Imac or PC for CS6

[Ed Stahr]

At an NAB breakout session a presenter went through this in some depth. OpenCL support in CS6 for the Macs will give a significant speed boost over CS5.5, but the way that the Windows OS interacts with the video card will give it the edge on performance.

This isn’t too surprising. There is a reason that games has always performed better on Windows. DirectX and API’s for getting access to the hardware.

Of course, there is more to consider than pure speed. Stability, virus and malware control, software and apps you have already invested in, etc.

[Ramin Mohammadalikhani]

I am not as professional as you guys so I am not stressed to have quick support if something goes wrong with my system. I am also switching from Mac Pro to a PC workstation (from FCP to APP). I build and maintain my own system. For

$1800 for 2 x Xeon X5670: six cores 2.93ghz each (bought used)
$350 EVGA SR-2 (bought used)
$150 EVGA GTX 480 (bought used)
$250 for 48GB RAM (bought new)
$250 PSU (bought new)
$200 raid Card (used)
$300 2 x SSD hard drives in raid zero for system drive (new)
I am using my old HDD’s from the Mac Pro for data drive

Case: well a very decent case could be had for $220 but I opted for an expensive case.

I am currently using Windows 7 but may switch to Windows 8 once it is released.

Next, the Xeon’s can be overclocked on SR-2 to probably beyond 4GHz, if speed is important to you. OC is something you can’t get on Mac. The system is currently being cooled by air but, I am contemplating on utilizing a liquid cooling system. However, I understand it adds another $700 or so to the costs.

The whole system should cost $5000-$6000 (if all parts were bought new) and is probably as good as or even better than a $10000-$14000 system one might buy from big names.

So if you don’t need big name’s after sale support and you are on budget, you can simply buy the parts yourself and build it yourself or, ask a local computer shop to assemble it for you.

Now my question is having Quadro useful? For Adobe Premium Production suite, the only advantage I see it might have is support for 10bit color assuming you have a 10bit monitor to take advantage of it. Since I don’t currently have such an expensive monitor, I am better served with a Geforce card than a quadro. A cheap GTX 480 has twice more cuda cores than Quadro 4000. So are there other advantages to a Quadro card that I am missing?

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks, Ramin