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carboncow

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 1, 2009
54
2
We are a small midwestern winter resort and do a lot of our own video and photo. I'm going to put our Marketing Director's Macbook out to pasture and I've got him talked into an iMac that will be better or his day to day needs. Although he does a lot of low tech marketing stuff (web pages, blogs, press releases and a little photoshop) he also does a lot of great photo editing quick and fast is the game...no masterpieces. We like to have 24 hour turn around on big events and most projects.

Programs used are Light Room (a lot), final cut (a lot) and sometimes go pro software as well as even iMovie for stupid quick stuff. I know the later does work with multiprocessors.

We've started to shoot a bit more in 4K but not fully. So still a lot in 2K. He has a new DSLR (mirrorless) and I think that is why he's doing more 4K but to be honest we just rip it down for web and on site usage. Looking at a couple 2019 iMac (new and refurb options, as we do buy a lot of refurbs with 99% success. So here is my question...finally...

For a half time video/photo guy and monster mulititasking (we work harder a small resorts!) which system is better:

iMac 27" 3.6 (8 core) (9th gen) with Radeon Pro 575x (4GB GDDR5)
or
iMac 27" 3.7 (6 core) (9th gen) but the higher video Radeon Pro 580x (8GB GDDR5)

What is going to be the better image/video editing and rendering machine?

Price on both systems is close and in our budget but I cannot have both the 8 core and the big video card. If you are curious I'll be booting from an external 2TB SSD in a thunderbolt sled and doing my own 40GB RAM. So for the budget I'm just trying to figure out if the money should go in the processor or video card. I"m not a gamer or such and don't know squat about what a video card can do...well I do, I just don't know how much it will impact these tools.
 
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