-What's Premiere performance like without the CUDA hack? Big difference with it? Any beachballing when cutting 1080p DSLR footage?
Without CUDA it will be perfectly fine. I used to edit full HD on a 2010 iMac with i3, 4GB RAM, Radeon HD 4670 w/256GB VRAM; you honestly do not need a supercomputer to edit HD video, people overestimate the computers needed to edit video, even that iMac was more than enough to edit HD video. I did upgrade to 8GB RAM though.
I once had a go at editing HD video on an 11" MacBook Air and it worked quite well, obviously not ideal, but just shows that there's no need to shell out so much money on something to edit videos on.
Lastly, CS6 has OpenCL, which I've found to work pretty well, so there's that.
-How about After Effects? Smooth playback, quick renders?
Same story with my 2010 iMac.
-What is your disk setup like- externals, RAIDs, etc? Where are you storing project files, footage, final exports, etc? (I am considering the
OWC Helios+E2 Thunderbolt- working footage on the SSD, archive on eSATA connected RAID, project files on Fusion).
For 2 years I was using a 1TB G-Drive hooked up to my iMac via FireWire 800 (Firstly using it on my 2012 iMac, then using it on my current 2012 iMac), and it was pretty much flawless. Soon, I decided to get a LaCie Little Big Disk 240GB SSD RAID, it was extremely fast, but I discovered that the speed of the drive wasn't making my renders/exports any faster whatsoever, and the fan was so loud, it wasn't worth it, so I ditched that drive,
I even made a post regarding it.
Last weekend I decided to buy a G-RAID 4TB, to be hooked up via FireWire 800. Unlike the LaCie, this RAID isn't any faster than the regular G-Drive, which is disappointing; the G-Drive is a single disk. I cooked up a conspiracy that G-Tech decided to throttle the newer FW800 RAIDs to make either the USB3 port (That this drive has) look better or to make the Thunderbolt versions look better. Anyway, I'm gonna keep this drive since it's 4TB and I can't be bothered to look for something else.
Personally, if you want more help on a disk set up, make a post about it or search the forums, not quite in the mood right now to talk about storage solutions in depth.
-How is the display for color grading? Would you recommend another (ie, non-Apple) external display for this instead?
I don't do any serious colour grading, so I don't really have any say in this.
Edit: Anyone wondering what happened to the 2010 iMac, never did manage to find out the actual problem, but it pretty much broke so I decided to go up a step and wait for the next iMac...which was a very long wait.