Thinking about exchanging new 27" i7 Imac for Mac Pro...

[vac373]

This is my first post to this forum, so please go easy on this newbie.

My employer is letting me work from home a few days a week, so
I recently purchased a new iMac (i7). The machine is great (my first Mac at home!), but now I'm thinking that I should have picked up the Mac Pro instead. I work as a "New Media Specialist" (video editing, compression, etc). I chose the iMac because of it's price. Though, I could have afforded a MP if I absolutely had to.

In your opinion(s), do you think the iMac will be ok for my type of work? Or, should I bite the bullet and exchange for a 6 core MP workstation?

If I keep the iMac, will adding an SSD (seems like a real pain to install) and leaving the internal 2 tb HDD (as a scratch/media drive) suffice?

Thanks in advance, I appreciate your time and opinions.

 

[Hellhammer]

If it can do the tasks you want it to without issues, then it's just fine. You can add extra storage via FireWire 800. 6-core Mac Pro with displays, extra RAM etc will easily cost you nearly 5000$, that's more than two iMacs!

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Have you done some intensive video editing, etc on the new iMac yet? Anything that really taxes what it can do? Did it seem too slow for your needs when actually applied to your needs?

I also own that machine (plus the SSD from Apple), but I find it pretty hard to really tax it, even doing simultaneous rendering from iMovie 06 and iMovie 09. I've had situations where I've had both going, plus Handbrake processing, and still found other tasks (like email, Safari, etc) all working "fast enough".

I'd suggest that you put it through the paces- even "as is", and decide if it can do all you want it to do fast enough for your own needs. If not, even more horsepower may be needed... but it will prove to be a lot more expensive for those extra horses.

If you are really just chasing "latest & greatest", that's a race you can never win for more than a very brief period of time.

Since I also work with a fair amount of video, I can recommend to load up on RAM, as that may prove more helpful than installing an SSD for your purposes. Use Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder while you do your thing and see if you ever exhaust available "Free" RAM. If so, that's where to spend some dollars (only hundreds instead of thousands).

 

[vac373]

Thanks.

No, I have not put the machine through it's paces yet. Good idea. I've just been reading that FW 800 drives aren't quite fast enough for HD video editing. Then again, I don't much "true HD" editing. At least for the time being.

I did buy an additional 4 GB of RAM, for a total of 8 GB. Do you think that's enough? Or should I go to 12 GB?

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I went 12GB myself. 2 stock 2GB + 2 4GB. I've never utilized all of it yet, though I do come close.

For video work, I store the raw footage on a big Firewire 800 drive, then import just what I want to work on to the internal 2TB drive. That seems to scream in terms of speed. When I'm done with the editing/rendering, I produce a final file then send it back out to firewire for storage. Works great!

If I ever believe I need to accelerate disk read/write speeds, I'll either go with another SSD or a RAID setup. But for stuff I do now- a lot of it in 1080HD resolutions- the iMac Quad seems like it's quite up to the task.