imac g5 or powermac g5 for graphic arts

[pocketsha]

hello everyone. i am a newbee, my 1st post. i am an art director for a small graphic arts/publishing co. i currently have (1) 867 g4; (2) 400 g4's; and (1) 500 g4 server. i am looking to upgrade the dept w/new g'5, but dont want to give the owner a coronary with the costs. so i am wondering about the quality/longevity of a new imac to do layouts and some lite-ps work. the machine i use would need to be a powerhouse g5 powermac. but the other machines are only used maybe once a week for pagemaker use. i have never upgraded these machine b4, so the upgradability of an imac is not a huge concern to me. i just need them to be fast and reliable. and the cost of the monitor and cpu in one is more do-able than separate pieces. are there any graphic artists out there who work on new imacs who can give me some advice? it would be greatly appreciated. thank you all in advance!!

 

[Blue Velvet]

Welcome to MR Forums!

A colleague recently purchased the 'middle' iMac model for working from home -- it's fine with 768mb RAM. There have also been price cuts within the past couple of days...

The iMacs (with plenty of RAM) would be fine for most layout work and ok for Pshop but bear in mind the cost of software...

Pagemaker doesn't exist any more. You'll have to purchase & train for InDesign or Quark or...

...run Pagemaker in Classic.

 

[Sun Baked]

Memory and the graphics cards would probably be two things you'd want to be able to play with in the future.

The iMac G5 has 2 DIMM slots and a built-in GPU...

While the Single Processor PowerMac G5 is the same machine with 4 DIMM slots and a video card.

You may lose the nifty LCDs that come with the iMac, but if you are replacing existing machines -- you already have monitors.

NOTE: The DP machines run the PowerMac architecture, while the SP machine is running the consumer iMac architecture. There is a difference on the inside besides the 2nd CPU.

 

[jadam]

Go with the 1.8 iMacs, they should be fine for your purposes.

 

[iGary]

My 1.8 iMac at work is just about as fast as my 1.25 G4 at home, benchwise, and real-world usage wise.

The only reason I would get the PowerMac would be if you planned on upgrading as time passes...you'll get more longevity out of the PowerMac, especially when it comes to video cards, available RAM slots, PCI Cards. But that assumes you guys already have monitors.

I had no problem talking the boss into the iMac - it's perfect for the photography work I do (batch actions, etc.) along with Quark and othe publishing work.

 

[pocketsha]

i should have mentioned that i have old monitors and am looking to get new ones also. and i already have the indesign program and the new photoshop also. thank you all for the replies!

 

[mcarvin]

Pagemaker doesn't exist any more. You'll have to purchase & train for InDesign or Quark or...

...run Pagemaker in Classic.

If you're migrating from Pagemaker,
this may be useful to you.

 

[Blue Velvet]

i should have mentioned that i have old monitors and am looking to get new ones also. and i already have the indesign program and the new photoshop also. thank you all for the replies!

Don't forget Suitcase. Adobe Type Manager doesn't exist for OS X.

But if you only deal with a limited number of fonts, say a corporate set or a limited number of families then FontBook is OK. We run it on our RIP G4 because Quark won't send font postscript info to a RIP machine on the network...

 

[Sweetfeld28]

They both will handle fine. At my uni. we have labs that have both, and i have not noticed any major set backs.

i wouldn't mind having either one of them.