Am I wasting my money on old iMac?

[Gary Huff]

[Bret Williams] “The i7 isn’t just a newer faster processor, it also supports hyper threading, doubling the number of virtual cores. And, apparently, that’s a good thing.”

Absolutely. If you’re doing video editing, you shouldn’t consider any other class of processor under an i7.

[Bret Williams]

And if you go 27″ you can change the RAM yourself. Buying 32gigs for $200.

[Steve Buke]

Thanks for the replies guys. Here’s my dilemma, not sure now if I can run FCPX properly with the GPU I listed in those 2 machines that I was looking at, they only have 512 of dedicated RAM. If not that only leaves me with buying a new 21.5″ iMac i7 with my budget.

[Dave Gage]

[Bret Williams] “And if you go 27″ you can change the RAM yourself. Buying 32gigs for $200.”

Steve,

Sorry for the late reply, but yes, what Gary and Bret said. As always, buy as much computer as you can afford. It will last you that much longer. As I said, I’ve got 2 x 2011 i7 MBPs, and if something major doesn’t go wrong with the hardware, I can use them another couple of years.

As Bret said, with the slightly older Macs, you can go in and upgrade the RAM and HDs yourself which is a bonus. My next upgrade will be replacing my spinning drives with SSDs.

Good luck,
Dave

[Gary Huff]

Definitely avoid anything less than 1GB of GPU memory.

[Steve Buke]

Thanks. Just picked up a 2011 iMac 27″ 16gb (I can upgrade myself) with HD 6970 1gb card have some footage that needs to be edited and this was my quickest and least expensive way to get rolling. Thanks for all the posts, great forum.