New Computer - Mac pro

[Studiolinea]

Hi everibody. it's time for me to change my Indigo dedicated computer. it have to be a mac, so I'm looking for a mac pro. no budget problem.
i have tried to configure it and that's what i'm thinking:
MAC PRO
2 Intel Xeon 6-core "Westmere" a 2,93 GHz (12 core)
24 GB (6 x 4 GB)
HD Serial ATA da 2 TB a 3 Gb/s e 7200 giri/min
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2 GB
SuperDrive 18x
Apple LED Cinema Display 27".

what you think about? somethingit's excessive?

thanx

[Studiolinea]

no suggestion?

[Headroom]

If there's no budget problem that it can't really be excessive by definition.
Indigo will use as much processor power as it can get.

If GPU pathtracing is your most favorite render mode in Indigo, then the mac platform may not be you best option as there is only a very limited number of GPU's available that are more expensive than the PC equivalents and also are usually not up-to date in terms of technology.

[Studiolinea]

tnx... i mean that maybe 24gb of ram are unuseful.
or maybe the quadro is not the best choice

unfortunately this computer have to be mac.

is this configurtaion the best i can get for a mac?

[Headroom]

2GB / Core does not sound too excessive. If it's useful that depends on what kind of work you intend to do with the machine.

In terms of graphics cards I believe the Quadro 4000, while "only" costing ~$700 it's a little dated. A Quadro 4800 would serve you quite a bit better in terms of GPU rendering.

Again it also depends on what other things you intend to do with he machine.

I use an iMac but would not get a mac pro for working with Indigo. To get number crunching power for rendering it makes much more sense to buy 2 or more Windows based machines and use these as render slaves. That provides much better price/performance ratio (for rendering that is) than a mac pro. After all there are two node licenses included with a Indigo license. Also you'd get much more GPU power.

Just to reemphasize that once more, this would apply to my situation and what you want to do with your machine may be entirely different.

[Studiolinea]

why the quadro 4800 is better?
it has less less memory, memory bandwidth and less cuda processor cores.
i'm a bit confused about the gpu.

[Headroom]

I apologize! You are correct the Quadro 4000 is the better graphics card.