Radeon Pro 580X vs Radeon Pro Vega 48 for Graphic Designer

[ipottersmith]

Hi All,
I'm a Graphic Designer and Illustrator planning to upgrade to an iMac in the near future, to use as my main work machine for at least 5 years, hopefully more. My current Macbook Pro has been my workhorse for the past 4 years, and is going great, but I want to upgrade preemptively to prevent an emergency upgrade if this one fails.

My plan is to purchase the 27" model with the i9 CPU, 64gb Ram (aftermarket), 3tb Fusion Drive, secondary 4K Monitor (Phillips) and I'm debating the GPU.

All my research tells me that the software I use daily doesn't need an intensive GPU past a certain point, and relies much more heavily on the CPU and RAM. Specifically:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Indesign
VMWare Fusion (literally just for Microsoft Publisher )
Adobe Animate
Blender (this is a hobby)

I don't use my computer for gaming, and don't intend to either.

Especially since I'm maxing this thing out in other areas, I don't see a need to upgrade the GPU based on my research, and would definitely like to keep the extra $450 in savings.

Before I pull the trigger, I wanted to hear your thoughts on the matter?

P.S. I've debated going all SSD in this computer (my current Mac is all SSD), but the cost is too prohibitive and I would like to have as much storage as possible in this machine anyway.

 

[macduke]

Hi All,
I'm a Graphic Designer and Illustrator planning to upgrade to an iMac in the near future, to use as my main work machine for at least 5 years, hopefully more. My current Macbook Pro has been my workhorse for the past 4 years, and is going great, but I want to upgrade preemptively to prevent an emergency upgrade if this one fails.

My plan is to purchase the 27" model with the i9 CPU, 64gb Ram (aftermarket), 3tb Fusion Drive, secondary 4K Monitor (Phillips) and I'm debating the GPU.

All my research tells me that the software I use daily doesn't need an intensive GPU past a certain point, and relies much more heavily on the CPU and RAM. Specifically:
Photoshop
Illustrator
Indesign
VMWare Fusion (literally just for Microsoft Publisher )
Adobe Animate
Blender (this is a hobby)

I don't use my computer for gaming, and don't intend to either.

Especially since I'm maxing this thing out in other areas, I don't see a need to upgrade the GPU based on my research, and would definitely like to keep the extra $450 in savings.

Before I pull the trigger, I wanted to hear your thoughts on the matter?

P.S. I've debated going all SSD in this computer (my current Mac is all SSD), but the cost is too prohibitive and I would like to have as much storage as possible in this machine anyway.

Get the 580X and put the money saved towards an SSD. Even a smaller one is fine, and since you're just working with design files, you can easily work from a 512GB or 1TB SSD and archive projects as you're working to external storage, which is cheap. The SSD is worth it and is less likely to fail over time vs. a Fusion drive which has two points of failure—the small SSD and the larger spinning drive (which is even more likely to fail than a solid state by itself, much less in an array). I'm a professional designer and photographer and I'm also getting more into video and wanted some space to bootcamp for gaming so I went for the 2TB SSD. But at work where I mainly just do design, web development and photography, I have a 512GB SSD that I offload projects onto a couple spinning drives that backup to each other with CCC. Before that I had a Fusion drive and while it was an improvement over older spinning drives, I noticed a big improvement when I switched to SSD only.

 

[ipottersmith]

Thanks for the feedback! I currently have a *full* 1tb SSD in my Macbook, so the speed difference is a concern for me, I just don't like Apple's pricing for storage. I store pretty much all of my work files in Dropbox, which is where most of my storage goes. Do you think it would be a good idea to stick with the base 2tb Fusion drive for the OS and software (since it has 128gb of flash storage) and get a 1tb thunderbolt SSD for my work/ dropbox files? Unfortunately 512gb is too small for me to work with on a single volume because of the Dropbox folder.

 

[alaman64]

I would go internal 512 SSD for programs and osx, plus 1tb or 2tb external SSD or data/work files. Just make sure when you set up Dropbox and make it point to the external drive.

 

[ipottersmith]

I would go internal 512 SSD for programs and osx, plus 1tb or 2tb external SSD or data/work files. Just make sure when you set up Dropbox and make it point to the external drive.

Thanks! I think this is the route I’ll go.

 

[macduke]

Thanks! I think this is the route I’ll go.

That is what I would have done also. In addition to what @alaman64 said, I would also look into selective sync in the Dropbox settings. Do you really need every single Dropbox file available at a moment's notice? For important things that I want archived to the cloud, I usually keep a copy on a local hard drive, and then deselect that folder from syncing to my internal drive. But I also didn't think about just putting my whole Dropbox on an external drive now that I have a desktop. This would have been really annoying with a MBP having a drive hanging off of it at all times, but with a desktop you just tuck the drives behind it. That would have made 1TB a much better option. Dang. Well, at least if I do ever start to run low on space on my internal 2TB SSD I can just get another one for Dropbox. I wonder if you can do this with iCloud storage also? If you want to save even more internal space, I think you can sync your iTunes and Photos library to an external drive. For me I don't have much of a local library nowadays though. I keep the high resolution photos in iCloud and use Apple Music with streaming 4K movies. I keep my Lightroom catalog on an external 2TB Samsung T5 SSD so I can use it with my MBP when I travel.

I kinda wish I had gone with the 1TB SSD instead of the 2TB SSD now, but I was still under my budget and wanted to be able to have a 512GB Bootcamp partition. I didn't realize it was possible to put Bootcamp on an external drive if you follow a bunch of long, complicated steps online. So if I did it all over again, I'd do 1TB SSD with an external 512GB SSD for Windows and put the money I saved towards an eGPU for better gaming in Windows. Oh well, live and learn.

 

[ipottersmith]

It's amazing how many possibilities there are! I know you can definitely keep Photos and iTunes stored on an external drive, it's pretty easy to do if you copy the folders and then point iTunes/ Photos there. In terms of selective sync, I'm already using it aggressively and am just tired of it. I haven't utilized external storage on my current machine simply because of what you said, it's annoying to have an external drive connected all the time.

 

[ipottersmith]

Just placed the order! Thanks for the feedback everyone