Media OSX Computer So I'm helping my friend build a media computer that he wants to dual boot with Win7 and OSX. Now I can suggest gaming builds till the cows come home but this is out of my comfort zone. He's in Canada so I'm not sure if that will influence any components. Now there really isn't any set budget just that he doesn't want to upgrade for quite a while. For arguments sake let's say C$1600. Overclocking is a possibility and a sufficient hard drive for storage. I was thinking an F3 1Tb. The main aims are CAD, HD films and to run silently. This is just the base unit. No screen or peripherals. Any suggestions guys?
dont bother with OSX its not worth the hassle getting it to run on custom hardware as even when its working its not 100% perfect. a media PC should be as hassle free as possible with minimum input needed from the end user. id go with just a mac mini or a PC although not sure on CAD requiremetns and a PC would get better performance for your cash.
That's ridiculously expensive. He basically wants mac for just about everything. Except most cad applications don't run on OSX.
If you want a mac then buy a mac. You can always vmware fusion windows 7 from inside the mac operating system for the CAD programs
What kind of CAD are we talking about? Professional use or just playing around a bit? If it's just for some AutoCAD to play around with and draw some easy stuff, then a macMini with 4GB RAM will handle it allready and AutoCAD is available for MacOS aswell, making Win7 moot. Need more details there actually about the CAD-part.
We're talking full car models. From the nuts and bolts to the bodywork. No fea is going to be run it's basically for packaging and geometry.
id opt windows 7 just because you will have a lot more RAW power for the same price as a mac which will help considerably with CAD app using geometry you got any tesselation and high point counts too ?
Unless he's going with any Mac specific programs, there is no point in going the Mac OS X route. At all. It's simply too expensive for him by the sound of things.
OK, with that information given... forget about MacOS and buy a decent rig (i7-9xx + 12GB RAM + GPU with lot's of RAM) and go with Windows 7 64-bit. For HTPC build something cheap based on an IONITX-board additionally and run Ubuntu+XBMC on it.
I've tried telling him all this but he insists that he loves his mac book so he wants to run OSX on this media/workstation. Certainly likes a challenge. -.-
He can't run MacOS on a self-made rig decently and without some hacks. If he want to run MacOS X then he needs to buy a Mac, and with this CAD-thingy, he would need to buy a MacPro at two-three times the cost of a Windows-machine. There's no other solution to this. If he still insists on running MacOS on a WinPC, then show him this -> http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page and let him decide if he want to go down that route with all the possible problems included ofc.
I have a friend that wanted pretty much the same thing, i tried for ages to convince him just to get a high spec PC running win7 OR a mac. He wouldnt have any of it. In the end i told him to sort himself out because he wasnt listening to sound advice, and i couldnt be arsed. So now he has a mac that cost more than the PC would have and he doesnt like it! Im sure he'll listen next time though.
Use the laptop for most tasks and a really fast PC for CAD? maybe Linux if he want's to be different. If he won't stretch anymore that is the only real solution. mac lovers and haters will tell you that.
