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I’ve switched our main edit suite system to a 27” i7 iMac after realizing that it renders about three times faster than the 2008 Mac Pro it’s replacing. I’ve got a 30” monitor hooked up to it, and a fast external RAID via a cheap Thunderbolt to SATA adapter. We’re running AE, FCPX and Maya on it, primarily, and for what we do it’s plenty fast. (We are rarely under tight delivery deadlines where rendering speed would make or break us. In fact, the biggest bottleneck these days seems to be h.264 encoding for delivery.) As for the new Mac Pro, if you need the speed it doesn’t seem the price should make all that much difference. Even if you replace it after two years, a couple of grand difference in price shouldn’t break the bank for an active shop with a decent number of projects coming through. It’s amazing to me that after all these years people are still shocked - Shocked! - that there’s a premium for Mac OS workstations. For our small shop it’s worth it, since we know the Mac OS and know how to troubleshoot it. Interesting times, with all of these incredibly fast machines for choose from. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play Marathon on my Quadra 700… On Dec 22, 2013, at 12:33AM, Robert Houghton <gfxguy74@gmail.com> wrote: I think I might not get the Mac Pro, while the features such as the increased bandwidth, accuracy and workstation class video cards are nice they seem to be overkill for what I do which is primarily motion graphics with a growing amount of 3D animation. When honestly looking at it, unless you happen to have a monitor with retina-type resolution already (I don't presently), the iMac when maxed out at 27" seems to be a good buy. The only thing really holding me back is the mobile video card on the iMac unless someone can tell me that it can hold a candle to a full power video card like a 770 or 780. I do know that a Dell equivalent to the Mac 27" will run about $650. |
