Of course, for our purposes, we're much more interested in how the iMac Pro performed in Photoshop. When it came to rendering 4K video, the results were eye-opening:īut in other situations, like Ram Preview in After Effects, it actually fell quite short given the sheer amount of power it has to draw from: In some categories the iMac Pro really did destroy the competition.

That's what Colin was thinking too, and he tested each machine using Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.Įach machine was put through its paces on some very CPU and RAM-intensive tasks in these (already RAM and CPU-intensive) video and photo editing programs, timing each system to see how they ranked. So you would hope, at least, that nothing would come close to touching its performance either. Cost: $1,600Īs you can see, the Apple options are all much more expensive than the PC, but nothing comes close to touching the $6,400 iMac Pro.

An Alienware Aurora R6 PC, which is running a 4.2GHz 4-core i7 processor, 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 1070 video card with 8GB of its own DDR5 RAM.

The latest 15-inch MacBook Pro, with a 3.1GHz 4-core i7 processor, 16GB of 2133MHz DDR3 RAM, and a Radeon Pro 560 video card with 4GB of RAM.

A 'trashcan' Mac Pro circa December 2014, with a 3.7GHz 4-core Xeon E5 processor, 64GB of 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, and dual AMD Profire D300 video cards with 2GB of RAM each.

Going up against the iMac Pro were three contenders at various price points: If you configure it yourself on the Apple website, you'll find this setup weighs in at $6,400. His unit sports: a 3.2GHz 8-core Xeon W processor, 64GB of 2666 MHz DDR4 ECC Memory, and an AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16GB of its own HBM2 RAM. The iMac Pro Smith was testing is a slightly upgraded version of the base model. In Colin's case, he pit a slightly upgraded version of the iMac Pro against an Alienware gaming PC, a MacBook Pro, and the current Mac Pro. Photographer and Photoshop expert Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE recently embarked on a test many photo and video editors have been asking for: comparing the new iMac Pro against some of its main competition.

Mac vs pc photo editing