#Imac 5k vs mac pro for video editing upgrade#
#Imac 5k vs mac pro for video editing pro#

If the graphics power ever becomes insufficient, I can always add a second graphics card in SLI and double the graphic power. I can re-use hard drives from my previous PC or setup a RAID array very easily. I enjoy the upgradability of my system.It certainly was way easier than I thought and I learnt a lot during the whole process. Choosing the parts and building the PC was an interesting experience.

#Imac 5k vs mac pro for video editing pro#

Both Premiere Pro and After Effects use GPU accelerations to speed up rendering times, this is why I went for the GTX970 graphics card with lots of CUDA cores and Vram.

I use the Adobe suite (Lightroom, Premiere Pro and After Effects) and their softwares are fairly optimised. The main goal of going high-end was to speed up the operation when photo and video editing. The R9 M290X gets a score of only 2547 while the desktop 290X card reaches 6875. Do not confuse the mobile versions of the graphics cards used in the iMac when reading the chart. The GTX775M is benchmarked at 4530 points ( ), the R9 295X 4GB scores just below 5000 and the GTX970 4GB tops at 8603 points. With a Windows 7 licence and a few accessories (optical drive, SD / micro SD card reader, high end CPU cooler, quiet case fans, mid-tower quiet case (Fractal Design R5)) and a 27' 1440p IPS display, it costs around в‚¬2200 or ВЈ1600.

#Imac 5k vs mac pro for video editing upgrade#

I will upgrade it to 32GB of Ram and will add a 512GB SSD.

The PC I built is based on the i7-4790K processor, 16GB of 1866Mhz Ram, a 256GB SSD + 2 x 2TB 7200Rpm hard drives and the GTX970 4GB GPU.

It uses the same i7-4790K CPU running at 4.0Ghz (4.4 Turbo) with 16GB of Ram, a 3TB Fusion Drive and the AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB graphics card.

The 5K iMac with all the available options is close to my current setup.

As of February 2015, this costs just under в‚¬2800 or ВЈ2050.

The 27' non-5K iMac I considered was the 3.5Ghz i7 (3.9 turbo) with 16GB of Ram, a 3TB Fusion drive (which combines a 128GB SSD and a 3TB hard drive) and the GTX775M graphics card.

To compare the specs, here is a show-down of each option. I felt the non-5K iMac would not be powerful enough for my use, and a maxed-out 5K iMac would run too expensive. I would have installed Windows anyway as a few softwares I use are not supported by OSX, so I ruled it out. The Hackintosh did appeal to me but it would have restricted my build to very specific parts.

My choices were the 27' iMac (either regular or 5K), a custom build PC or a Hackintosh (more on that here: ). With limited onboard storage, the Mac Pro was not an option. As a 13' Macbook Air and low end desktop PC owner, it was time for me to upgrade to a more serious platform for photo and video editing.