#557253 - 05/03/1110:49 AMRe: Rumor is NEW iMACS this week- May 3rd !
[Re: John Rougeux]
zwei
soporific
Registered: 06/26/04
Posts: 2479
Loc: Near an iPad
Agreed John, these machines have had ample oomph for a while now. Heck, my iMac is 4 years old and I have no intention on replacing it any time soon. (especially with my external SSD upgrade)
John.. I was speaking of vid ram being more on the refurb.. albeit wit a slower card.
I am deliberating getting the refurb to save money...soooo... an SSD isn't really an option at this point. If I was going to do an SSD it would be an after market one on my MP at home. Tempting though... very tempting... Plus i can always do an external SSD boot later on via TB.
Aaaarrrghhh..
I am leaning towards the new one.
Anyone else have thoughts? Anyone? Bueller? Buelller? Reboot?
Oh I know you were and I forgot to include that in there.
Video card would probably only see real benefits in video editing. Running your photo applications would take more ram than video I think.
So this would replace an existing machine or add to your studio? I"m thinking you said that you have a macbook pro and that's it?
If so, then yeah, a new one would be the way to go.
If you are replacing a mac in your studio, is there anyway you can live off of it for 6 months to a year? Wait until the next one comes out then get this one as a refurb/closing out?
I was checking this out the other day.. Capture One was a 60 MB app and a memory hog 4 years ago at version 3.7.
Then they started adding functionality to it to compete with Aperture and LR. It went to 368 MB app in version 5. Now it's at 525 MB at version 6.0 I know app size isn't the issue here.. I'm just saying my 3+ year old laptop is ok for capturing... but trying to do much more is causing it to lag.
So.. this iMac wouldn't replace it completely... but I would use the laptop a LOT less... just on location shoots. Use the new iMac for all studio work.
Plus... this laptop is at max 4 GB ram. When I launch C1 and PS and Quark and a few others.. it gets eaten up quickly.
sorry, I meant the new iMac. I think this Thunderbolt port will prove out to be really good. Problem is, what's out there that can utilize it?
So, perhaps waiting for Lion and more periphials to come out before getting it might be the better idea. Especially in the hard drive area. That's where it'll come in handy.
Best scenario: get the...wow, just seen the price of a 256GB SSD card! Yikes!
But, since this is a work machine that should last you 5-6 years at minimum, I would recommend this setup:
21.5 inch iMac 2.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB 1TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512MB GDDR5
You want something that will run fast? There you go. And then later on get say a Drobo or whatever that utilizes Thunderbolt.
And by getting the smaller one, you can get a Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel) as a second monitor. I think having 2 would be better than one large one especially for apps like Photoshop.
You can get both installed by Apple, that's an option with the top 21.5" and the 2 27" iMacs.
If you aren't sure, you can check if you have any PowerPC apps on your mac by going into System Profiler and choosing Applications on the left. These are what I have left that are running PowerPC (Rosetta)
Wow... Lion is going to be a problem for me. I have 64 apps that are PPC only. A lot just need weeding out or updating... but not all we be "transferable". So maybe I shouldn't use Lion as a reason to wait....
A phone call from Reboot ... he talked me off the ledge.
Gonna do the refurb and max out the ram from OWC for $208.00 for 16 GBs.
The refurb only has 2 cores... but I guess I don't need more than that right now... maybe after a couple of years I'll upgrade. TB will be more mature by then anyways...
#557294 - 05/03/1109:33 PMRe: Rumor is NEW iMACS this week- May 3rd !
[Re: Acumowchek]
Acumowchek
Blink
Registered: 12/29/07
Posts: 1805
Loc: Petaluma, CA
Hey Moderator! How come after a minute or so, I decide to delete a post, because it's too smug, and it says it's too late to delete? What's my time frame? 10 seconds? 5?
Is there that much advantage to having that much? I ask, because I have my eye on one of the new iMacs and I'm debating between four or eight. 16 seems kind of extreme.
Depends on what you run. I run several apps at once that suck ram like it's mothers milk.
PS3 takes over 3 Gigs by itself.. and when I upgrade to 5 it will take even more. I open lots of files at once...30-50 MB files and for every file you open..PS needs 2.5 times that in ram. Then I need Quark open.. Adobe Acrobat, C1 version 6.0 and Safari and ...blah blah. I'm tired of quitting apps...OSX handles ram better these days... but you can never have enuff ram. Besides...16 GBs of ram for a paltry $208 bucks. I'm on it. All I know is looking at my MBP with 4 gigs of ram.. I was experiencing heavy page outs... which results in lags in the softwares. I don't need clients sitting next to me watching the beachball. Previously I used the iMacs at the printing company I worked for 10 years. But i have been on my own for a year and now need to step up at the studio. Home is ok with a MP and 6 GBs.. although I'm thinking about some more ram that too.
Well this has been an excellent thread! I am in the same boat at home and use my 3 year old MBP to do everything. I need to replace my old dual 2 GHz G5 in my home studio and I was having the same dilemma...new or refurb and max out the RAM. I think I will go with the refurb deal too. I have a MacPro tower at work with 16 GB RAM and between PS and video editing and whatever else more RAM is always the way to go.
Hey Moderator! How come after a minute or so, I decide to delete a post, because it's too smug, and it says it's too late to delete? What's my time frame? 10 seconds? 5?
Everyone else can delete their posts, it's just you we've hobbled.
So you should have saved some time and called Reboot first since you aren't going to listen to me.
I still think you should go new. Thunderbolt won't "mature" any on the iMac,at least not for a long while, but new periphials will be coming out. In the meantime, you will be stuck with last years model with no chance of using thunderbolt at all...until you upgrade again.
New ones are only $400 more. Considering that you would/could use this one a LOT longer than the previous model because of TB....just saying.
That 27" one is out of stock...did you get the last one?
And wait, isn't that refurb one a single processor? I don't see any mention of duo/dual/etc on there.
You will want at least a duo core running your photo apps.
The iMac "Core i3" 3.2 27-Inch Aluminum (Mid-2010) is powered by a dual core 3.2 GHz Intel "Core i3" I3-550 (Clarkdale) processor with a dedicated 256k level 2 cache for each core and a 4 MB shared level 3 cache. In lieu of a system bus, it has a "Direct Media Interface" (DMI) that "connects between the processor and chipset" at 2.5 GT/s.
I knew those refurbs would go fast! OK damnit I'll get the new one. It will allow TB stuff down the road and I don't want to have to upgrade for 3-4 years
John.. I hear you about TB. But consider this... what data, or amount of data, do I need to move at those speeds? USB 2.0/ FW800 are fast enough for me. Today my shoot resulted in 3.45 GBs of data. That took 2 minutes to transfer to a back up drive. TB would have made it be about a tenth of that.. but I'm ok with it taking 2 minutes.. I'll do something else while waiting. After careful consideration... I have come to the conclusion that TB is not yet ready for prime time (in my world). When FW800 came out I didn't need it ASAP.. and actually seldom use it now at full 800 speeds.
Of course I do appreciate your advice... but Reboot has final say.
JK. But, seriously, he called me... where were you?
Looks good.. except that I have bought AppleCare of Ebay for 1/2 of Apples asking price.
I looked at the refurb Apple TV version 2 also... but I have a version 1 that still works.. so I decided to hold off.
Just do it.
Actually.. now I'm wishing I had gone ahead and spent the extra for the quad and the vidcard with 1 GB...lol Oh well.. I 'll trade up in a year or two... Or maybe by then I'll have enough business to warrant having 2... I have been contemplating getting some interns in here....
Actually.. now I'm wishing I had gone ahead and spent the extra for the quad and the vidcard with 1 GB...lol
Climb down, come back in, everything is okay. Trust me, I never lie, and I'm always right. .
Unless you play graphic intensive games, or do 3D rendering, (Bryce etc) you would not see any difference in performance.
In Photoshop CS4 and CS5 on systems with over 256M of VRAM the GPU is used for smoother zooming in and out, rotating the canvas, displaying and working with 3D objects, and color correction among other things. Here's what GPU acceleration does in PS. You're getting the acceleration, and the extra VRAM would not make any difference unless maybe you were applying any of the effects to multiple pics at at once.
Going from 4 to 16G of system RAM is the biggest improvement many times over as compared to more VRAM anyway.
You'll want to tweak Photoshop. It takes 70% of system RAM by default, you know where to change that. You'll want to balance out what it uses and what other apps need, you don't want PS sucking down RAM it doesn't have to. Set it to 8G at first. Do a normal day or two of work, then doing "top" in Terminal check out the free RAM. If you have plenty of RAM still left you can allot more to Photoshop.
If you only have a few hundred MB of RAM free it may be a sign that PS is taking too much and starving other apps.
If it says you have plenty of RAM free, but there are 100's of thousands of pageouts, PS may need more. It will take a while but watching top and tweaking PS will get you to a good balance. My guess is for what you do 8G will be enough for PS to be set at though.
Also for reference you can use the Activity Monitor app to check out the RSIZE, sort by RSIZE, real size, to see how much apps are actually using.
As far as the Quad core vs Dual, the i3 will use 4 virtual cores to run more processes at once, which is a great boost over standard dual cores, whereas the quad i5 can't, although the i5 is a real 4 core. The i3 also runs at 3.2 GHz as compared to 2.7 GHz for the i5, so the 20% faster i3 offsets some of the lack of cores, it about makes up for 1 of the "missing" cores.
PS uses 4 cores but again with what you'll be doing I doubt you'd see any noticeable difference.
On the truck out for delivery.. Of course, I'm on a location shoot all day today. Maybe i can at least swing by the studio later today and take a peek...lol. This is all standard, customary/mandatory Mac excitement.
27" Refurb iMac 2.8 GHz Quad-Core i5 4 GB RAM 1 TB HD 1 GB ATI 5750
Refurb Apple TV
Refurb Airport Extreme
I still have the old Airport Extreme so I really needed to upgrade to the faster wireless N version and now that I have a plasma TV I wanted the ATV to really take advantage of it, really wanna do the Netflix thing. I should be set for a while. I still plan on getting an iPad and maybe upgrading my iPhone but I've spent enough for a while.
Can't wait to play some of my Steam games with 1 GB video RAM!!
OK. Till now the most screen real estate I have had for my own has been a couple od 20" Apple LCDs. There were a few times I had more at work... in the art dept. for a week or so at a time... but they weren't mine. Having said that..
Damn.. this thing is big.. and beautiful!! Amazing screen..
I set it up in the studio... but now have to return to work. Grrr....
. 
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