'Upgrading' from a Mac Pro to an iMac?

[R.Youden]

I have a 2006 Mac Pro with a Dell 20" monitor and the idea of upgrading first started off a few days ago. I love the new 27" monitors Apple do and I would be interested in getting a new Gfx card for the Mac Pro and buying a new display, however that would set me back over £1,100 so I started to look at the 27" iMac.

I would get the bigger display built in and a better Gfx card (my Mac Pro has the X1900XT) and a faster processor, I would go for the i7.

I could sell my Mac Pro for around £900-£1,100 looking at eBay so that would set the cost of the iMac at around £1000-£800, a bit less than a new Gfx card and monitor.

Really I guess the question is how much of a performance difference is there between the iMac and Mac Pro with these configurations:

iMac:

2.93GHz i7
4GB RAM
5750HD

Mac Pro:

Quad 2.66GHz Xeon
5GB RAM
X1900XT

I like the idea of a tower and its expandability but with a FW800 drive thrown into the back of the iMac that should be fast enough to access files, mainly my ever increasing Aperture library.

In the future I could easily throw an SSD into either of the machines to speed the startup disk up, I know that is not so easy on the iMac but I am an electronics engineer so it doesn't phase me too much.

Has anyone else made this transition?

 

[Hellhammer]

iMac should be a lot faster. Your MP scores 5142 in GeekBench while i7 iMac scores over 9000. Of course that is synthetic but better that nothing.

http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/mac-benchmarks/

ATI 5750 should also be much faster than your aging XT1900 though ATI 5770 would be faster if you put that into your MP.

It's a good upgrade if you can live without upgradeability.

 

[R.Youden]

It's a good upgrade if you can live without upgradeability.

Great quote! But seriously I know what you mean.

In reality the only thing that is not practically upgradable in the iMac is the graphics card. RAM can go to 16GB, HD can be swapped for an SSD, even the processor can be upgraded (not sure about heat issues there though). I can easily add a big external HD for my data which should be plenty fast enough.

It would have been nice if the iMac had a CF slot rather than an SD slot but hey-ho. I guess I could buy a really fast FW800 card reader if I really wanted the speed.

 

[Hellhammer]

Great quote! But seriously I know what you mean.

In reality the only thing that is not practically upgradable in the iMac is the graphics card. RAM can go to 16GB, HD can be swapped for an SSD, even the processor can be upgraded (not sure about heat issues there though). I can easily add a big external HD for my data which should be plenty fast enough.

It would have been nice if the iMac had a CF slot rather than an SD slot but hey-ho. I guess I could buy a really fast FW800 card reader if I really wanted the speed.

If FW800 is the problem, think about the eSATA mod. That will give you ~285MB/s so you can even RAID couple HDs until you reach the maximum of eSATA.

If you don't do gaming, then the GPU ain't that important. Besides, ATI 5750 is a decent GPU. You can also sell it after 2-3 years and get a new one if the GPU is the bottleneck.

The CPU can be upgraded but currently the best CPU for LGA1156 socket is i7-880 and it's only 133MHz faster than i7-870 found in iMac. LGA 1156 will be dead soon as Intel is launching Sandy Bridge with new LGA 1155 socket so I wouldn't worry about the CPU upgrade. You're better off with a new machine if CPU is too slow