Imac a Good dp6 machine?

[Mayhem]

Hello gents, I'm re wording my question. I'm looking to purchase a Imac 2.40 ghz 20" inch. For those of you who have Imac's and use DP6, is this machine strong enough to handle the work load? I will be recording, mixing, and sequencing in Dp6. Can the new Imac intel core 2 duo 2.40 ghz 250 hd handle what I want to do with DP6? By the way thanks James.

[newrigel]

I just purchased a new 2.66 (24 inch) and it's benchmarks are better than my quad 2.66 MacPro! But if you want PCI DSP for audio (powered plugins) you'd be better off with a new MacPro. IMHO the firewire stuff is OK, but PCIe is the real solid performer here.
I'm truly blown away with what this machine can do for just a dual core. As far as the past generation of iMacs are concerned, you shouldn't have too much of a problem if you go with a fast firewire drive but they are a bit weak on the throughput compared with the newest models. If you can, I'd get the newer iMac since the improved FSB and ram speeds are faster which give better performance.

[Mayhem]

Thanks for the advice.

[mikebeckmotu]

I use an older iMac (late 2006, if I remember right), and I'm still happy with it. The newer ones are ridiculously fast.
If you don't need expandability for PCI boards, and the ram limit is good enough, the iMac is a monster. The other things to think about are storage and ports. Consider a larger internal drive, and determine what you need for external drives, because you'll be spreading the firewire and USB bandwidth across your external devices. All my ports are full.
For USB, I have a lot of stuff hooked up (dongles, MIDI hardware, etc.), and I use two external powered USB hubs to make sure they all get enough power.
For firewire, I'm using both my ports - one for my Apogee Duet and the other for my recording drive. I have my sample drive on USB. I was concerned that I might have trouble with the Duet and a hard drive on the same bus, but it's been working flawlessly.
I also have a 2nd monitor attached.
I guess you could say I'm pushing the limit of what this particular iMac can do, and it's been great. The main reason for me to go to a MacPro would be to add internal drives to handle all the storage I need for heavy apps like BFD and all its expansion packs, and the ability to add ram if future updates require more. In the mean time, the cost difference has allowed me to do other things with my money, with very little in the way of performance limitations.
Please pardon my excess wordiness, but I hope you find something worthwhile in there...

[mhschmieder]

Hmm, just when I thought I was going to have to resort to saving up for a MacPro vs. a new iMac, to get adequate performance...

On my ancient one, it takes Vienna Instruments about 20 minutes to launch, any time the machine is restarted. A real productivity killer.

I thought maybe even going from FW400 to FW800 wouldn't be enough for me to notice big improvements once I upgrade my G4 PPC iMac.

So even though I don't need the expandability, I had almost concluded that going to internal drives, eSATA, PCI, etc., would be necessary.

I have recently switched to using BTD mode for ALL audio rendering of MIDI tracks when using plug-ins. Works flawlessly, always.

I suspect that other than initial startup times for Vienna Instruments, etc., the main criteria for good performance is LOTS of RAM.

Surely 4 GB is enough for most purposes, and 8 GB is too expensive currently, but the new Mac Pro's have weird configurations/upgrades.

So given that criteria, the current line of iMacs is a much better deal than the current line of Mac Pro's. This could change come September.

Bottom line is that FSB and memory may be the most persistent limiting factors for streamed sample engines, vs. FW800 limitations.

So the iMac may be sufficient as a long-term upgrade investment moving forward. It sounds like several here are happy sticking with iMacs.

[mhschmieder]

Of course latency figures into the equation as well.

Latency isn't so good on my G4 iMac. I'll be curious to hear how good it can get on a new iMac, vs. the near-zero latency of a tower (this is related to a combination of CPU/memory and how that dictates DP project settings, as well as internal communications vs. external Firewire).

This is starting to matter more to me, as I'm working on a lot of jazz and Broadway style scores of late, and live overdubs are quite tricky (and you can't really quantise in those genres), due to latency issues. Not that jazz overdubs weren't a challenge in the days of tape either!

Anyway, the point is just that your lowest possible latency is different between different Macs, but often gets overlooked as a factor vs. the sheer ability to run powerful plug-ins 9and lots of them).

[twistedtom]

Wow that seems a long time for a VI to load. With the ram you now have it can not be loading much into ram. Why so long? I do not have Vienna Instruments so I do not know much about it. I would think that sample VI's streamed from the hard drive and this would be the bottle neck. iMacs are far more computer than our old G4's were and other than needing to push things into the highest sample rates while loading up ton's of VI's with verbs and having a high track count with low latency the iMac should rock. On my old system I could only run a few VI's now I have no idea how many I can run, time they are a changing.

[mhschmieder]

Actually, I think the problem with Vienna Instruments load time is the Synchrosoft license lookups, since I bought my way incrementally into the larger collections by getting over half of the download libraries (each of which has its own license on the key).

In that case, it may be that the critical spec is USB 1.1 vs. USB 2.x, which means ANY new Mac would probably mitigate the problem with this particular VI.

[tonester]

FWIW, I have a 20" 2.4Ghz Intel iMac that I bought last year, and run DP6, EWQLSO, EWQLSC, MachFive 2, Kontakt 3, EZ Drummer, MSI , Ethno and Synthogy Ivory at various times in projects with very few side effects. I did beef up the RAM to 3G, and probably will max out to 4G soon.

I use a MOTU 828Mk3, and run a lot of audio tracks (24/48) with plugins,(sometimes up to 36) and if I freeze the softsynths, I barely notice any slowdown or glitches. It's really a wonderful machine, and until I get a MacBook pro, I can tote it around if needbe.

If you're considering it, i wouldn't hesitate. I come from a Windows-based background, and couldn't do nearly what i can now on my fairly beefed-up PC without it grinding to a halt.

a very satisfied mac owner............