TL;DR: For photography and 1080p video editing, is Geekbench a good way to compare machines that were never designed to compete with one another? Is a Mac mini scoring 11,678 truly faster to process data than a Mac Pro scoring 8,631?
I've got a 1,1 Mac Pro that I use for professional photography (22MP) and light video editing (1080p). I've been holding off replacing my machine until the 6,1 Mac Pro was announced, and the announcement has me more confused than ever.
The plan: get a new/refurb 3,1-5,1 Mac Pro if the 6,1 Mac Pro was largely unchanged. Get a 6,1 Mac Pro if it was.. Well, it certainly was. So, I'm ready to think outside the box in that nothing actually goes inside the box.
I need to have a protected (ie, RAID) volume of at least 1TB for client images. I'd like to have a very fast boot drive (ie, SSD). I'd like to keep my Users file (personal documents, downloads, etc) on a large drive that's backed up to crashplan. I put my RAWs in an UnRaid array.
The current form factor Mac Pro can do that, and I've set a budget of around $2,000USD, which would get me a single 2.8GHz quad core that scores an 8,631 on Geekbench. My current 1,1 scores a 5,942, which means the 2010 quad core 2.8GHz is an 45% improvement (right?). $2,000 after tax on apple.com, plus $150 for 16GB memory. Would use my current drives. It would get me by, but it wouldn't help prepare for the Thunderbolt-only era.
Or, I could get a Mac Mini. With the 2.6GHz i7, it'd be $900. Add my current SSD with the $50 iFixit kit, I'd have my fast boot and a 1TB for user/docs to back up to crashplan. $200 would max out the memory. I could get The Pegasus R4 and fill it with a RAID 10 (1+0) nested array of striped pairs. Possibly fusion drives? That would give me 2TB of room for client files that could also be backed up to crashplan. The 2.6GHz Mac mini scores an 11,678 on Geekbench, an improvement of nearly double my current machine's score and a 26% improvement over the 2.8GHz Mac Pro. All for around $1,800, plus I would have spares to add to my unRaid array.
So, for slightly less money, I'd be getting a faster machine, freeing up a huge amount of desk space, AND getting used to having Thunderbolt-only and no internal expansion in time for the 7,1 or 8,1 Mac Pro (assuming yearly updates). Am I right?
I've got a 1,1 Mac Pro that I use for professional photography (22MP) and light video editing (1080p). I've been holding off replacing my machine until the 6,1 Mac Pro was announced, and the announcement has me more confused than ever.
The plan: get a new/refurb 3,1-5,1 Mac Pro if the 6,1 Mac Pro was largely unchanged. Get a 6,1 Mac Pro if it was.. Well, it certainly was. So, I'm ready to think outside the box in that nothing actually goes inside the box.
I need to have a protected (ie, RAID) volume of at least 1TB for client images. I'd like to have a very fast boot drive (ie, SSD). I'd like to keep my Users file (personal documents, downloads, etc) on a large drive that's backed up to crashplan. I put my RAWs in an UnRaid array.
The current form factor Mac Pro can do that, and I've set a budget of around $2,000USD, which would get me a single 2.8GHz quad core that scores an 8,631 on Geekbench. My current 1,1 scores a 5,942, which means the 2010 quad core 2.8GHz is an 45% improvement (right?). $2,000 after tax on apple.com, plus $150 for 16GB memory. Would use my current drives. It would get me by, but it wouldn't help prepare for the Thunderbolt-only era.
Or, I could get a Mac Mini. With the 2.6GHz i7, it'd be $900. Add my current SSD with the $50 iFixit kit, I'd have my fast boot and a 1TB for user/docs to back up to crashplan. $200 would max out the memory. I could get The Pegasus R4 and fill it with a RAID 10 (1+0) nested array of striped pairs. Possibly fusion drives? That would give me 2TB of room for client files that could also be backed up to crashplan. The 2.6GHz Mac mini scores an 11,678 on Geekbench, an improvement of nearly double my current machine's score and a 26% improvement over the 2.8GHz Mac Pro. All for around $1,800, plus I would have spares to add to my unRaid array.
So, for slightly less money, I'd be getting a faster machine, freeing up a huge amount of desk space, AND getting used to having Thunderbolt-only and no internal expansion in time for the 7,1 or 8,1 Mac Pro (assuming yearly updates). Am I right?