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Poor iMac Performance

L

LikeYikes

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 13, 2007
4
0
Hello,
I'll fill you in on my iMac experience, basically, I've been editing videos in college for the past year and a half and in November after trolling these forum's for months I decided to purchase my first mac. The 24" 2.8C2E kind. Now, I wasn't expecting a Xeon Power-horse, but after using my friends older iMacs and Macbook Pros in Final Cut and other heavy programs I figured it would have a pretty decent performance in Final Cut Studio, which they all run. So anyway the day came, mac box arrived. The case was pretty battered, but I figured it would be fine, unboxed it and set it up, installing my 4GB's of Crucial RAM.
To be honest after updating too Leopard, it seemed no quicker than my old 3.2 P4, but ran steady none the less. A few weeks later after installing Final Cut and all it's parts, I began trying out the more demanding app's... And that was the one thing that disappointed me most. Performance was, well, awful. Final Cut takes hours to render anything, LiveType is unusable, DVD Pro is a nightmare and all in all it's not what I'd expect for £1300+.

Now you may say, why did you get an iMac if video editing was it's main purpose, but I've done extensive edits on a friends 2.16 1GB RAM MacBook Pro and that absolutely throttles my setup on stability, Performance and it also feels more responsive.

So, what I want to know is, is mine a dud or am I a fool for getting the wrong mac?

Yours,
A thoroughly disappointed first time mac user. :(
 
Wow, sounds awful for you. I have no idea how my experience can be so 180 degrees different. Leopard seems so much faster, after all it is a 64 bit OS. It is faster on my 2.8 iMac, my 2.16 MBP and other older iMac.

4 gigs of ram as well and sill shoddy performance for you... I have no clue but I trust some one here can help...
 
Download some benchmark testing software for OSX and run the full gamut of tests - then compare to what other people with your configuration post.

If you have bootcamp - boot up in windows - and run benchmark tests on that, too.

Many of the test programs will have free demos, or provide at least a couple of tests when they're unregistered. Then just google your program, and find other people who posted their #s.

Next: Make sure the software you're running is 64 bit or intel - otherwise they will run slower on your intel system.

Also be aware - Leopard and Tiger both run slower on a "fresh" install - due to spotlight indexing, and your caches are just getting set up. After a couple of days - the system should run faster.
 
Check the System log to see if something is erroring repeatedly out.

Check Activity Monitor to see if a background process is out of control, sometimes spotlight may never finish indexing due to a font issue or something similar ... or a USB device like an AIO printer is sucking resources.
 
Thanks for the quick reply's. I'm going to download GeekBench, shall I post what score I get?
Nothing seems abnormal in Activity Monitor, I checked System Log, seems there are a fair few problems, for instance LiveType is reporting I'm using QuickDraw rather than Quartz? Which is causing it troubles. I've no idea what I can do too sort that.
One thing I can think that may have raised issues is the fact I forgot too update any of 10.4 before I installed leopard, so could that of cause me problems?

Thanks again for your help.
 
Some people have had problems upgrading to Leopard. What type of upgrade did you do?

And yeah - post your results - someone else with a similar machine could provide some info.
 
Ran Geek, got a score of 3681, compared online, seems good enough. I got the drop-in Leopard disc, and I believe I did an archive install, would it be an idea to install Tiger again, update it, then upgrade to Leopard, or is that not needed?
As for whether the software is the PPC version, I'm not entirely sure, it's the Final Cut Studio package, got from eBay, could this be a problem?
Sorry for asking so many questions, I like the computer, I do, it does have some ghosting issue's as well but nothing problematic, I just don't feel it's working as well as it should be.

:(
 
LikeYikes said:
Ran Geek, got a score of 3681, compared online, seems good enough. I got the drop-in Leopard disc, and I believe I did an archive install, would it be an idea to install Tiger again, update it, then upgrade to Leopard, or is that not needed?
As for whether the software is the PPC version, I'm not entirely sure, it's the Final Cut Studio package, got from eBay, could this be a problem?
Sorry for asking so many questions, I like the computer, I do, it does have some ghosting issue's as well but nothing problematic, I just don't feel it's working as well as it should be.

:(
Click to expand...

If you're running the PPC version, that's most definitely the problem. PPC software has to run through rosetta, a behind-the-scenes emulator that reduces performance. You won't notice a major slowdown with software like Microsoft Office, but anything CPU-intensive will definitely cause the system to feel sluggish.

I would make sure you're running the Intel version before you do anything drastic like take back the iMac.

EDIT: If you run Activity Monitor (Applications -> Utilities), while running Final Cut, it will tell you whether it's Intel or PPC under the Kind field.
 
Activity Monitor will tell you wether it is POwerPc or Intel. Check when the app is running on the far left. If it says PowerPc then that is your problem.
 
:apple:/about this mac/more info/software/applications

should show you quickly what apps are intel/universal/ppc
 
Ok, I've checked, it's Universal, they all are. Which doesn't really help me. I don't really know what the problem is, at all, I think what I'll probally do is just do a fresh install, this time updating Tiger first, then upgrading to Leopard and just re-install FCS. I do hope that works, if not, I'm gutted and it will look like no iMac over christmas :mad: More time too spend with those I love I guess. Thanks for your help.
 
LikeYikes said:
Ok, I've checked, it's Universal, they all are. Which doesn't really help me. I don't really know what the problem is, at all, I think what I'll probally do is just do a fresh install, this time updating Tiger first, then upgrading to Leopard and just re-install FCS. I do hope that works, if not, I'm gutted and it will look like no iMac over christmas :mad: More time too spend with those I love I guess. Thanks for your help.
Click to expand...

I would forget about Tiger and just do a fresh install of Leopard if you can. It's worth a shot. Unless of course if you planned to install FC in Tiger to see its performance prior to upgrading to Leopard.
 
LikeYikes said:
One thing I can think that may have raised issues is the fact I forgot too update any of 10.4 before I installed leopard, so could that of cause me problems?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that you are supposed to have all the 10.4 updates installed before you install Leopard. Your best bet now, if you're still having problems, is to do a fresh install of Leopard.
 
Big-TDI-Guy said:
Also be aware - Leopard and Tiger both run slower on a "fresh" install - due to spotlight indexing, and your caches are just getting set up. After a couple of days - the system should run faster.
Click to expand...

It's even more so now with Leopard... especially if you are using Time Machine. A lot of people were having problems because spotlight was indexing, the caches were setting up, Time Machine was doing the initial backup and then they were adding all their old programs and data.
 
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