Which showed both the quad-core iMacs outperforming Mac Pros in some benchmarks. Just prior to getting the 27' iMac i5 (the i7 was having problems with shipping etc and I was in a hurry) I looked at this one. It works great on all fronts.Īs Sheldon points out there are many benchmarks one can look to. My primary editing machine is the PC though, which I use for 1Ds III files, bulk editing in lightroom (just edited 30GB of images from my last shoot) as well as editing huge 1.5GB layered TIF's in Photoshop CS4.

I like both Mac and PC and own both (currently typing on the Mac right now). If you prefer the Mac OS either a Mac Pro or i7 iMac is a great option and very capable. If you are willing and able to build/overclock your own PC then you will get a LOT more processing power for your money and can get a faster overall machine. The difference was about 40% using the Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test, 17 seconds vs 29 seconds. It's also a faster Photoshop machine than the i7 iMac (my friend has a new one and we benchmarked the two against each other). My $1100 home build quad core PC is almost twice as fast at importing/rendering previews than the current fully equipped top of the line Mac Pro.

This can be a really big deal when you need to import a lot of photos and render 1:1 previews. If you are doing a lot of work in Lightroom, one thing to consider is that the 64bit version of Lightroom on the PC is better optimized for utilizing multiple processing cores than the Mac version. The i7 iMac is also good, a better value than the Pro in some ways though it lacks the capability to have a second internal Sata drive for a fast scratch disk (important for photoshop). If you like Mac and can afford a well equipped Mac Pro, it's an excellent choice. The Mac Pro isn't 'slow' on single core operations, just has a lot of underutilized processing power.

Overclock mac pro 2.93 processor