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Interesting Blog post From Walter Biscardi
Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television -
25 Replies
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Very interesting. I’m also in the process of trying to decide whether to go iMac or Mac Mini. The Mini is almost fine for what I want to use it for, except for the AMD Radeon generation lagging a bit behind everyone else (and no 1GB VRAM option).
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It’s funny because I had just laid out the costs for new gear a day before his blog came out. I was completely on the same page with him. (I feel like the entire post community is on the same page right now!) It seems like the best deal with Apple (right now) is the iMac. I just don’t want to be forced to use their display when I have lots of beautiful cinema displays throughout my facility.
So, I’m starting to look into building a Hackintosh for at least one of my systems to see how it goes. Upside: Fast, Cheap, if I can’t get Mac to be stable, I’ll have a smoking Windows system that I can put CS6 and Avid on. Downside: probably lots, but I’m willing to try it out since I love to tinker. 😉
Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company -
Walter is pragmatic as ever, but I think he’s leaving out a wide swath of PCs that might change his analysis: light iron towers. He could get PC towers with comparable guts to an iMac that also have slots for his existing cards, all the flexibility of a tower (interns of GPUs and serviceability), but aren’t a big iron dual CPU $10K workstation. He says if he is going to buy big iron, he is going to go really big, but what about small iron? Wouldn’t that compare more evenly with the internal specs of the iMacs?
Now, if this is about finding any way practical to keep using OS X wherever he can, I can certainly sympathize. I think the only reason Apple is able to pass the top-end iMac off as an entry-level workstation is the lack of a headless Mac between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. If there was such a thing, it would be very popular among the pro video folks.
But if you are not biased in favor of OS X, why not line the iMac up next to something like a Dell Optiplex 990 or an HP Z210?
I’m a big time OS X partisan, and I would be one of those guys that would accept the limitations of an iMac just to keep using OS X in lieu of Windows on a comparably equipped mid-range tower. But Walter is framing his decision around strictly cost/benefit, and he’s leaving out a very significant class of options. Tough to kick the Apple habit.
Best,
Andy -
True, also his calculation is based on speching out the machines directly at at the source. I’d never buy ram, hard drives etc. at Apple, HP etc. They all charge a premium for these thing. It’s much cheaper to get all you add-ons, ram etc. separate.
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[Frank Gothmann] “It’s much cheaper to get all you add-ons, ram etc. separate.”
Yeah, I agree. Once you start looking at third party RAM, the iMac can suddenly hold 32 GB, and the GPUs that are available for BTO from the PC vendors might not be the GPU you want.
But I chalk that up to keeping his cost comparisons consistent for the sake of argument. Benefit of the doubt for the sake of a cleaner blog post.
Best,
Andy -
Frank, glad you pointed that out, I noticed that, too. So I went and did a price comparison. His system was about 300 more than going through OWC for RAM.
Andrew – totally agree with you about not turning your back from the PC market. There is an amazing amount of opportunity there and the prices are in line with what I think most people are willing to spend on a new system that will last a couple of years.
One downside I see to going PC is that the resale value isn’t as good as Apple products. It might be more difficult to sell a 2-3 year PC on Craigslist rather than an iMac. But, you could also repurpose a PC tower with a new Mobo and processor. So, I guess it’s 6 of 1…
I think a mid-range PC is an excellent value right now. Before I invest in a new system, I’m going to wait for NAB and Ivy Bridge at the end of the month. Hopefully Thunderbolt can make it’s way to PCs in the near future.
Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company -
[Andrew Richards] “Walter is pragmatic as ever, but I think he’s leaving out a wide swath of PCs that might change his analysis: light iron towers. He could get PC towers with comparable guts to an iMac that also have slots for his existing cards, all the flexibility of a tower (interns of GPUs and serviceability), but aren’t a big iron dual CPU $10K workstation. He says if he is going to buy big iron, he is going to go really big, but what about small iron? Wouldn’t that compare more evenly with the internal specs of the iMacs?”
This is especially true when considering apps like Premiere Pro which can use GPU processing. You can get great performance/price on select editorial tasks with light iron systems and a rockin’ GPU.
I do love a good sizzle core beast, but a couple hundred extra dollars on a GPU can make a much bigger difference for some work than a couple thousand on the CPU.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
This a rough estimate for comparison to Walter’s numbers. You can build a mid-range PC with a core i7 4-core with an Nvidia 5xx card for between 1300-2000 depending on drives, RAM, etc… I think that system would probably out-perform a fully-loaded iMac that you can buy today. Who knows what’s around the corner, other than Ivy Bridge, though.
Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company -
[Walter Soyka] “I do love a good sizzle core beast, but a couple hundred extra dollars on a GPU can make a much bigger difference for some work than a couple thousand on the CPU.”
The line that seems to give away his bias is this one:
[Walter Biscardi] “We honestly don’t miss the CUDA “extra realtime features” because we’ve never had them.”
So since FCP7 never had any GPU accelerated goodness, they don’t care if they don’t get it in PPro? That smells like rationalization to me.
Best,
Andy -
[Michael Garber] “This a rough estimate for comparison to Walter’s numbers. You can build a mid-range PC with a core i7 4-core with an Nvidia 5xx card for between 1300-2000 depending on drives, RAM, etc… I think that system would probably out-perform a fully-loaded iMac that you can buy today.”
I have just done exactly that Michael for much less as I still reuse my old rack mount cases and power supplies. I find the concept of trying to resell any computer after four years amusing. My old machines see duty as Linux boxes for my ftp & web server.
By the time my hardware cycle is over the guts are binned and the cases reused.
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