imac i7, 16 GB ram vs G5 2 core, 4 GB ram

[Walter Soyka]

The iMac will be dramatically faster.

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

[Kevin Camp]

hi hope, i agree with walter.

you should also budget for any 3rd part plugins that you have (and want to continue to use in cs5). cs5 is 64-bit, and will need 64-bit versions of those plugins.

you don’t want to spend 2k on a new system only to find out that you have to spend another $500 in effects to be able to do the same things you did on your old system…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

to give you an idea of the performance increase, here is an old benchmark of cs3 that has a quad-core g5 (2.5ghz, 8gb) — note the first graph for ‘total benchmark’:

https://www.barefeats.com/octopro4.html

and here is a more recent benchmark for cs5 on an imac (core i7, 2.9ghz, 4gb) — note the last graph for totalbencmark:

https://www.barefeats.com/imac10v.html

if you had a quad-core 2.5ghz g5 with multiprocessing enable you’d see nearly 3x better performance on the imac core i7; over 4.5x faster if multiprocessing was not enabled. and that test g5 is faster than your g5, so i’d expect to see better perfomance gains.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Hope Holmesby]

Dear Kevin,

I am really touched.

You are so sweet to take your precious time and give all this very detailed, crystal clear info. I really so very much appreciate.

So, yes, it looks like it may be even close to 4x faster than my current machine.

Thanks again for your unbounded thinking and exacting remarks.

Amazing….

Warmly,
Hope

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 150 GB; Mac OS X (10.4.11) 4GB RAM; 2 La Cie external HDs 1TB each; STP v2.0.2; FCP 6; AE 8(CS3)

[Hope Holmesby]

Dear Walter,

Thanks for taking the time to write this. Really appreciate you taking the time to do and read and reply…

This is encouraging.

Warmly,
Hope

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 150 GB; Mac OS X (10.4.11) 4GB RAM; 2 La Cie external HDs 1TB each; STP v2.0.2; FCP 6; AE 8(CS3)

[Hope Holmesby]

Also, if u can bear it, do you think you could do an animation in Standard Definition video like this on an imac 17 w 16 gb or would u need a 12 core:

https://www.apple.com/the-beatles/

click on the first lower icon/link ‘beatles thru the years’

What do you think?

Thanks again.
Warmly,
Hope

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 150 GB; Mac OS X (10.4.11) 4GB RAM; 2 La Cie external HDs 1TB each; STP v2.0.2; FCP 6; AE 8(CS3)

[Kevin Camp]

i think an imac would be capable, though you should note that something like the 3d logo would probably need to be done in a 3d app like cinema 4d, studio max or maya… with some effort you could try something like zaxwerks pro animator, or if you are really daring, you could try extruding text in photoshop extended cs5, then animating that in ae… possibly freeform (an effect bundled with cs5) might work.

also, that piece was probably assembled in an editing system, with only portions being composited in after effects and edited in.

i don’t think the imac is going to limit creative possibilities, if that what you are asking.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Walter Soyka]

[Hope Holmesby] “Also, if u can bear it, do you think you could do an animation in Standard Definition video like this on an imac 17 w 16 gb or would u need a 12 core:”

In terms of the processor, a quad-core iMac can do anything that a 12-core Mac Pro can do — it’ll just be slower.

What you can’t do with an iMac is expand it like you can with a Mac Pro: you can’t add as much RAM, you can’t add a high-speed RAID card, you can’t add a video IO card, etc.

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

[Hope Holmesby]

Thanks so much Dan and all of you. It is really so very kind of you all to view that movie and give all this info.

What a great group of fellows you are. Really really appreciate your kind concern and expertise. What a marvelous recourse you all are.

Appreicate so much all this input.

Am gathering info for my presentation to the dept.
Lots and lots and lots of thanks…
Very Warmly,
Hope

Now I have to think which 3D program to get. We did have a very old version of Zaxwerks…

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 150 GB; Mac OS X (10.4.11) 4GB RAM; 2 La Cie external HDs 1TB each; STP v2.0.2; FCP 6; AE 8(CS3)

[Hope Holmesby]

Dear Forum Experts,

Thanks so much for kindly reading this.

See below study showing the speed of a Mac Pro 12 core (see the bar and the legend at bottom highlighted). This is the speed to run a project in After Effects. Would it be safe to extrapolate/imply from this that a different configuration for the 12 core, namely:

12 core Mac Pro 2.6, 4 internal hard drives, striped together (Raid 0), 24GB of ram

would be, instead of the 1.9 times faster than the imac hightlighte, that maybe it would be 4x faster than the one shown on the chart, the: iMac i7 2.9 16GN ram?
or 2x faster…or…

What do you think? Is there anyway to guess how much faster the later configuration might be?

Warmly,
Hope

bench-mark-for-ae.jpg

__________________________________________________

Life is here to enjoy.

Dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 150 GB; Mac OS X (10.4.11) 4GB RAM; 2 La Cie external HDs 1TB each; STP v2.0.2; FCP 6; AE 8(CS3)