Requsite computing power

[Pesto]

I am currently using an iMac 27" with the 2.8 GHz i7 processor, 12 GB of ram, and 750 GB hard drive and finding it adequate for my needs while using my Nikon D3s. I am now about to take delivery of a new kit that will be based upon a PhaseOne P40+ back and wonder how much longer my poor old iMac will seem "adequate". The test images that I shot with the P1 back seemed, not surprisingly, to slow things down quite a bit. I would like to stay with the iMac format for space and convenience reasons but wonder if I were to upgrade to the current "latest and greatest" iteration ( 3.4 GHz quad core/ 16 GB ram/ 2TB HD)  if I would see worthwhile improvement running Capture One or PS5 or will I need to upgrade to a Mac Pro to derive meaningful benefit? What are people with similar systems using?

[Ellis Vener]

Do you store your photos on a drive separate from your main HD that has your OS and applications on it?

[DeeJay]

The problem is you are at the ceiling for Ram in the iMac. C1 is very resource intensive. It hogs your RAM and CPU.

It will be useable and I'm sure you will manage for a while you will need to close all other apps down. But you might want to factor an upgrade into the equation at some point. If you need to wait longer invest in a dedicated scratch drive because when you run out of RAM photoshop will call on the scratch drive to use as RAM. There are eSata conversions available from macsales.com I believe. FW800 is OKish. You might consider a RAID stripe for this.

Also if you need to make do with the old computer i recommend a very useful little app called Free Memory. It frees up Idle RAM that sits there doing nothing after being used by some other process.

Personally I would avoid the iMac. It's a dead end system and you're going to find yourself in the same position a couple years down the track. Also, the iMac monitor really isn't something you can rely on. You need a quality external monitor you can accurately calibrate. I think you can use your existing iMac as a monitor for the Mac Pro if that helps budget wise in the meantime. I bought a Mac Pro for the same task. 3.3 6 core with 24GB of RAM. Even with that I'm considering swapping it out to 16GB sticks for 48GB of RAM for retouching the files but that is working with P65+. I used to shoot with a P45 and the systems was totally fine.

I couldn't stress enough. Get the Mac Pro. You can upgrade it, add super fast SSD's and SSD scratch drives, Have a dedicated Boot drive for your OS and Apps and add RAM as you need to. iMac is limited for heavy use.

[Pesto]

Ellis and DeeJay,
Thank you for your thoughts. I had suspected that moving up to a Mac Pro would  be the suggested solution. Storing my images on a separate drive sounds like an idea that I should have thought of a long time ago.
Thanks again.

Douglas Benson.

[Ken Bennett]

The new iMac can have two drives installed, a 2TB hard drive and a solid state drive. I've not seen any hard numbers on this, but I expect that using the SSD as a boot and application drive, and the 2TB drive for photos, would speed things up considerably. Experiment with both drives for scratch.

I did do a test last year with my iMac, using an external FW800 drive for scratch vs the internal drive, and the internal drive won by a mile. FW800 just is not fast enough.

[chrismurphy]

I tend to agree that you're going to want more than 16GB of RAM sooner than later, and that this is the limiting factor. Thunderbolt provides a potential means for getting data to mush faster external storage, but we're still kinda limited on products/solutions.