iMac, Mac Pro, Renderama

[sphaera]

iMac, Mac Pro, Renderama

Last Thursday I realized that there weren’t enough hours in the day to complete my current render intensive project on schedule.

My iMac 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 (4 core) is very capable, but not up to the job at hand.

I ordered a Mac Pro 3.5GHz Xeon 6-core from the Apple Store. It arrived Monday evening.

Tuesday morning I un-boxed, fired-up the Mac Pro.

I connected the Mac Pro to the iMac via a single Thunderbolt cable.
explained here: 
http://www.macworld.com/article/2142073/connecting-two-macs-using-thunderbolt.html

I set up file sharing and using a spare hdmi TV monitor I copied the EIAS folder to the Mac Pro and set up a Rederama slave.

Networked, slaved in three hours I was rendering on all ten cores. Would have been one hour were it not for overlooking a detail in the Renderama setup.

24 hours of fast flawless rendering. More than twice as fast as the iMac alone.

This morning I disconnected the temporary TV monitor that I had used for setup and set the Mac Pro screen to share on the iMac.

Now my workspace contains just:
27” iMac, Mac Pro, (all SSD onboard and off), keyboard & mouse, support storage via a Thunderbolt LaCie 2big (two 4TB drives).

Simple system, lots’o power.

My project is back on schedule.

Michael

 

iMac screenshot showing Mac Pro, all ten cores at work.

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Michael,

Let's make more power with the same hardware in the next upgrade ;)

thanks

tom