Home user--Which should i choose? 3.2 Quad Mac Pro or i7 2.93 iMac?

[Sean Dempsey]

I love MR.com

All these threads asking the exact same question:

"Should I get the fastest Toyota Camry, or the Slowest Ferrari?!?!?!"


We need a new Axiom on MR. "If you need to ask, get the consumer product."

 

[philipma1957]

can you explain what part of the Mac Pro would allow it to be faster at this task than the iMac?

the question was importing with a digital hdtv camera. if the camera has esata the mac pro will load it faster of course you will need to buy the esata jack extender for 20 bucks from owc.

 

[Aysheaia]

Anyone use R here?

I'm looking to replace my 2006 Mac Pro (2x3GHz Xeon, 2 GB RAM). I do scientific computing/statistical analysis, so pure processing speed is my main concern. I don't care about expandability, graphics, extra HDs, games, etc. -- just computational speed. I'm buying this for work so price is not a major concern, although value per $ is important. The main software I use is R, which doesn't (easily) take advantage of multiple cores. I'm hoping to keep whatever I buy for at least 4 years.

I had been planning to buy a new MP, leaning towards the 3.33GHz 6-Core Westmere. However, yesterday I was in the Apple Store testing some R code on the previous Nehalem MP (they didn't have the new model yet) and the new iMacs (3.2 GHz i3, 2.8 GHz i5). I was surprised to see that performance for my needs was roughly comparable across all three machines. That being the case, I am now considering buying two 3.2 GHz 27" iMacs, which would cost about the same amount as one 6-core MP (and I wouldn't have to buy a separate monitor). With two iMacs, I could get true multiprocessor performance from R, even if each iMac is slightly slower than one MP. There would also be some work involved in stitching together the results from two machines into one set of results at the end, but I think I can deal with that.

I'd appreciate any comments anyone might have on this plan. Any drawbacks, or any issues I'm not thinking of?

 

[theSeb]

An NAS is a server (a basic server, but still). Speed is limited to what your network can handle (I recommend wired Gigabit Ethernet), but I don't think it'll be as fast as FW800. From what I hear, real-life throughput of NAS over Gigabit is closer to FW400. HD read/write speed is also a factor.

Decent NAS systems from Synology, QNAP, Thecus and Netgear achieve 100 MB/s+ over gigabit ethernet, which is 800 mega bits per second. Firewire 800 is 786 mega bits per second.

The cheap systems however perform far worse so in some cases, FW800 is the way to go.


HD read/write speed is a factor no matter what the connection is.