Opinion about fcpx and motion on imac i5 with 2gb GPU

[Noah Kadner]

Yep solid FCPX machine there.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops

[Darren Roark]

That’s a great machine for FCP X and Motion. The screen will spoil you against wanting to look at anything else.

Depending on what you will be editing the only possible bottleneck I can see is the G-RAID drive if it’s a 2X drive model.

If you ever work with Red footage, keep the 2009 machine, it’s still a great workhorse for heavy transcoding jobs. Gotta love Apple for making machines that are still useful eight years later.

[Camilo Ramos]

Thank you guys.

My biggest concern is that the AMD Radeon R9 M395 graphics card might not be good enough. I do mainly tv commercials and a lot of longforms with tons of compositing and effects. Nothing mayor but many seconds and minutes per video.

In a few weeks i will upgrade my hard drives if they give me any trouble

With that in mind plus the issue of 4k becoming the new standard, you think this mac is a decent work horse?

Again, thank you for the advice

[Darren Roark]

I think 4K is a long time away from being standard.

The M395 is pretty impressive having used it next to my dual D700 Mac Pro. What GPU is in your 2009 Mac Pro?

If it’s a really good deal then it should hold that value for at least the near future so you could get your investment back and trade up to a beefier machine.

[Camilo Ramos]

Thanks a bunch for your opinion! I’m getting my brand new imac first thing tomorrow morning.

[Camilo Ramos]

Sorry, i forgot to,answer your question.

I have a SapphireHD 7950 3Gb Mac Edition installed, plus a 1tb ssd drive with 32 gb of ram on my Mac Pro 8-Core (Early 2009) 2.7 GHz.

[Darren Roark]

I’m doing a 180 with the new info but you may want to try it out first if possible.

The 7950 is a very very good card that rivals the new Mac Pro GPUs though you only have one.

Is it used? If so you could take a drive and test it out first with sample timelines to see if it feels faster. Specs aren’t everything when it comes to the newer iMac models.

[Camilo Ramos]

Yikes!!! It’s a brand new computer still on the box so i can’t try it. a friend is selling it to me for 1,900. I can go to a store but since they don’t have fcpx or motion installed i won’t be able to perform any valuable test.

Know I’m back where i started jejejejeje. Do you think i should hold my self and wait for a better machine?

Thanks again!

[Darren Roark]

You may want to wait. The display is amazing, you’d have Thunderbolt as well, but if you do GPU intensive work, the machine you have is still very impressive.

If you don’t have a USB 3.0 card yet that’s something that will modernize it. A natively supported card is available for $30.

There are ways to add a second 7950 which would make that a beast of a computer. Even further, you can swap the CPUs and make that machine rival the new mac pros for very little money.

[Camilo Ramos]

You’re right on the spot Darren. This morning after reading your post i contacted a friend of mine who’s a mac expert and he almost quoted you word by word! He has already requested a quote from owc for the cpu upgrades. Do you have any recommendations as well as on how to install the second graphics card? I think i would need an expansion chasis since i already have a decklink card, a esata card plus the 7950.

BTW, thanks again! You saved me from doing a bad investment!