[Tyson Frantz]

WOW. Just… W-O-W. My jaw is on the floor. I couldn’t even begin to wrap my head around this, and you’ve managed build exactly what I was looking to accomplish in a single, elegant Expression. I can’t even begin to thank you enough, Filip!

[Tyson Frantz]

Thanks for your quick reply Dave, and yes, what you said is exactly what I meant. I take it from your response that you’d advise to NOT buy that iMac?

Bottom line is, I know that I’ll be seeing vast performance improvements over my current dinosaur of a machine, but I’m just wondering if I’ll be experiencing buyer’s remorse 6 months after buying an i7 iMac.

Having 64-bit capability would be great, especially being able to render longer RAM previews on higher resolution projects.

The type of work I do, however, is typically short-length (10-30 second) HD resolution graphics… so what’s really important to me is faster renders, not so much longer RAM previews. I realize those go hand-in-hand, but will I ever add more than 16GB of RAM (which is the iMac’s memory max) to my machine, even if I did buy a Mac Pro? Probably not.

Since Apple is supposedly launching a new line of Mac Pros in June (hopefully?), maybe my best bet is to wait until it’s announced, and make my decision then.

Maybe I’m just dreading the thought of dropping upwards of $5k on a new Mac Pro and CS5 upgrade!

[Tyson Frantz]

I’m planning to upgrade very soon as well… I’m currently using a PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad with dual 23″ cinema displays.

Since I plan to upgrade to Adobe’s CS5 at the same time, I was considering the Quad i7 iMac simply because of the price vs. power ratio that the new iMacs are providing. I’m a motion graphics designer, but don’t do much video editing. Therefore, I just simply don’t need the industrial expandability of the Mac Pros.

However, I fully understand I’d be taking a hit on performance considering Apple’s plans to update the Mac Pro line very soon with the reported hexacore chips. At times, I perform some fairly intense rendering with AE and Cinema 4D.

I’m wondering how much of a disadvantage I would be putting myself in by purchasing an i7 iMac, since AE CS5 is now supporting 64-bit architecture?

I could be saving myself a good $2,000 by purchasing the Quad i7 iMac over a new Mac Pro, so price becomes a major factor.

Does anyone have any advice?