27" imac or Mac Pro six core?

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Level 1

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27" imac or Mac Pro six core?

I would welcome some real world advice?

I am a professional photographer and my main machine has been a 1st gen MacPro 1.1 ( 2x3Ghz Dual-Core with 16Gb RAM SSD boot drive and ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB graphics card ) but I feel it is time for an upgrade. The new mac pro is way out of my budget so the choice comes down to the following:

A: A MacPro 5.1 3.33Ghz 6 core, 48GB RAM and I'm told I can add my SSD, internal 2TB drives and graphics card to this - so continunity and I can upgrade the OSX now, plus still use my 30" Apple cinema display monitor ( Or upgrade to an Eizo ). It leaves me using firewire 800 instead of thunderbolt but I have many multiple firewire external drives already, not sure I want to buy thunderbolt drives as well. I can add a USB 3.0 card I guess if I want that connection.

or

B: An 27" Imac, 3.5GHz i7, 32GB RAM with a 3TB fusion drive, etc + the added expense of new thunderbolt drives.

I like the design of the 'old' macpro - you can have hard drives on top of it, etc but will I see enough of a speed increase with this model compared to my old one? ( this is the cheaper option by far ) Is it false economy as I want this machine to keep going for at least 2-3 years?

The imac, is it that much faster?

Any hands on advice from people who use these machines would be very useful! Looking to buy this in the next few days.

Cheers!

Posted on Jan 29, 2014 7:12 AM

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Answer 1

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Strawb268

Level 4

1,464 points

Jan 29, 2014 7:30 AM in response to martbedd

I don't use a MacPro, but based on the comparative specs, I would observe the following:

I really don't think you will notice a speed improvement on the iMac compared with the MacPro. Any slightly better processor speed will be cancelled out (and possibly overtaken) by the increased amount of RAM and the fact that the MacPro is 6 core compared with the i7 iMac only being "quad core".
You may well notice the drop from your 30" cinema display to the iMac's integrated 27"screen. Now, if the iMac screen were retina - it would be different, but it isn't!
Whatever spec you choose for your iMac is the one you are stuck with. The MacPro, though an old model with the release of the new Pro, is internally expandable - you can add and change components as you wish (this may be particularly relevant for graphics processing).
I personally wouldn't worry about Thunderbolt. There are relatively few drives out there supporting it and although it is theoretically faster than USB 3, benchmark tests show the difference to be quite small in practice. Thunderbolt 2 is significantly faster, but drives with this facility have mostly yet to hit the market. And, of course, unlike the iMac, if Thunderbolt becomes a necessity for you in the future, you can just add a Thunderbolt card to your MacPro.

Purely my take on this but I would say that unless you are hooked on having the latest model, then the MacPro wins the race.

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