac PRO which is the most beautiful piece of computer i have seen, but about $8K to get setup with monitor.  Currently my imac runs REViT in all aspects pretty smoothly but the CA demo only works in 2D, sections produce an error, camera doesn't work etc.,  so i must upgrade to secure this potential line of business.  So i need to know how smoothly the newest imac fully loaded would work with CA or if i would have to go to the mac Pro???

 

Oh and what about renderings can anybody point me to the best CA stuff so i can judge?  The out of box stuff is really stiff. 

 

Oh also does CA offer a rent/project option like REViT now does?

 

Mahalo for your thoughts

http://ozon6.wix.com/badabim

Roland

[Doug_Park]

Pretty much the entire line of Mac products are decent choices for Chief. The high end iMacs actually compete well with the Mac Pro in performance so going to a Mac Pro may not be as good of a Return on Investment as one would like.

 

The real question of performance boils down to how detailed of a model you are going to end up creating. For example a dog house would likely not stress any of the Mac hardware. But a high end condo with hundreds of rooms and a high degree of detail may make the fastest computer you can buy seem sluggish. There is a lot you can do to manage the performance issues. I've seen some amazingly complex plans done in Chief that perform well.

 

Chief is 64 bit so all the memory you have on the machine will be available, although typically something in the neighborhood of 8GB is going to be a good minimum.

 

Here is a link to some samples: http://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/samples.html

 

For rental options you should contact our sales department. http://www.chiefarchitect.com/company/contact.html