2010 cMP 5,1 versus 2011 iMac

[Zeke D]

ive got the following two units:

2010 cMP:
1x Xeon QC 2.8 ghz
16gb RAM
Radeon 5750 1gb
240gb Sata III SSD in pcie card
24" Dell monitor

2011 27" iMac:
1x i5 QC 2.7ghz
16gb RAM
Radeon HD 6770M 512mb
1tb HDD

My primary use is photoshop to design book covers. I used to play games, but I don't have time anymore with all the personal appearances I've been making lately. I finally got my bachelors degree, and I might think about my masters in the future, but any old Mac can handle that. I could do my writing and book formatting on either. The 27" screen on the iZmac is nice, but I could get up to a 40" screen for the cMP.

Which one should I continue to use, and which one should I retire? What questions or situations have I not thought of?

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Geekbench shows the CPUs are much of a muchness. The key is what hard drive is in the iMac?

If it is a treacley 1TB 7200rpm, nowhere near the speed of the SSD in the Mac Pro.

 

[Zeke D]

Geekbench shows the CPUs are much of a muchness. The key is what hard drive is in the iMac?

If it is a treacley 1TB 7200rpm, nowhere near the speed of the SSD in the Mac Pro.

It looks as if I can get a kit from OWC to move my SSD into the iMac. After that, though, they're pretty much in a dead heat. The major advantage is that I could eventually upgrade the cMP to a dual-CPU tray, and it supports natively 64GB RAM that way...

 

[kschendel]

I'm not sure there's any contest here, unless you're excluding upgrades of the cMP. Isn't that iMac one of the ones with GPU failure issues? and even if it's not, you can upgrade the cMP GPU, you can upgrade the CPU (even if you stick to a single processor), you can add SSD's or even spinners if you need pure space, you can add RAM easily. With a relatively inexpensive GPU upgrade you can move to 4K monitors if you like. I'd keep the cMP and sell or repurpose the iMac.