Imac versus Macpro

[sejanus]

Hi Guys

I'm a wedding photographer.

I currently am using a Macpro I bought in mid 2009. It's the nehalem 8x2.93ghz with 24gb ram. It has 4 x 7200rpm drives and a 256gb ssd as the boot drive and a ati radeon hd 5870. It has 2 x apple 30" screens.

It's a decent box but I also have a 2011 3.4ghz i7 27" imac and in general it feels quite a bit snappier. It also feels a lot easier on the eyes - the twin apple 30's on my macpro look impressive but it's pretty fatiguing on the eyes - at least for me.

Please note below prices are australian dollars, it will look expensive to americans

My options seem to be ;

1) Buy new iMac, the config I want is $3498.

3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2X4GB 512GB Flash Storage NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5 (I'd add ram to that after I get it)

2) Buy new Macpro, and use 1 of my 30" screens with it in the meantime until I get a 4k screen a bit down the track. The config I want is $4478.

3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache 16GB (4x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC 512GB PCIe-based flash storage Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter

Basically it's $980 more for the Macpro.

Any thoughts on what the best path would be? I'll be buying a Lacie 5big for thunderbolt storage. I have some other older usb disk boxes I can use for backups. The lacie would be the primary storage. If I got the imac I could sell both my 30" screens to go towards it, so I guess the big question is for things like lightroom with photos, would the Macpro be much faster or would the imac be fine?

The imac is tempting given it's all in the one unit - but the macpro is also tempting with the extra grunt (at least on paper) and thunderbolt 2.
Thanks!

 

[RedCroissant]

Hi Guys

I'm a wedding photographer.

I currently am using a Macpro I bought in mid 2009. It's the nehalem 8x2.93ghz with 24gb ram. It has 4 x 7200rpm drives and a 256gb ssd as the boot drive and a ati radeon hd 5870. It has 2 x apple 30" screens.

It's a decent box but I also have a 2011 3.4ghz i7 27" imac and in general it feels quite a bit snappier. It also feels a lot easier on the eyes - the twin apple 30's on my macpro look impressive but it's pretty fatiguing on the eyes - at least for me.

Please note below prices are australian dollars, it will look expensive to americans

My options seem to be ;

1) Buy new iMac, the config I want is $3498.

3.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2X4GB 512GB Flash Storage NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5 (I'd add ram to that after I get it)

2) Buy new Macpro, and use 1 of my 30" screens with it in the meantime until I get a 4k screen a bit down the track. The config I want is $4478.

3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache 16GB (4x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC 512GB PCIe-based flash storage Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter

Basically it's $980 more for the Macpro.

Any thoughts on what the best path would be? I'll be buying a Lacie 5big for thunderbolt storage. I have some other older usb disk boxes I can use for backups. The lacie would be the primary storage. If I got the imac I could sell both my 30" screens to go towards it, so I guess the big question is for things like lightroom with photos, would the Macpro be much faster or would the imac be fine?

The imac is tempting given it's all in the one unit - but the macpro is also tempting with the extra grunt (at least on paper) and thunderbolt 2.
Thanks!

I would honestly go with the new iMac. I say this because I have a new 2013 iMac (27” i5, 16GB RAM) and it’s awesome! Just be aware though that you will need more than 8GB RAM especially running OS X 10.9. And I know you know that and plan on doing that, but I just thought that I would reiterate that based on my own experience with the OS.And be careful when upgrading your iPhoto library to iPhoto ’11 because there are some issues with moving over .avi files.

You seem to want/need TB technology which neither of your machines currently has. So go with the iMac (it’ll also cost less to run as far as energy and should provide comparable performance to the MP and better performance than your current iMac). Sell them both and use that money to pay for the new iMac.