Hey everybody, I'm just trying to figure out if the computer I'm getting is over kill. I plan to get the 3.06 Imac , with 4 gigs of mem, and a terabyte hard drive. With the up graded graphics card, do I need to upgrade the card?I plan on running photoshop CS4 and I want to get into video editing. Nothing huge maybe 30 min to a hour movies in HD. And the wife will probably use it for creating music. I'm a little nervous about the switch but I have had it with PC'S,my sony Vio is 6 years old and has so much malware I get find it all. Its funny how the two sides are PC and mac users. It seems if you play would of war craft you hate macs. But people who do editing love them. But any thoughts would be great.
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I need advice on switching from PC to Mac.
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Well in reality, you should get the best you can afford especially if the computer won't be replaced for many years. The reason being you can't upgrade the GPU later.
Photoshop CS4 will take advantage of the GPU for manipulating the image like zooming, rotation, etc, but not the actually application of filters, etc. You probably won't benefit from a faster GPU for anything else short of may be if you plan to get Premiere CS4 which offers some GPU acceleration (albeit more NVIDIA and CUDA related)
Music creating will obviously not benefit either.
Again I would like to repeat, since you can't upgrade laterif you can afford it now, then go for the upgrade.
Photoshop CS4 will take advantage of the GPU for manipulating the image like zooming, rotation, etc, but not the actually application of filters, etc. You probably won't benefit from a faster GPU for anything else short of may be if you plan to get Premiere CS4 which offers some GPU acceleration (albeit more NVIDIA and CUDA related)
Music creating will obviously not benefit either.
Again I would like to repeat, since you can't upgrade laterif you can afford it now, then go for the upgrade.
Buy the most you can now.
It's worth repeating: Few people regret spending more money to get something better. Many regret not spending enough to get what they really want.
It's worth repeating: Few people regret spending more money to get something better. Many regret not spending enough to get what they really want.
Welcome to the Mac world!
Well, to put it in perspective, my system is a 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM. It's a fantastic machine, and runs Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4, and Final Cut Pro, all perfectly - probably even side by side.
I must admit, the downside is my hard drive is a mere 200GB (well, 185, actually), and I've only got a few gigs left of room. However, a 500GB external HD from Iomega for under £100 (approx. $160) has never proved so useful for all those bloody render files in FCP and other general large space storage.
3.06GHz and 1TB will be plenty! If I were you, I'd save a few dollars by buying the iMac from Apple with 2GB, but then upgrading yourself to 4GB for a lot cheaper, buying from a site like Crucial.
Hope that information is useful! Good luck on the Mac purchase!
Well, to put it in perspective, my system is a 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM. It's a fantastic machine, and runs Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4, and Final Cut Pro, all perfectly - probably even side by side.
I must admit, the downside is my hard drive is a mere 200GB (well, 185, actually), and I've only got a few gigs left of room. However, a 500GB external HD from Iomega for under £100 (approx. $160) has never proved so useful for all those bloody render files in FCP and other general large space storage.
3.06GHz and 1TB will be plenty! If I were you, I'd save a few dollars by buying the iMac from Apple with 2GB, but then upgrading yourself to 4GB for a lot cheaper, buying from a site like Crucial.
Hope that information is useful! Good luck on the Mac purchase!
+394902384082 I used to sell computers a while back and customers who upgraded were always more happy with their purchases then people who bought "what they need now".
As others have stated they arent easily upgraded but none the less I'm sure you will be thrilled with the machine. I have a MBP (the one in my signature) and run zbrush, maya, logic, photoshop, vmware, corel painter x, etc all on it no problems. I have an external I hook to where all my large things are (such as virtual instrument files). I switched a little over a year ago and am not looking back at all. I fix windows all day for a living which makes me really appreciate the smoothness of mac osx.
One tip though, you may love or hate apples keyboard/mouse. Any other keyboard or mouse will work fine even if it says "windows only" (Like my DiNovo edge).