Buying Advice for Photographer

[blueskybyway]

In the fall of 2005, I switched from a PC to an iMac 20" 2Ghz G5 with 2GB of RAM, and as long as Apple keeps making Macs, I'll never return to PCs.

I want to upgrade to the Mac Pro. At fiirst my wife didn't understand why I needed (wanted) to buy another Mac so soon, but once I bought her a video iPod for Christmas and told her she'd get the iMac when I got the Mac Pro, she keeps bugging me to go ahead and buy it.

It's hard to wait, but I don't want to do anything until the octo-core Mac Pros debut. I also think there will be either a price drop on the ACDs and/or they will debut a 24 inch. That way I can make the decsion between the 24 and 30" ACD.

Reading the posts on quad-cores vs. the upcoming octo-cores, it seems I will benefit from more cores when I have several programs open and running, even though the individual applications may not fully utilize the extra cores.

The main problem I have is Aperture (1.5.2) is sluggish on my G5 and then really crawls if one of the backup programs starts to run. I'm assuming more cores will alleviate much of this problem. Am I wrong here?
(I tried scheduling the backups at night, but the computer didn't wake to run them. I'm not keen on leaving the computer active all night. Am I missing something here in it should have awakened to run them, or is there really no shortening of computer life to leave it active all night and that's what many users do?)

Additionally, if the octo-cores come in several Ghz versions, will I really get much more speed out of the faster version? (Mainly with Aperture. I don't do video editing and rendering.) To ask another way, does anyone know what kind of speed difference there is with Aperture on the 2.66 Mac Pro vs. the 3.0? I realize your amount of RAM makes a big difference as well. Once I get the Mac Pro, I will upgrade to 4 GB of RAM as soon as I can.

Do most photographers on this board find the 30" ACD worth it? My concern is it may be too big. Anyone had the pleasure of testing out both the 30" and 23", for any length of time, to get a sense of this?

Thanks!
Chris
http://www.blueskybyway.com

 

[JAT]

Leave it active. Set the hard drives to spin down after a couple hours if you want, but the system active.

And I think you will see an approximately 12% increase in speed in going from a 2.66 to a 3.0, for processor-intensive tasks. Remember that Aperture uses quite a bit on the GPU, too. (and you already mentioned RAM) So upgrading the CPU won't be the only way to improve its speed, nor will it necessarily actually give a 12% increase.

They don't seem to have made programs that truly take advantage of 4 CPUs yet, 8 is probably overkill til the software people catch up. I don't think you'd have any complaints with a current Pro.

I would kill for the time to make my photography hobby serious and get a Pro and a 30". Not going to happen, unfortunately. I don't see how anything can be too big for photo work. The more resolution, the better.

 

[blueskybyway]

Thanks, JAT. The 30" is definitely tempting.

 

[seany916]

Your computer is fine.

Spend the dough, get the screen.

The one computer component that people should never skimp on is the screen. It IS your interaction with the computer. Your G5 is fine. I don't think you need a new computer for your needs.

The Cinema will increase your productivity and give you something to plug your notebook into since you already have a desktop.

Make sure the screen is compatible with whatever computer you plan on hooking it up to (graphics card can handle it).