iMac or Mac Pro? Would like some advice!

[jonnysods]

Hello MR world, I am wondering if you can help me.

I currently own a 24" 2.33 C2D iMac (see sig), which I initially bought as a switcher. In the last 6 months I have started a media company, specialising in video editing (not crazy heavy, but a lot of encoding stuff for clients), website design, graphic design (some very heavy photoshop work), and just general use of course.

My iMac has been under heavy load of late, and can only be loaded with a max of 3gb or RAM as it's the Merom chipset. I'm finding rendering times very long, sometimes the machine can beachball for a long time and I have to quit CS4 and retry the work I was doing.

So I've been eyeing out the Mac Pros the past 3 months, and now, even more so with the new release. I have a budget of $3K, but I'm not sure what would be overkill or not.

Do I buy the top end iMac and run into the same problem I have right now with my current iMac, or buy a Mac Pro? Would my work warrant that sort of power?

This advice you give me will be crucial in how my business moves forward, and how much hair I will pull out in the future!

Thanks!

 

[dazloe]

Hi there, something that would fit under your budget is the latest Quad core mac pro. I would advise going for that, CS4 is definitely going to like the new architecture a lot more than your old imac ever would. In my experience it's always money vs. time. Dishing out the extra money for the mac pro may save you time in the long run, especially when new software comes out and you want to use CS5. +1 for the mac pro, definitely with the future proofing your business

 

[Igantius]

I'd go along with what dazloe said!

 

[bozz2006]

+1 for dazloe. a new imac won't perform that much better than your current imac. mac pro, do it.

 

[jonnysods]

I guess you are right - I think I'll be stuck with a new iMac in a few years, at least with the MP I can add a bit more stuff to it in the future. I just didn't want it to be overkill, but you are right about the time is money thing - some nights it is just killing me with renders, I have to walk away and come back in an hour to see how it's progressed. I want to be able to do 2-3 things at once. That's what I expect from my machine.

Maybe with the sale of my iMac some proceeds can go towards two new 24 inch monitors?

I guess now I wait to see what the benchmarks are between the base model quad or previous gen 8 core!

Looking forward to those results this week.