Time to say goodbye to my 2009 Mac Pro. You served me well
Early this year I decided to get a new or should I say refurbished 2017 iMac. I love it! I did hold out to get the one I wanted refurbished to save even more. In the end, it cost me $2,289.00 for the 27″ with AMD Radeon Pro 580 Graphics Card (8GB), 64GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Not bad at all.
I held out for longer than I should have because my Mac Pro was old but not dead. The 2009 model was a special one. It was capable of a CPU upgrade and wow did this make a huge difference. To really understand the performance improvements of the two 3.46 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon check out my build process here. I also had installed a Nvidia Quadro 4000 and upgrade that one with the NVIDIA GTX TITAN X 12 GB for more CUDA cores. That was expensive. Yes, I sold that as well. Ah, the beauty of a box that’s upgradable.
I bought the 2009 Mac Pro new back in 2009. That makes it approximately nine years of service. Not bad for an editing workstation that did see some 4K work too. The main reason for getting the iMac was for faster drives with Thunderbolt. I have an external SSD raid that smokes and makes editing a much better experience plus the 27″ screen is gorgeous.
While I’m a little sad to see it go it kind of blows me away that a nine-year-old computer sold for $900 on eBay today. People still want the upgradable Mac Pro’s. Now let’s see what Apple comes out with next? Hopefully a truly upgradable Mac Pro but I’m not sure it’s going to be affordable? I still have 8 years left on my iMac!
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Hey Erik!
How much faster is the iMac than the the Mac Pro?
Other than TB drives, what’s the improvement on export time, timeline scrubbing, more video layers, etc?
But I guess you can’t separate the computer’s improvement vs the SSD RAID, right? Did you edit any on the iMac any before you got the RAID?
And you’re on FCPX now, not Premiere, right?
How and when did that happen?
It’s all around faster since it’s a modern computer. I used an internal 2 SSD drive Sonnet card and was getting W-825MB/s R-957MB/s in a RAID0.
With the external TB2 RAID0 that has 4 SSD drives, I’m getting W-720 R-1175. Plus the 27″ display is gorgeous.
For reviews and such or basically anything I edit at home I’m in FCPX. It was an adjustment but I really have taken to it and like the way it works with graphics and titles a lot.