When I did 3D (3D Studio DOS, long time ago) I had a couple beefy rendering slaves. My desktop was not even the fastest machine on the group - it just happened to have a better graphics card (a Matrox one IIRC).
If I had to do it now, I'd have an iMac on my desk (because the screen is so incredibly awesome) and a bunch of Dells (or custom built) boxes on a rack at the other end of a fat pipe).
There are external GPU docks, but if I'm paying $3000-$5000 for a computer I'd rather it just have 3-4 PCIe slots.
Things could be different if you didn't need the screen (I need the pixel count, but not so much the density and color precision, for instance) and would prefer the cash to be invested in memory (32 is enough for me now, but I'd get 64 or 128 for a machine that has to be usable 5 years from now).
I'll also point out that the iMac used to be able to be plugged in as a display (target display mode), but the iMac Pro isn't listed on the compatible models page. For whatever reason, they dropped that feature after the 2014 models and decided not to reintroduce it.
Once you're no longer using it as your primary workstation, that gorgeous 5K panel is going up on Ebay or wherever along with the rest of the computer. If you want to spend your money efficiently, I have a hard time believing that's a better deal than a workstation and monitor from Dell or similar.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/15/2017-4k-5k-imacs-w...
That's a fair point. With this machine you are committed to a certain performance over a long period before you commit yourself to the next machine. With a modular design, you can change the asset in smaller increments, at the cost of having an upgrade process to manage.
I do make incremental upgrades on my personal desktop though (mostly gaming). The last rebuild was triggered by some failed parts, so I ended up doing a new motherboard and processor and switching to DDR4, but I still have the GPU, screen, SSDs, and some other miscellaneous components. If I'd had an out of warranty failure on an iMac Pro motherboard I wouldn't have been able to salvage those. Or perhaps knowing that giving up the computer means losing the screen along with everything else, I'd have just shelled out a couple of thousand dollars on repairs.
I was a pretty early adopter of 4K screens and I'm still using the same one more than three years later.
Yes, seriously
With all the cloud offerings available, this is very fucked up. I can pretty summon a Top 500 cluster in minutes and can't use it to render my 30-second spot in 8K HDR for downscaling into broadcast...
Apple might have had an edge back in the day thanks to QuickTime, but Premier, After Effects, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, all these things are basically equivalent across platforms.
Except for the fact that on Windows they can run faster on cheaper hardware.