my 2008 mac tower, K5000, SSD system drive, 3X3TB raid eats thru 1080 editing all day long with good responsiveness. I’m talking 8-10 layers in PP with 1-2 video layers where one is often some h.264 format, 1 ProRes, maybe one ProRes 4444 + alpha, static graphics, lumetri from speed grade. where this system probably suffers is decoding the h.264 formats where 2-3 layers will get boggish a bit. 

OTH I am finishing a shot in 4K GH4 edited in 1080 on my imac i7 and its gone well. since its a 2.93gh / much faster ram bus machine it decodes h.264 a lot more smoothly than the 2008 machine.

so a used 5.1 tower should be a consideration if you want the PCIe slots, and a loaded 27” iMac with nV GPU could be a really nice compact machine. I’m somewhat waiting for an update iMac with 6core i7.

S

On Aug 13, 2014, at 1:30 PM, Tony Romain <AE-List@media-motion.tv> wrote:

This is exactly what I've been hearing as well.  Unless the software is written from the ground up to take advantage of the updated hardware specs/architecture on the new mac pros, the speed boost is negligible.. Especially for the price.

Would def just spend your money upgrading video cards, ram,  DEFINITELY replace your system drive with an SSD as well as get an additional SSD for use as a AE disk cache…  they are super cheap these days

Can't stress enough how awesome the switch to an SSD system drive was…