Economist needs purchasing advice

[deliriouscu]

I need to buy a new desktop late summer (end of July 2011) for a new academic job I'm starting, and it would be great to get some advice. I have a budget of about $4500-$5000 from the school.

Currently, I have a Mac Pro 1,1 Quad 2x2.66 at home, and it has served me well throughout graduate school, and I was originally thinking of purchasing the 3.2 Quad Mac Pro as my new office computer. But now I'm having second thoughts and thinking of possibly upgrading my original mac pro as well with the budget.

What do you guys think of these two options.

Option 1: Buy 3.2 Quad Mac Pro for office, live with my Mac Pro 1,1 quad at home

Option 2: Buy two 27 inch iMac Quad update (assuming that happens in June/July) with Sandybridge and Thunderbolt.


My needs:

- Office: A fast computer for regular office work and statistical estimation/computation that can take advantage of multi-threading

- Home: Statistical estimation/computer PLUS Adobe Photoshop RAW image processing/editing, some short HD home movie editing

- I do not need more than two harddrives, 16gb of memory are probably enough for my needs


Do you think that I would experience a lot of performance or speed bump from the 3.2 quad Mac Pro above the new iMac that would justify the extra cost?

Thanks.

 

[TomCondon]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Wait for the new lines of iMac, Mac Pro is way too much money for what you do

 

[gpzjock]

For home and away buy a Macbook Pro fully pimped out and a nice 27" i5 or i7 iMac for the office. Then you have portable power, your Mac Pro as backup at home and a bloody nice office desktop.

It's not greed it's avarice....

 

[chrismacguy]

Depending on just how much calculation the OP needs, the Mac Pro might be a lot more sensible than the above are suggesting. For instance my Quad 2.8 Mac Pro 2010 easily out "computes" a Quad i7 iMac in Mathematica 8. If the OP is spending more than 6 hours a day running computations, then a MBP Quad / MP Quad is a must (And the ability to use plenty of screens helps, especially if their doing data visualisation - nothing like 4 monitors to view data on if its a large data set.) If your going for an iMac, Id wait for the inevitable update, however if its a Mac Pro/MacBook Pro Id go right ahead and get it since the CPUs for the next Mac Pro aren't arriving for quite a while.