iMac Pro, worth it?

im new to the forums, so sorry if this is in the wrong place.

well, i really want to get into computer animation, and in an apple store they said the best thing to get is an iMac Pro.
so i had a look at it and to me it seems pretty decent, except the price tag. £2500 (customized to the specs that i want, and i only added 2 more things). I'm not rich, and it does seem a lot to spend on a pc.
i was thinking about building a high spec PC (running windows) which came up to £1000.

i haven't got any experience in animation, but i really want to get into that field, but i do a lot of video/photo editing.

The only thing is, everyone keeps saying, macs are great for animation.
Are they really that good for animation? or worth the money in general?

i already own a mac, powerpc G4, i know, ancient. but i dont really do much on here, since its really slow.

so now I'm not sure which one to buy, pc or imac pro.

well, if anyone can help or advise me, that would be great. Thanks!

For starters, it's not an iMac Pro, just a regular Mac Pro.

I personally don't know what software would be used for animation, but whatever it is, it's probably better than the Windows equivalent, which is why people say that Macs are better.

Animation:

If you haven't gotten into the field, I don't think you will notice that much of a different between Macs or PCs in this regard besides stability. What kind of animation are you going to do?

Photo/Video:

What do you use to video/photo edit? Macs are pretty notorious for being great environment for that as well, so you may benefit from that as well.

well, 2D/3D animation.. only animation, i know of but yea
i normally use adobe photoshop cs3 and adobe after effects and premiere

Be careful about how to spec a machine through Apple. I would order the base Mac Pro and upgrade the HDD and RAM myself, probably saving yourself a small fortune. You said you could build a PC for half the price, so you should know what you're doing.

yeah, i mean the only things i upgraded are these:

320GB HDD to a 500GB HDD
1GB RAM to a 4GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT to a Nvidia 8800 GT

the only thing i can think of to cut the price is to put the HDD back..

Blindinlight said:

yeah, i mean the only things i upgraded are these:

320GB HDD to a 500GB HDD
1GB RAM to a 4GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT to a Nvidia 8800 GT

the only thing i can think of to cut the price is to put the HDD back..

Click to expand...

Get the standard Kit, but upgrade to the 8800 GT as you need a special version anyway - this should cost about £1800, get the RAM from Crucial around £180, less than £2,000 in total.

Now I am not sure if you can buy a twin Core Xeon 2.8ghz based PC (even build it yourself) for less than £1,000, as two of these CPUs at retail would cost more than £1,000 alone. But you probably could do it for less than £2,000

Awesome! I've been looking for RAM for the Mac Pro but couldn't find any hehe

The standard Mac pro comes with two 2.8Ghz quad-core Xeons, but you can choose a single quad-core which subtracts £320, or choose a 3.0 Ghz quad core or a 3.2Ghz quad core..which adds to the price much more, but im happy with a standard 2.8Ghz quad core, I'm not gonna really need more then that

oh, I've selected Final Cut express HD aswell which adds £130, but yeah i like editing videos

Overclockers sell the Intel Xeon E5440 LGA771 Harpertown processor at £479 (inc VAT) for the 2.83GHz version, but the challenge would be to find a dual processor m/board that matches what the Mac Pro offers. If you only ever want to go with a single processor, then you'd have more options going the 'self-build PC' route.

As for Mac Pro RAM, cheapest I found was a company in the States that is selling 2 x 1Gb 800MHz DDR2 Fully Buffered for the 2nd Gen Mac Pro for just $135 - which is about £77 compared to the eye-watering £320 that Apple charge for it! Even if you get stuck for the duty it's less than £100 for 2Gb which is a huge saving.

As for hard drives you can also get the Western Digital 500Gb SATA-II drive, that is the exact same part that Apple use (p/n WD5000AAKS), for just £59 plus postage from Overclockers and fitting it takes less than 5 minutes on the 2G Mac Pro. That compares with £160 for the same item direct from Apple.

thanks for that aswell, ill probably keep the Cores the same, and buy the ram at crucial.com, and buy a seperate HDD, most probably the Western Digital 500Gb SATA-II drive.. that seems pretty much sorted, now i gotta save up for it >.<

theres a new Graphics card out, 1GB BFG Tech 9800 GX2, anyone know if i can put this on a Mac pro? or is there specific graphics cards out there made for macs?

sorry for all the compatibility questions, just wanna know what i can/can't put on a mac if i upgrade it ^^