Do You Really Need A Mac Pro or Will An iMac Do The Job?

[Harbourmaster]

http://www.barefeats.com/im09b.html

barefeats wrote:
Many readers have asked me, "Do I really need a Mac Pro or will an iMac do the job?" The short answer is, "It depends on what you do." We have gathered a mixed bag of benchmarks to make this point. The graphs show two 4-core Mac Pros being compared to the fastest 'early 2009' iMac along with a few older iMacs.

[sekker]

We've been very pleased with the speed of a recently purchased iMac - so much so, we're going to postpone a mac pro purchase until we find a major bottleneck from the CPU in our workflow.

[Wailer]

I wonder how my 10-year old pismo powerbook would score.

[hal]

AFAIC, very few people 'need' a mac pro. Unless you spend a good deal of time watching progress bars for work that earns you money, you don't need it.

The days of requiring the biggest mac that money can to run photoshop have long past.

[pRICE cUBE]

The place I used to work learned this the hard way. While encoding a flv file, we looked at the cpu monitor and the big bad 2.8 quad was only using 1 CPU because of Flash encoder. We could have has 2 imacs for the same price and same encoding speed.

[jdc]

said it before, will say it again -- replaced my whole studio -- Dual 2.0 G5s and Dual 1.25s MDDs with AL iMacs -- maybe the best mac purchase i have ever made

speed over the G5s is astounding -- opening 5-6 100+ meg photos on my G5 was doable, but i know it would take a bit -- but with my imacs, it takes just a few seconds... all running dual screens

the only drawback is the internal drive size (although not so much with the new ones) and the difficulty to upgrade it and the 4 gig ram limit (again, not with the newest model)

their gaming tests with the 3.06 iMac and the stock GT130 were impressive as well...

http://www.barefeats.com/imac09.html

EDIT: just read the test page -- IMHO, not really helpful. if yo are running After Effects, or motion or any other video app = Macpro, i think thats understood?

[mikebw]

Let me tell you- I am running AfterEffects and Compressor to do batch transcoding at work and these types of processes need as much RAM and as much raw processing power as you can afford.

I can peg all 16 cores on my new 2x2.26 Quad Macpro with little effort, and the 6GB of RAM I have now is a real limitation. Hopefully we will be upgrading to at least 12GB, if not 16GB very soon.

But for average Photoshop, web design, audio editing, page design stuff you can most certainly do well on an iMac.

[john dough]

Well, for me the need was based on storage and RAM. My Quad 2.66 MacPro has 24GB of RAM and 4.6 TB of storage (1TB x 2, 2TB x 1 640GB x 1). I keep backups of all my computers (4 laptops and a G3 iMac) on it, as well as rips of all of my DVDs and all of my CDs, all photos back to 1995, and images of all the software I have bought. I actually need the storage and having Parallels run XP, Vista, and Server 2008 (for testing), often all at once, I need as much RAM as possible. I know that no iMac, or any other Mac (excluding MacPros), can store that much internally or keep that much RAM.

If it was just on processing speed, I may think different, but to be supporting clients who use said OSs, I need them running when they call so I can assist them (often times I have to train them in use of a new program).

As far as watching progress bars, yes, it is faster, and I can handle more tasks, but the real reason I bought this machine is more headroom for storage/RAM. I could not care less if an iMac is faster or not if I cannot add more RAM or add more storage (I know that you can upgrade the HD, but AFAIK, you void your warranty and you only have one HD). iMacs are great as clients or part of a network but the MacPro is a different beast and not a valid comparison.

[guitarist]

Wailer wrote:
I wonder how my 10-year old pismo powerbook would score.

Like a 10-year old pismo powerbook. A senior citizen eligible for Medicare!

[jdc]

clearly john, you need a MP