Multitasking and the 2011 iMac? (how much will upgrading help?)

[mixel]

I'm thinking about replacing my

iMac8,1 / Core 2 Duo / 2.8 GHz / 6GB / 750GB HDD / 8800GS / 24" (early 2008)

With a refurbished 21.5" 2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 / 1TB HDD /6770M

I run Aperture, Photoshop & Illustrator and small scale video editing with iMovie and Screenflow.. My old iMac doesn't actually have too much trouble with the work I do (maybe Aperture needs a speed boost!), it's only because I'm often running a lot in the background.

Generally I'm also running a Minecraft server, Plex Media Server, Bittorrent, iMessage, Skype, Tweetdeck, Safari, iTunes, Mail, MPlayer or VLC.. And sometimes Parallels/Win7. Unsurprisingly this sometimes slows things to a crawl. :O

Is the Quad 2.7 i5 going to play nicely with that amount of stuff? Is the elusive 2012 update likely to make much difference in my situation? No one thing i do requires an obscene spec bump, just cumulatively I definitely do!

6GB isn't enough either so looking forward to being able to add a lot more whatever I end up with.

 

[leman]

Well, for really heavy multitasking the i7 might be better, but for your purposes, the i5 should be good enough. Clearly vastly faster than the C2D. Be sure to get lots of RAM on that thing though (8-12GB at least).

 

[blevins321]

I'd definitely put at least 8GB in that machine. In addition, you might want to consider an SSD. That would help with having so many programs accessing the hard drive.

 

[mixel]

Thanks! As for the SSD, I really need ~TB of storage, can I get an external thunderbolt SSD enclosure and boot from that? Then I'd only put the system stuff and frequently used tools/always running things on there, while the Aperture libs etc would stay on the internal 1TB drive? I'm guessing an SSD of such a capacity would be pretty expensive!

 

[blevins321]

Yeah you can do that. Might be cheaper to put a normal SSD in the iMac and get a Thunderbolt set of hard drives. Or maybe even a NAS.