upgrade time??

[Trout74]

I currently have a 24" aluminum imac, 2.4ghz Core2due ( santa rosa ) 2GB Ram and 2600XT GPU. Basically three years old. Its just starting to show some age. Burning discs takes a long time and half of the time it times out in failure. a re-boot helps but its still 60% good, 40% errors out. seems like its slowing a bit, im ok with that in general it is still very workable.

we have bought Photoshop and will be using it alot, and running our new Cannon 9500MKII printer for a photography studio. We want to upgrade to a new 27" with 4GB RAM and i5 Quadcore and 5750 etc. maybe the i7, but likely not.

Question: will we see a substantial increase in speed and productivity in photoshop ( cs5) and general tasks?

or

would our current set up work for a year till a new upgrade makes it a no brainer?? or is it a no brainer now? We could wait 3-4 months but dont have too.

thanks for your time and input.

trout

 

[TMRaven]

I say it's good for one more year. Burning discs will always be limited to optical drive speed, and that probably hasn't seen a speed boost since the first iMac came out with superdrive.

I say when next spring/summer comes around, apple might have upgraded the iMac to sandybridge cpu and mobility 6k series gpus, with a possibility of SSD standard storage. That will be a good time to upgrade, in my opinion.

 

[Hellhammer]

You could spend couple hundreds on upgrades for your current Mac. Get at least 4GB of RAM and external DVD burner if you burn a lot discs. Maybe a newer and faster HD wouldn't hurt either. You should be able to get those for around 200 bucks

 

[Trout74]

So im gathering that the current machines are not going to substantually out-perform my early 07' imac?

trout

 

[Rodus]

A new quad core will do some things substantially faster. Video encoding, HD editing, gaming. It won't make word processing, emailing or web browsing any quicker. Try Photoshop on your current machine with 4GB of RAM, if it's acceptable for you then there's no need to upgrade yet.

 

[TMRaven]

So im gathering that the current machines are not going to substantually out-perform my early 07' imac?

trout

It all depends on what you're aiming for when you upgrade. Some people like to get every new revision that comes out and bank on selling their current model for a reasonable price.

Me personally, I take a computer and make it last 4-5 years, then upgrade to a newer one for a serious improvement. I could have upgraded my G5 iMac to core2duo for significant performance improvement, but I was determined to wait until apple put quad core nehalems in the iMac, to make my upgrade worthwhile.

 

[SpitUK]

Will a new iMac make your photography business more productive?

 

[Trout74]

Will a new iMac make your photography business more productive?

If it can handle RAW images better than mhy current set up it will. But im starting to think an external DVD burner that is very reliable would be the most cost effective upgrade. We have the funds set aside to upgrade, its whether or not to take it as profit or re-invest. I will say 18mp images in RAW are big files.

 

[SpitUK]

I work with canon 550d 18mp raw files with my setup and it flies. Takes seconds to import into aperture 3.

 

[jamesdmc]

I work with canon 550d 18mp raw files with my setup and it flies. Takes seconds to import into aperture 3.

With a setup like yours, I'm sure it does fly . I, like the OP, have a three-year-old iMac and am contemplating upgrading it also. I already have the RAM maxed out at 4 gigs (did that on Day 1), but have noticed that both Fusion and Aperture will drag the system to a crawl. Working with raw files takes longer than it should.

Does anyone know if it's possible to add a SSD to a 2007 iMac? I've read in some places that it's possible and in other places that it's not possible. I'm sure it would be the best upgrade for that machine I could do, but don't know if it can be done.