Mac Pro to iMac and regret it or love it?

[illustratton]

I switched from a MacPro tower to a iMac a few years back, with few regrets - but most of my work is in web development and illustration (with a little Photoshop). If I was doing video, I'd stay with a Pro tower.- but for everything else a iMac is fine for me.

[davemchine]

I do a lot of video encoding so I need raw horsepower. I often have multiple apps trying to write to drives at the same time so I need a lot of throughput. I don't need a monitor at all. So I'm thinking either a MacPro sitting in a corning or a hackintosh as mentioned. I'm not much for being a tinkerer and I would want it to be 100% compatible with iTunes so I'm hesitant to go the hackintosh route.

[smacks]

Like others mentioned, depends on what you are crunching. Went from MacPro to iMac in December. Design, illustration, heavy Photoshop. Never going back. Just add lots of RAM, and you'll be fine.

[ka jowct]

No regrets about NOT having an iMac. I have the monitor I want, and 4 machines hooked up to it.

BTW I wish this had been available at this price last January when I bought my MP:



Nice price for a 6-core machine that can run Snow Leopard.

[Psurfer]

The price on that refurb 2010 MP is beginning to have me worried about the kind of money they'll want for 2013 MPs...

[Bosco]

As people have already mentioned... It depends on what you will use it for.

Personally, I'm very happy with my iMac. I maxed out the RAM 32gb (from OWC). I do graphic design: illustrator / photoshop. I also do some basic video editing. It's fine for what I do.

-

[kj4btkljv]

davemchine wrote:
I do a lot of video encoding so I need raw horsepower. I often have multiple apps trying to write to drives at the same time so I need a lot of throughput.

You're not going to get "a lot" of throughput on any MacPro, since they have only have SATA rev. 2 ports on the drive connectors, which is a max of 300MB/s.

However, having said that, 300MB/s is still fast. You can get top speed if you use SSD drives with everything you do, but that's getting crazy expensive.

Jeff

[JoeH]

kj4btkljv wrote:
[quote=davemchine]
I do a lot of video encoding so I need raw horsepower. I often have multiple apps trying to write to drives at the same time so I need a lot of throughput.

You're not going to get "a lot" of throughput on any MacPro, since they have only have SATA rev. 2 ports on the drive connectors, which is a max of 300MB/s.

However, having said that, 300MB/s is still fast. You can get top speed if you use SSD drives with everything you do, but that's getting crazy expensive.

Jeff
On the other hand, with a Mac Pro there is the option to add Fibre Channel or other high speed data connections. Older models had the RAID card option which supported use of SAS drives instead of SATA. Some of this can be done with an iMac over a Thunderbolt connection now, and since the prices on that option are getting a little less, that may be an option for some.

[tortoise]

kj4btkljv wrote:
[quote=davemchine]
I do a lot of video encoding so I need raw horsepower. I often have multiple apps trying to write to drives at the same time so I need a lot of throughput.

You're not going to get "a lot" of throughput on any MacPro, since they have only have SATA rev. 2 ports on the drive connectors, which is a max of 300MB/s.

However, having said that, 300MB/s is still fast. You can get top speed if you use SSD drives with everything you do, but that's getting crazy expensive.

Jeff
Or for $43 one can purchase eSATA card from our sponsor and plug it into PCI slot to achieve the higher 600MBs (theoretical). http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20T...PCIE6G2S2/ That was my solution, again hard to beat the expandability of the old reliable towers. Not to mention the superior cooling offered in the MacPro design. Comparison shows the iMacs just run hotter than the towers and while they assure us it is all OK, I have seen a lot more failures in the field with iMacs than with MacPros.

[mrlynn]

tortoise wrote:
. . . Not to mention the superior cooling offered in the MacPro design. Comparison shows the iMacs just run hotter than the towers and while they assure us it is all OK, I have seen a lot more failures in the field with iMacs than with MacPros.

Agree; my 2009 iMac 27" i7 is a beautiful machine, but runs really hot, even though it's not doing any heavy lifting. Aside from running Windoze software on a Parallels virtual XP, I don't really do anything to justify all the power I've got.

But if Apple made a tower priced low enough I'd buy that plus a big monitor, just to have the access and expandability. I wouldn't attempt to pull off the glass to get at the innards of my iMac (not to mention the new ones with glued-in screens), and there's no room for anything in there anyway.

/Mr Lynn