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Greig0D4D
Participant
November 24, 2020
Question

iMac for Premiere Pro

  • November 24, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 349 views

I am new to editing and am in the process of setting up my hardware. I need to keep my total spend to less than £1000.

I will be using Premiere Pro.

I have chosen an iMac "Core i5" 3.0GHz 21.5-Inch (Retina 4K, Mid 2017) Model No. A1418 Model Identifier:iMac18,2 with 16GB Ram and a 1TB HDD.

It is in mint condition and I got it from a friend at a really good price of £400, which leaves me budget to upgrade.

Three questions:

1. The RAM is upgradeable to 64GB. Should I go for that, or will an upgrade to 32GB be enough?

2. I am also thinking of upgrading the drive to a 2TB SSD. Will that be sufficient?

3. Should I get an external drive too? If so, any pointers?

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

R
RjL190365
Legend
November 24, 2020

You can do better than that for the same or less money. That CPU has only 4 cores and 4 threads to begin with. It will work for Premiere Pro, but don't expect it to perform as well as a budget current-gen desktop PC. And its included (soldered-on-board) AMD Radeon Pro 555 discrete GPU does not provide much, if any, GPU acceleration for Premiere Pro even if it uses the Metal API that's preferred by Apple.

 

And I found only one result in the PugetBench for Premiere Pro database at Puget Systems that matched the core hardware of your planned iMac (though the one in the database was equipped with only 8 GB of RAM instead of 16 GB): That system, even with the discrete GPU, barely outperformed my old 3.5-year-old Windows mini-ITX PC with its (at the time) i7-7700 CPU and only integrated Intel HD Graphics 630 (no discrete GPU) using the "standard" preset of the PugetBench script (the mini-ITX box has since been significantly upgraded on the inside).

 

By the way, don't bother upgrading that iMac yourself: Accessing its ostensibly upgradeable internal parts requires major and expert disassembly, which officially can be performed only at an AASP (Authorized Apple Service Provider).

    G
    Greig0D4DAuthor
    Participant
    November 24, 2020

    Thank you for your detailed and helpful reply. So I'll probably leave this iMac as is and sell it on. If you don't mind giving me a little more of your time: what would you recommend as a set-up on a budget of £1000 or less?
    Many thanks,

    Greig

      J
      johnnewbie17712031
      Participant
      November 26, 2020

      I second your question. I'd like to know too.

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