iMac Upgrade Question

[electrotech555]

Hey,
I am new to the forums and can't wait to see how this goes.

Will upgrading my ram to 4gb, and adding an SSD make running Final Cut Pro X at all smoother? I used Final Cut Pro X with the current specs:
2GHZ C2D
1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 32mb cache
2.5gb ram 667mhz ddr2
ATI X1600 128mb SD GDDR3

The only "Slow" part of running it was the fact that background rendering made it a bit laggy, but besides that I made several impressive videos with it.

Any help is appreciated,
Thanks,
Austin

Note:
I do not want to buy a new Mac as of now, I actually just bought this iMac this year (yep call me crazy for buying an 06-07 iMac in 11). I will be selling this later for a Mac Pro, but need to upgrade within the next few months.

 

[apw100]

The RAM will definitely make a difference, the SSD, not so much. Unless you are editing multiple streams of very high bit rate video, a normal 7200RPM HDD should be fine.

 

[Hellhammer]

Your iMac can only utilize 3GB of RAM so you are pretty much maxed out. An SSD shouldn't help either as the HD isn't the bottleneck. Rendering is mainly CPU intensive and 2GHz C2D is really not top notch for video editing anymore.

 

[electrotech555]

@HellHammer My iMac will recognize 4GB of ram, but most applications will be able to use it, while others may only be able to run on 3gb. It's odd, but after some research, that is what I found.

 

[Hellhammer]

@HellHammer My iMac will recognize 4GB of ram, but most applications will be able to use it, while others may only be able to run on 3gb. It's odd, but after some research, that is what I found.

Not true. Something like 3.3GB might be utilizable by the whole system, it's not limited to any specific app. See this

 

[electrotech555]

@HellHammer Thanks for the heads up! I would've had no clue, but would still have had somewhat of a performance increase. Thanks for the help! I will most likely wait for FCPX until I upgrade to a newer mac.