I have the go-ahead to buy a new Mac for the bittness. I'm wondering if the iMac 24 maxed out with 3 gig of RAM will suffice? We can afford a quad core Mac Pro with 8 gig of RAM, but I'm not into throwing money away unnecessarily. I use CS3 on an iMac 20 at home with 2 gig of RAM, and it does drag sometimes (funny how the non-Intel native version CS2 seemed to run faster). Thoughts? Can an iMac handle the workload of a two photographer studio?
The unfortunate thing is that CS3 can only use 3GB of RAM so unless you're running a lot of other things in parallel, 8GB will not buy you much. 4-5GB is probably optimal.
To get the most performance, a fast CPU is not enough - tuning is important as well - make sure you have at least 2 physical fast drives (not USB), and that your memory configuration uses as much of the available memory as possible without swapping.
I think the iMac can only hold one SATA drive which, other then the memory limitations, is another strike against it for optimal performance.
My suggestion is to get a barebones MacPro from Apple, then get an additional drive and memory from 3rd parties which are much less expensive.
Thanks, Guy. That makes a lot of sense. I do run Aperture and sometimes FotoMagico at the same time, along with email. Maybe 5 gig is the way to go. Buying something maxed out today (iMac) doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Kelly, I got a refurbished MacPro for less than $2000. Added a second drive and 4GB of memory (for a total of 5) and still kept my total cost around $2500. If you don't mind installing some parts yoruself you can really keep your costs down.
What Guy said. I almost went for the iMac after using a friend's maxed out version. Performance was good until we started multi-tasking with several programs up at once.
Here's another grief for the iMac, and long narrow monitors in general: When you start working with or displaying vertical shots, you've effectively moved back to a pretty small monitor. Swivel mounts as a cure are no sweat with dedicated monitors, but a royal PITA with a few cords attached to the iMac.
Discussion
5 repliesTo get the most performance, a fast CPU is not enough - tuning is important as well - make sure you have at least 2 physical fast drives (not USB), and that your memory configuration uses as much of the available memory as possible without swapping.
I think the iMac can only hold one SATA drive which, other then the memory limitations, is another strike against it for optimal performance.
My suggestion is to get a barebones MacPro from Apple, then get an additional drive and memory from 3rd parties which are much less expensive.
Guy
Guy
Here's another grief for the iMac, and long narrow monitors in general: When you start working with or displaying vertical shots, you've effectively moved back to a pretty small monitor. Swivel mounts as a cure are no sweat with dedicated monitors, but a royal PITA with a few cords attached to the iMac.