Anyone using a New Mac-book Pro with ZBrush3.12?
I might be needing a laptop soon and would like some input from the ZB Central community.
it runs great. Pixo really did a great job fixing bugs in 3.12B. as with any CPU intensive app the mac books run hot, so i recommend some fan control… i use this http://www.eidac.de/?p=134&cpage=2 and keeps it about 20C cooler. i also recommend the anti-glare screen if you’re going for the 17" unibody.
cheers
I have one of the late 08 model MacBook Pros and ZBrush 3.12B runs really smooth for me. I use ZBrush through a Wacom Cintiq 12WX but have no complaints here.
Ok, I like what I hear, I’ll be out of the country fro an extended stay, and a laptop is my only recourse atm.
get a solid state drive, too… everything is more responsive.
I ordered a new 3.06GHz 17" uMBP (matte screen of course) earlier this week. I’ll be topping it up with 8GB of Ram and dual 256GB OCZ Vertex SSD drives in a Raid 0 config. With Snow Leopard on the way it should be the perfect ZBrush mobile creation station awaiting a 64bit ZB4 release for OSX this summer/fall.
ps. Check out how fast a 13" uMBP is with the Intel X25-M SSD installed. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for the video). 18 seconds to do a complete system restart, 4 seconds to load PhotoShop! I can only imagine what it’ll be like with 2 SSD’s in Raid 0. :eek:
Sounds like a great configuration, though I do wish they offered the 15" with a matte screen option.
Do you remove the dvd player to get two drives in and are these third party drives?
One thing I don’t like is the way ZBrush overworks the fan in my previous (by two generations) model Macbook Pro. I wonder if that will be an issue with the newer models?
Yes, the Superdrive will be sacrificed. Optical media are so ancient.
I’ll probably get an external enclosure for it and mount it in there. I barely ever use optical media anyway.
The drives are third party yeah. Not going for Apple’s overpriced SSD’s. Haven’t really decided on which SSD’s I’ll go for. But the OCZ Vertex drives at the moment look to be the best performers in terms of the speed/size ratio. The Intel X25’s are faster but don’t have great capacity. Bare Feats ran a revealing benchmark test a while back. Nice to see the fastest conventional 10K HDD being left in the dust.
ZBrush does tend to stress out the processor a lot causing the otherwise silent fans to really rev up. That’s a trade off of working on such a portable laptop I suppose. Long gone are the days of passive cooling in systems like the Amiga or the 386 Intel PC’s.
I’ll be curious if your new configuration is any quieter though.
ZBrush runs very quiet on my MacPro desktop. The fans on the laptop get so noisy that I only use it for very crude models. Don’t even have to go to that high of a polycount to get them going.
Mudbox is better in that regard.