How much better are the newer Macs?

[musique]

Recently I edited a short film (~7 minutes) with about 175 audio clips, about 15 video clips and maybe 100 stills on my “Early 2008” (3,1 with 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Xenon processors) Mac Pro with 10GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, three 2GB drives and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics adapter with 1GB and two 1920x1080 displays. Needless to say, the MP frequently “went away” to process things when I would do something or even just select something in FCPX.

I know that there are rumors of a new/updated Mac Pro. However, if I needed to replace this old MP right now, this week, would I see a marked improvement in performance with a new iMac or would I only see better performance with the almost two year-old (cylindrical) MP? Or would I not see an improvement at all?

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[dan1eln1el5en]

I had a MacPro 1,1, on which I edited videos and similar to your experience lots of lagging and rendertimes.

then I had a MacMini server with RAID disk (7400 rpm) - didn't change much, then I bought a MacBook Pro and the jump was very high, the SSD on PCI (read and write speeds around 1 GB /sec eliminates the spinning ball of death) it's just screaming.
so for your situation I think an iMac could be the answer, but only if it has the SSD stick, not the harddrive version or Fusion drive...SSD is the the key.

 

[joema2]

I edited a short film...“Early 2008” (3,1 with 2 x 2.8 Ghz Quad-Core Xenon processors) Mac Pro with 10GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, three 2GB drives and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics adapter with 1GB...if I needed to replace this old MP right now, this week, would I see a marked improvement in performance with a new iMac....

The top-spec 2015 iMac 27 is considerably faster in most metrics: SSD I/O, GPU, single-threaded CPU and probably multi-threaded. If you are editing in FCP X the iMac supports Quick Sync which would be vastly faster on export to H264. I do lots of 4k multicam video editing with my 2015 iMac 27 and it does OK.

 

[martinX]

^ What Joema said. My set up is a 27" 5K iMac with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD, a 27" Apple monitor, a 12TB Pegasus RAID for all video footage, and two 4TB USB3 WD drives for Time Machine. Beautiful. Edits and exports like a dream.