2.66 Quad vs. 2.16 duo iMac...

[scoobs69]

I was really hoping to put my purchase off until next year when the Gulftown machines hit the market, but my photography workload is just killing my maxed out iMac and I'm falling further and further behind.

My main apps are Photo Mechanic, Nikon Capture NX2 (I know that's a dog anyway) and Photoshop CS3. All are heavily used and I prefer to have them open at the same time so I can toggle. But as is it is, I can only work in one major app without throwing my iMac in frozen molasses. ...I plan on moving to Aperture 2 later this fall, thus ditching NX2. Even so, I'll still be strapped with ram issues.

SOOO! What kind of speed increase can I expect going from the 2.16GHz iMac with 3GB of ram and a small library of FW800 drives to the 2.66GHz Quad with 12GB of ram and two or three internal working SATA drives.

If I'm coughing up $4000 for my new system, I wanna feel it.

Thanks,

c

 

[JPamplin]

Pretty much triple to quadruple what you're used to on the iMac - it's a combination of factors - going to internal SATAs (especially if they're RAID0) will give you a huge boost, then all that RAM means you'll swap to disk almost never.

The quad-cores is nice - but be sure to get a video card that is 10.6 OpenCL compliant! An ATI 4870 is a good choice.

Enjoy, and welcome to the Pro Club.

JP

 

[scoobs69]

Isn't the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 10.6 OpenCL compliant? From my understanding, it is. Plus, the graphics card will be one of the last things I can upgrade (along with an SSD boot drive and one last 4GB dimm) to squeak out a little more performance later down the road. And hopefully they'll be a bit less expensive than they are today.