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iMac Pro vs 5K iMac: Worth the Price?

2018-02-01
hey I'm Matt the video director here at TechnoBuffalo and I'm mark on the creative director and we make videos here at TechnoBuffalo for the past few weeks we've been testing the 27-inch 5k iMac fully loaded and I've been testing out the eight core I'm act Pro so just like our previous flagship videos we're going to split this verses video into three different categories we're gonna check out the IMAX design the performance and the value and at the end of the video we'll declare a winner and see whether the 5k iMac or the iMac Pro is a better computer for a concentrator so we just picked up the base model iMac Pro a few weeks ago since we made the switch to Final Cut Pro 10 as our main editing software however we're still using After Effects to create our graphics because that's just what we're used to before we move into any benchmarks and test though let's just talk design now we haven't really seen a major design overhaul on any of the iMac since late 2012 when they remove the optical drives and introduced a 21 and 27 inch iMac s' so here we are in 2018 the iMac and pro variant look exactly the same other than a space great color and accessories it comes with out of the box it also comes with bigger vent in the back and you'll also get two extra USB C Thunderbolt 3 ports a faster 10 Gigabit Ethernet port and a 1080p FaceTime camera so up front the display on both imax are completely identical with the same 5120 by 2880 resolution the same 500 nits of brightness as well as the same p3 color gamut for that super accurate punchy colors now I personally love the screen on the new IMAX it's really vibrant it's really bright and it's just perfect for coloring in post one thing to note though before moving onto benchmarks speakers are so much louder on the iMac Pro it's not the best speakers out there but there's more base its more full than the regular iMac and it sounds great out of the box so let's move on to performance our 5k iMac is the top-of-the-line 27-inch model it has a four point two gigahertz Intel Core i7 processor 40 gigabytes of RAM which we upgraded ourselves something you can't really easily do with the iMac Pro it has the Radeon Pro 580 graphics with a gigabytes of vram and 500 gigabytes of SSD storage the iMac pro is the base model with the 3.2 gigahertz intel xeon w processor with 8 cores as 32 gigabytes of RAM built in a one terabyte SSD and it's got the Radeon provegan 56 with a gigabytes of vram taking a look at Geekbench we first see that the iMac pro finished quicker at 1 min in 10 seconds with a single core score of 4372 and a multi-core score of 30 3719 the 5k iMac finished just a couple minutes later with a single core score of five thousand 675 and a multi-core score of 19,000 806 so quite a bit lower moving on to Blackmagic speed test you can see the iMac pro blows the 5k iMac out of the water with its three gigabyte write speed and two gigabytes reads beat the 5k iMac on the other hand is just slightly behind the pro with a 1.8 gigabyte write speed and two gigabyte read speed now in Cinebench the 5k iMac and an OpenGL score of 120 frames per second and a CPU score of 900 the iMac pro got an OpenGL score of 118 frames per second but a CPU score of 1641 now moving on to some more realistic tests we moved to Final Cut Pro 10 we downloaded a six second 8k clip from red and tried to add color correction and effects to see how these two handled a cave video and it turns out the iMac pro can playback 8k videos just fine where the 5k iMac has some trouble playing back the files even after its rendered so we then duplicated this ake a file with its effects and colors into a 1-minute file and then exported it die macro exported it in 11 minutes and 42 seconds while the 5k iMac took a decent amount longer at 20 minutes and 45 seconds after our test finish we tried playing back the exported 8k clip in QuickTime and both IMAX were unable to playback video in real time which surprised us moving on to After Effects we exported a 50 second clip that we made from scratch with multiple elements and in 4k the iMac Pro finished exporting in 13 minutes and 50 seconds while the 5k iMac exported the same project in 15 minutes and 11 seconds another thing to note with these tests is besides the time difference there's also a noise difference with the fans in the time we've been using the iMac Pro not once have we heard the fans kick on or if they are on we can't hear them whereas with the 5k iMac it sounds like a plane's about to take off so clearly the iMac pro is the more beefier system but it's also more expensive but how much more is it the 5k iMac we bought with the extra 32 gigabyte kit we installed ourselves costs roughly around 3050 dollars and our base model iMac Pro costs five thousand dollars so we're looking at almost $2,000 price difference between the two systems obviously the 5k iMac is the better bang for the buck but if you're looking for a computer that will grow with you for the next three four or five years the iMac Pro starts to look appealing sure for most of the tests we did the difference may not seem worth the price difference but for the tests that are a bit more forward-thinking like editing a que large After Effects files the iMac Pro handles these way better so if you're looking for a computer that will be able to grow with you for the next few years the iMac pro is the way to go especially if you run a business or rely on a computer to make a living it's a larger investment up front that can help you earn more in the long run as creative professionals if you're in the market for a new computer to edit or create videos for YouTube or whatever else you want to create the base model 8 core iMac Pro is definitely worth the extra two thousand dollars and it's the clear winner here that extra boost in performance will save you some time rendering exporting and if you need even more power you can upgrade to a ten core or even an 18 core computer for way more power than what we have here while on the 5k iMac this is the best that you can get I'm pretty much every front you can't go wrong with the iMac Pro anyways thank you guys so much for watching this video let us know in the comments down below which one you would choose and if you enjoy this video make sure to hit that subscribe button and make sure to hit that notification Bell to be updated when we upload new videos i'm Marklin Sangin from TechnoBuffalo and i'm Meccans also TechnoBuffalo and we'll see you guys in the next one
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