Revit Running on Intel Mac

[Cleo]

I posted this as a separate thread but found this one and thought I might catch some additional responses here:

My firm is about to bring a small architecture firm into our operation - 1 senior guy who is a Mac fan/PC hater and his job captain. He wants to keep his dual processor Mac (in our all PC environment) and wants to keep his job captain on Mac also. My first response is that we can put up with the inter-machine hassles for him but for the job captain who will join the rest of our PC based team in production, No.

Any thoughts?
any experience with a mixed PC/Mac environment in general?
any issues with accessing the same central file from both PC and Mac simultaneously because of the mixed environment?

all of your responses are appreciated as we need to buy that Job Captain's machine here in the next week or two.....

thanks so much

[Andre Baros]

At home I have a mixed environment, my PC's, my wifes Mac's... and with not special setup or configuration she has no problem connecting her mac's to my PC's though I've never managed to connect to the mac's using the PC. In a server environment it's even easier though you'll run into problems if you're using an exchange server for Outlook as Microsoft's support of Outlook/Entourage etc. on the mac is spotty (they're official answer is to remote desktop from the mac to a PC running outlook and access it there) so you might as well just plan on running parallels if you use Outlook.

[angelo]

(they're official answer is to remote desktop from the mac to a PC running outlook and access it there) so you might as well just plan on running parallels if you use Outlook.

We just upgraded to Small Business Server 2003 which includes Exchange. With a little configuration, Entourage 2004 connects to everything (Public Contacts, Public Folders, Public Calendars, etc.).

As for issues in a cross platform environment, OS X works just fine connecting to a windows server. The only issue can be linking files via a specific path-mac os does it differently than windows, so sometimes this can not work as well as it should.

Running Revit via Bootcamp or Parallels works just fine, and I actually do it quite often, because my core duo macbook pro is so much faster then my dell dual xenon workstation! Once you are in windows (via Bootcamp or Parallels) the machine works just like a windows machine, so networking is not an issue.

Good luck!
Angelo

[Andre Baros]

Is your Entourage 2004 machine logged into the Server 2003 domain or outside and just connecting to Exchange?

[angelo]

Is your Entourage 2004 machine logged into the Server 2003 domain or outside and just connecting to Exchange?

Andre,

No open directory stuff yet. Entourage connects via the Outlook Web Access end of things.

Angelo

[Andre Baros]

Hmm, I'll have to try again. I couldn't get that to work... it always said that my secutiry settings were not correct.

[cadkiller]

Check this product out. I haven't tested it out myself with Revit; but a
friend of mine tested it out with ADT 2006 and Advanced Steel and he said it
worked better than on the PC..

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/

Here is some of what he said to me.

Our old home computer needed upgrading and like you I have been eyeing the
Mac for a while especially since the move to Intel. So I took the plunge and
bought a Mac instead of a PC, I went for a 20" IMAC with 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo
and 2GB of ram. It was mostly for the wife and kids to use but I couldn't
keep my hands of it and I can tell you if you ever use a Mac for a few hours
you will be totally converted. The OS is beautiful everything is very slick
and pretty, it is so stable absolutely rock solid I used it to transcode
some video running it with the processors absolutely maxed out for hours and
it never missed a beat. When you install an application you just drag its
folder into the applications folder and that's it no installer no dll's no
registry it's all self contained and to uninstall you just drag it to the
trash.
So I just fell in love, it makes windows look like total ****. I was always
sceptical of all the Mac fan boys but they were right all along it is light
years ahead of windows and Linux.

So it got me thinking I have to switch my work stuff over to Mac I can't
bear to go back to windows but as you know AutoCAD doesn't run on Mac and I
thought bootcamp would be a hassle because you would need to reboot every
time you wanted to switch. I had heard about Parallels which is a virtual
machine that runs on the Mac and lets you install windows into the virtual
machine, a computer inside a computer if you will. It lets you run a full
version of XP right inside a window on the Mac. It's exactly the same as
running XP on any computer it even boots all inside the window. Well my
experience of virtual machines in the past was they were dog slow but I had
heard on an Intel Mac it was pretty decent.

So I decided to give it a go and downloaded a trial of Parallels
www.parallels.com from there site installed it and then set up the VM and
took my XP disc and installed a copy of XP. When I booted XP it ran at full
native speed it was total as responsive as my workstation. Now remember this
is inside an ordinary window in the Mac so you can just minimise it and go
right ahead and do everything on the Mac as normal.

So then that got me thinking what about ADT but then I thought surely not it's
a virtual machine it is emulating a video card so the 3D graphics are all
being processed by the CPU's so its going to be really slow to redraw the
screen when you rotate a model. I decided to give it a try anyway so I
installed ADT 2006 and my Advance Steel and it works perfectly the redraws
are faster on the Mac than on my workstation. I can pan and rotate in shaded
model no problem and I'm talking about 200 ton buildings with thousands of
plates, clip angles, bolts, welds etc. It confirms what I always thought
that ADT is not hard on the graphics card. The Mac which is doing all the
processing on the CPU's because the graphics card is only emulated is
handling the rotations just as well as my workstation which has an NVIDIA
Workstation grade 256mb graphics card.

So then I decided to see what the speed of drawing generation in Advance
Steel was like so I took a 200 ton job selected the whole job and generated
the shop drawings all 300 of them. The Mac did it in 17 minutes and my
workstation took 20 minutes.

So I'm totally sold my workstation is up for renewal in January and I'm
moving to Mac. I thought you might be interested in the info.

[BomberAIA]

I tried ordering a HP Mobile Workstation at 3 different times and they are always on backorder. They keep pushing back the ship date. I'm fed up w/ HP & Dell. I'm thinking really hard about buying a Mac Pro. I'm waiting for the Mcabook Pros to update to Core 2 Duals. I'm glad to hear that Revit is runnig well on Macs. My Revit files are bogging down on my Dell Laptop even w/ 2 gigs of Ram.

[Andre Baros]

If you're Revit files are bogging down your machine with 2 gigs of RAM, make sure your new one has more RAM and a faster hard drive... personally I think the weak link in a lot of laptops is the hard drive speed.

[BomberAIA]

I'm getting 4 gigs of ram. I think it's a combination of processor & video card.