I’ve started learn Zbrush and I consider about change my current Macbook Pro (Core 2 Duo inside). I need change, because he is tiring when I work in Photoshop with some big documents, key visuals.
I’ve been looking for some desktop and I found i5-4670k, some gigabyte motherboard, 16gb ram and some gpu (maybe geforce gtx 650/660). But I wonder if Mac mini (middle version with quad core i7 2.3GHz) upgraded to 16GB ram will be good enough too? It has almost the same performance of CPU, but in PC I have dedicated GPU and here is integrated Intel HD4000. Is it so important to have good gpu for Zbrush/Photoshop or HD4000 will be good for my needs?
I would imagine it would work just fine. I use ZBrush on my Macbook Air (2010 model) at work with no problems. It will be slower that things like re-meshing or really really dense models but its fine for the most part, I just have to turn multidraw off each time I start ZBrush since that setting doesn’t save for some reason when you save the startup doc.
As I wrote, I found config which is PC based (i5-4670k, 16gb ram, gtx 650/660) and I am really thinking about PC because it’s a little more expensive than iMac but it has dedicated graphic card. I have a lot of work to do next month and I must buy some good machine for that. Now for example I am working on some key visual. Nothing special - just photo manipulation from few photos, a4 300dpi. Now I changed dpi to 150 because I want to pull down (about 100-200px) some layer and I see progress bar. It’s quite annoying to waiting for such tiny things.
Now I have laptop, but I never worked on him outside the house (to small screen - 13"). I think the best way (value for the money/performance) is to take desktop, if I do most of my work at home.
I don’t believe in MBA for photoshop things like for example big websites and key visuals in hi-res. I have now c2d and it’s only 2x slower in benchmarks than new MBA and I think that will be not enough performance for best workflow. New mini is about 4x faster than current MBP.