Which would you get?

[coffee610]

Which would you buy for photoediting...

Option 1: Old iMac Quad i5 with HDD only (hoping to add a SSD for boot later to this, but unsure if I can - seems like a difficult task from my reading)

Option 2: New Mac Mini Quad i7, 16RAM, 256SSD (hoping to add a HD to this at some point, but unsure if I can)

 

[fa8362]

I only buy Minis and would never consider any all in one computer.

 

[mystic man]

if you re only interested about performance I d say the mac mini

but you need to consider 2 things

first, imac comes with beautiful display and keyboard/mouse-trackpad

mac mini comes with usb 3.0

 

[fa8362]

if you re only interested about performance I d say the mac mini

Why? The Mini is faster and the HD 4000 is more than enough for photoshop.

 

[Mojo1]

I do pro image editing. I switched from a 24" iMac to a 2.3GHz Mini with 16GB RAM from Crucial ($82) connected to a 24" NEC2490WUXi2 display. My Photoshop scratch disk is a 7200rpm FW 800 external drive. (In another thread someone suggested creating a RAM disk for scratch use instead of relying on the slow 5400rpm internal drive.)

Barefeats.com is a good place to see how Photoshop runs on various Mac configurations including SSD and GPU performance.