Should I expect dramatically better AE render times with this system?

[i3s3d01]

I'm currently using an early 2012 15" MacBook Pro (non-retina display) for all of my video production and post processing. I'm holding off buying a 5K iMac until they (hopefully) release new models soon. The absolute worst part of my workflow now is the ridiculous After Effects render times.

If I was to get a system today I would get:
27" iMac 5K
4.0GHz quad-core i7
64GB ram
1TB Flash Storage
AMD Radeon R9 M395X

Basically what I'm showing is that I'll be speccing the system out to the maximum options on everything. I'll be doing this to future-proof but also to increase my video post processing speed.

Should I expect dramatically better results with these specs? I'd hate to drop over $3,500 for a system that only gets a little bit better performance where I need it the absolute most - particularly in After Effects and Premiere Pro render times.

Thanks in advance for any input.

 

[chrfr]

Should I expect dramatically better results with these specs? I'd hate to drop over $3,500 for a system that only gets a little bit better performance where I need it the absolute most - particularly in After Effects and Premiere Pro render times.

The iMac will offer significantly better CPU, GPU, and disk speed than the 2012 MacBook Pro offers. If you look at Activity Monitor and see that your CPU is being used heavily during the render, you can expect that the iMac will be quite a lot faster.

 

[Jack Burton]

That's the top of the line intel quad core chip in there. AE will see boosts in everything - render time, interactivity while working, etc. DO yourself a favor and go SSD wherever possible. SSD internal drive. Dedicated SSD drives for cache or media will also help.

IIRC, Adobe media encoder is also open CL accelerated. So the GPU in the current iMac top of the line would make a noticeable difference from your 2012 MBP.

If possible, though, hold off for the next revision. The GPU performance leap from AMD's newest GPUs should be significant over Apple's current offerings.

 

[ed.]

Render time in after effects was traditionally directly proportional to your CPU speed, if there is enough RAM available. In old versions with multipocessing enabled and the same comp, a 4 core machine will deliver the render in half the time of a 2 core machine (provided core speeds were comparably similar). So one used to have a pretty good idea of the render speed improvements simply by comparing the geek bench scores of the machines.
One thing you have to consider though is that the latest version of After effects doesn't use multi processor rendering in the classic sense anymore: it's being disabled for now and it will be reintroduced in a future version, according to adobe: https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/features-not-available-in-after-effects-cc-2015-13-5/
This doesn't mean investing in a multi core / multi threaded machine is a waste: the speed improvements will be there, especially if you're coming from a laptop, and moreover Adobe is promising they will bring it back. I see you're also maxing out the RAM, which will be fundamental to use multi processor rendering in the best way.