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iMac G5 VS. PM G5

L

lyen

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 8, 2005
2
0
Hi all I'm a total newbie with Macs but really want one for doing Graphic design/ FCP editings at a student level. What would be my best buy under this situation? I've leaning more towards the iMac because it's cheaper but unsure it is capable of doing video work. Does anyone have and suggestions :confused:

Thanks~
 
lyen said:
Hi all I'm a total newbie with Macs but really want one for doing Graphic design/ FCP editings at a student level. What would be my best buy under this situation? I've leaning more towards the iMac because it's cheaper but unsure it is capable of doing video work. Does anyone have and suggestions :confused:

Thanks~
Click to expand...


IMO, the new dual core 2.0 would have more bang for buck (assuming you currently own a monitor). You could also upgrade the video card later to suit your needs - not an option with the iMac.
 
Will the Graphic design and FCP at a student level evolve to professional levels?
Or are you doing it in great quantities?
We know you just asked the question for as many reasons as possible to go for the powermac :p
 
I do all that stuff and more on my eMac (see sig). It gets the job done. So iMac is your best choice! They're fast!
 
Powermac allows you to have 2 drives. You can have one dedicated drive for DV video. Some people will say that you can use a Firewire external drive for video on the iMac but from my experience it never can keep up when importing video from a camera and writing out the file to a DV drive at the same time. My only experience has been with 5400 rpm firewire drives and not the faster 7200 rpm drives so I could be wrong.

Video encoding will be much faster with 2 CPUs and Dual core at that since encoding will take advantage of multiple CPUs.

Having said all that, the iMac is very capable of doing DV work. I used a iMac G3 (450Mhz) with 1 GB of memory and 80 GB drive and it performed DV functions perfectly for several years. When I was done with my editing I would export it back out to tape. The only weakness was encoding quicktime in comparison to a Mac with a G4/G5 processor.
 
the bottom line is the powermac has a longer lifetime due to upgradability. that's why i bought the new dualcore 2.0. i didn't even bother to look at the imacs. they will be outdated in a few years. good example is the dual g4 powermacs. those things are still going strong.
 
andiwm2003 said:
this site compares the imac g5's to the powermac dual core 2.0 on various programs. that might give you a hint how fast the imac is.

http://www.barefeats.com/im21.html
Click to expand...

Don't forget that they are using the standard 128MB 6600LE graphics card. If you are getting a PowerMac, you should definitely upgrade the garphics card for $50. I believe the graphics test results will be quite different.
 
lyen said:
Hi all I'm a total newbie with Macs but really want one for doing Graphic design/ FCP editings at a student level. What would be my best buy under this situation? I've leaning more towards the iMac because it's cheaper but unsure it is capable of doing video work. Does anyone have and suggestions :confused:

Thanks~
Click to expand...

the iMac is capable of doing graphic design and video work......and for a student an iMac makes a lot of sense

the powermac wil do many things faster but the lower price of an iMac may be more important for a student
 
I think the current imac is one of the most appealing offerings apple has had in years, which is saying a lot. But, a powermac will really last you a long time. My single 1.8 rev. A powermac is still going very strong over 2 years after it was released. A dual will last even longer; the post that pointed out how viable dual G4 powermacs are, even now, was dead on.

So really, I don't think you can go too wrong with this choice.
 
One of the biggest advantages for the Power Mac IMO is that you can upgrade or change your display unlike the iMac's built in. You can also have dual display's with the Power Mac.
 
Oh wow thanks alot guys for all ur feed backs...
i'm really looking forward to getting my own mac
so that i won't always have to be at school, thanks a lot :)
 
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