5K Retina iMac vs Mac Pro, Which One?

Last week Apple introduced the amazing 27” iMac with 5K Retina Display. Immediately, we couldn’t help but think what does this mean for the relatively new Mac Pro and if you were in the market for one of these machines which one would you choose? Here we try and look at the various aspects and see which machine is suited to which user.

On our lease the new Retina iMac starts at just £17.99 + Vat per week whilst the Quad Core Mac Pro starts at £22.70 + VAT per week. The strength of the iMac has always been that when compared to the Mac Pro it has its screen already built in. With such a significant price difference the iMac starts with a real advantage over its big brother.

When looking at performance between the two machines the first’s tests have centred on the iMac’s 4.0GHz i7 Haswell processor and the six core Mac Pro that is based on Ivy Bridge technology. In these tests the iMac is 25% faster that the 6 core Mac Pro in single threaded tasks and only 15% slower in multi threaded tasks. That really does make the iMac look impressive.

Performance figures haven’t been produced for the iMacs new Graphics card but the workstation GPU’s in the Mac Pro will undoubtedly give it the edge in OpenCL and professional 3D applications. The Mac Pro is also more expandable than the iMac and can support up to 64GB RAM compared to 32GB.

Perhaps the iMacs biggest selling point however is its amazing 5K display. That equates to 14.1million pixels. 4K by comparison is 8.3 million pixels and operates at its optimum on a 24” display. The 5K is at its peak on a monitor of 27 – 30 inches.

The arrival of the 5K iMac immediately leads most of us to think that Apple will launch a 5K Thunderbolt display. However, to drive a 5K display you will need Thunderbolt 3 technology as Thunderbolt 2 uses Display Port 1.2 and that doesn’t have the bandwidth to support 5K. This means that we are at least a year away from seeing a 5K Apple display.

A big consideration of high end users is noise and heat. Here the Mac Pro will win. Even under extreme workloads it is incredibly quiet and its workstation quality processors, graphics cards and error correcting RAM all mean that it is less likely to trip up than the more consumer led iMac.

So which machine suits who best? It’s probably easier to look at who is best suited to the Mac Pro. If you are heavily using OpenCL apps, need multithreading CPU power and have a lot of Thunderbolt devices then the Mac Pro is the machine for you.

If however, you are a photographer, graphic designer or an agency then the 5K Retina Display iMac is the model for you. Its cost saving coupled to its performance and amazing display mean that it is hard to justify the extra cost associated with buying the Mac Pro and a 4k display.

If you are interested in either model please feel free to contact us on 0121 285 0098 or email info@localhost