Advice: iMac vs. Mac Pro

[atlendor]

Hello all,

I am a fairly infrequent poster, but frequent lurker, and would like to ask some general advice. I am looking to buy a new desktop, and am thinking about getting an iMac rather than a Mac Pro. I currently have one of the early generation 2 chip, 4 core 2.66 Xeon Mac Pro's (5gb RAM) and it a solid workhorse, but large, heavy and expensive. I wonder if an iMac would be just as good? I don't do too many processor intensive activities, some Matlab use, some illustrator, and use parallels for a couple of specialist applications. Would a new iMac be as fast as my old Mac Pro? (or preferably a bit faster, say with a decent memory upgrade?). One of the rationales for getting the Mac Pro (some 3 years back) was that I swap data disks in and out, but the external FW800 or eSATA seems just as good nowadays...

Thanks all for any feedback...!

 

[Hellhammer]

If you buy a quad core iMac, it will be faster than your current machine. In fact, it's about as fast as the current base Mac Pro. The only benefit of quad core Mac Pro is its upgradeability but if you are fine with iMac's FireWire 800, then it's a great choice.

 

[atlendor]

OK thanks. I think the iMac will be the choice. Shame it hasn't got eSATA though.

 

[hayduke]

Something else to consider is a Mac Mini and a 27" ACD. I really like this option because you can continue to use the same display for many, many years. The features for displays don't change much and Apple updates them infrequently. The Mac Mini is very capable and in a few years you can swap it for another machine. Just a thought...

 

[viizi]

OK thanks. I think the iMac will be the choice. Shame it hasn't got eSATA though.

You can get OWC to put an eSATA in as well as a nice SSD. They make it look really really neat too. It is almost like apple designers work for OWC lol