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To Buy or not to buy a Imac

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dtechlogic

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 15, 2011
203
3
Hi Everyone,

Just want your advice on buying a new Mac. So far i do still have my old trusted Mac Pro 5,1 12 core 32GB of rams. I am planning to buy a new mac and so far i am leaning towards the imac since i will save up space on my desk. Will it be worth buying it since i edit 4k videos from my drone and 1080p videos from my canon 80D. Which i will be upgrading to a GH5 soon. Anyways what is your advice on getting a new Imac or my trusted mac pro 5,1 can still kick some behind for more couple of years. I have the 2.4GHZ 5,1 mac pro. Thanks for your advices.
 
dtechlogic said:
Hi Everyone,

Just want your advice on buying a new Mac. So far i do still have my old trusted Mac Pro 5,1 12 core 32GB of rams. I am planning to buy a new mac and so far i am leaning towards the imac since i will save up space on my desk. Will it be worth buying it since i edit 4k videos from my drone and 1080p videos from my canon 80D. Which i will be upgrading to a GH5 soon. Anyways what is your advice on getting a new Imac or my trusted mac pro 5,1 can still kick some behind for more couple of years. I have the 2.4GHZ 5,1 mac pro. Thanks for your advices.
Click to expand...
I would wait at least until Apple releases new iMacs. While it seems not eminent, it will happen within the next few years. Whereas a new Mac Pro... who knows.
 
I'd hold off a bit and see if apple releases anything, people are expecting (or hoping) that Apple will roll something out in March
 
maflynn said:
I'd hold off a bit and see if apple releases anything, people are expecting (or hoping) that Apple will roll something out in March
Click to expand...

I agree with this. If you don't need it today best hold off and wait for the updates. If you do need it now I'm sure you would be happy with a the current iMac as well. I got to say though, what you have now isn't all that bad...
 
You could consider a CPU upgrade on that Mac Pro instead, and swap out a couple of the spinning drives for SSD. Even a direct replacement using SATA SSD (running at the MP's SATA II speed) will get you a perceived improvement, as I can attest. You'll be happier with the Mac Pro and you can wait to let Apple do its thing with the iMac, whatever that might end up being.
 
niploteksi said:
I agree with this. If you don't need it today best hold off and wait for the updates. If you do need it now I'm sure you would be happy with a the current iMac as well. I got to say though, what you have now isn't all that bad...
Click to expand...

Bad news is, Apple may release new iPads, iPhone SE 128G, new watch bands and red iPhone 7 in March event. No iMacs.

After 2 months of waiting, you think Apple won't announce iMacs till late 2017, you buy a 2015 iMac in April 2017, then Apple updates the Macbook 12', iMacs and iPad Pro in May.
 
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kschendel said:
You could consider a CPU upgrade on that Mac Pro instead, and swap out a couple of the spinning drives for SSD. Even a direct replacement using SATA SSD (running at the MP's SATA II speed) will get you a perceived improvement, as I can attest. You'll be happier with the Mac Pro and you can wait to let Apple do its thing with the iMac, whatever that might end up being.
Click to expand...

I though about it but I may just kill it. I don't feel confident on upgrading the CPU. So far I was testing the speed of my MacBook and no problem playing the video that i got from the drone but my Mac pro 5,1 playback stutter on the playback. Anyways I will do more research on the upgrade. Also will into the hard drive upgrade. Any recommend ssd. The video was in 4K. Anyways I was trying to save up space on my desk.
 
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Upgrading the cpu is pretty straightforward imo I managed it!

I would wait for new iMacs then have a go at upgrading your MacPro - if you did happen to break something, at least you could then buy a new updated iMac.

Add a ssd as the boot drive, spinning disc as your home directory (like a fusion drive)

Do you still use a ati 5770? If your eyes not bothered about the grey boot screen, I use a amd r9380 sapphire pic card that edits / exports raw gh4 4K files easily, much quicker than the ancient 5770
 
Thanks. the Mac pro I have right now is a 12 core 2.4GHZ 32GB, 7TB HDD of regular hdd. I have a Nvidia GTX 970 in my machine. I use to have a Nvidia GTX 680 mac version in my machine but I decided to upgrade. Will there be a difference between the Nvidia and the AMD video card. There is time I feel that my machine can still do more if I upgrade but also I hate it if I destroy it during the process. This mac I bought it when it was new and I am the only owner of this machine and I have taken good care of it. My 2nd mac is my MacBook which can play the file directly off the sd card without any slowness. Now I am doing my search online and see how much will it cost me to get a 3.46GHZ 12 core to replace my 2.4GHZ in my mac.
 
dtechlogic said:
Thanks. the Mac pro I have right now is a 12 core 2.4GHZ 32GB, 7TB HDD of regular hdd. I have a Nvidia GTX 970 in my machine. I use to have a Nvidia GTX 680 mac version in my machine but I decided to upgrade. Will there be a difference between the Nvidia and the AMD video card. There is time I feel that my machine can still do more if I upgrade but also I hate it if I destroy it during the process. This mac I bought it when it was new and I am the only owner of this machine and I have taken good care of it. My 2nd mac is my MacBook which can play the file directly off the sd card without any slowness. Now I am doing my search online and see how much will it cost me to get a 3.46GHZ 12 core to replace my 2.4GHZ in my mac.
Click to expand...

AMD - best for FCPX
Nvidia - best for Adobe Creative software

Obviously photoshops etc will still work with an amd card - its just rendering in after fx takes longer. If you use FCPX most of the time, AMD is the way forward.

Youd want the processor i used in the video above - think its the e5690 which is 3.46Ghz

I got it of ebay for about £150 a year ago so youd be looking at double that for the dual processor.

The amd r9 380 is probably no more than £150 - id imagine there is a newer version out.

I have a 120gb 2.5" ssd in one of the spare optical bays which is where my boot drive is, then a 2tb drive for my home directory. Not sure if you could do this without formatting your 7tb of storage but its definitely worth it because most things load extremely quickly.
 
The X5680 (3.33 Ghz) was a lot cheaper than the X5690 last time I looked, and is only marginally slower. There's also the X5677 which is top clock speed but only 4 cores / 8 threads, which might be the best value unless you are doing some serious parallel processing. I can't comment on the ease or difficulty of doing the swap because I used a board swap service; for me the peace of mind was worth the $$.

I put a Mushkin Reactor in mine, plugged into one of the drive bays. Crucial and Samsung are the other usual suspects, I guess. The existing drive bays can only run SATA II but that was good enough for me. You can get top speed with a PCIe SSD and an inexpensive PCI adapter card, the downside is that for OS X and boot compatibility you need an AHCI SSD and most of them are NVMe these days. I went with the SATA plug-in because it was easy and cheap ($220/Tb when I bought mine).
 
Yeah I wished I'd put in a 5677 because it uses less power / tiny bit less noise (mp in my boudoir)

But then again, might as well get the fastest / give it a good last push though yes 5690 is not worth paying a lot more for.
 
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