Hi all,

I'm in the position of upgrading my current setup and I'm a Mac person. I've been looking at my options for newer technology and for the shows I work on, I've concluded that I don't yet need the horsepoower of a new Mac Pro. I'm not going to try running Media Composer through Rosetta on a new bleeding edge Apple Silicon device though. For the next year or two, a solid new Intel Mac will be just fine.

I'm not interested in a Macbook Pro (been there, doing that now) and I don't want to go the Hackintosh route... or invest in an older Mac Pro, tower or trashcan... which leaves me staring at the iMac 2020 or the iMac Pro. 

Given how powerful the new iMac 2020 seems to be, really the only thing holding me back from pulling the trigger on it is my worry that even spec'ed out to the max - getting, say, the 10-core with 128B of RAM and the highest end graphics card - Media Composer is going to make it run hot doing a full 10-12 hour day's work, with the fans runninng more loudly than I'd llke. It makes the iMac Pro attractive, given that it's known to run cooler, but I know I'd be paying a premium for slightly older tech that the new iMac seems to best in many cases.

I know it's early in the iMac 2020's launch but I'd love to hear from anyone who may have one already and put it through its paces... or if anyone's been using the iMac Pro, is it still worthy of consideration, or has it had one too many tech issues to be worth the money?

Thanks!

Dan

I switched from a 12-core cheese grater to a 2019 iMac 8-core i9 with 128GB memory and the Radeon Pro Vega video card with 8GB last December.  I've been pushing it hard 10-12 hours a day for 10 months now and have had no issues.  Once in a while when it's doing heavy processing, I can hear the fans cycle on,  But it's really proving to be a workhorse at a fraction of the cost of a new Mac Pro Tower

Having only 2 Thunderbot 3/USB-C ports was a concern at first, but it really worked out great.  The 2 TB3 ports are first connected to 2 external 4-drive Thunderbolt 3 RAIDs which have looping/daisey chain ports.  One RAID is daisey chained to an Avid DNxIO via USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. RAID enclosures also have a Display Port output that is connected to a 48" ultra wide monitor.  The other RAID is looped to a 3rd 8-drive JBOD enclosure.  We're using an 8-stripe RAID zero setup with 4TB SSDs.  By creating the RAID with 4 drives on each separate Thunderbot 3 port, it doubled the read/write speed to over 2200 MB/s.

Having tried to read up on how Media Composer now uses the CPU and GPU, it seems to me that for Avid especially, it's more important to have that 128MB of RAM (and a decent graphics card) than lots more cores. So an 8 or 10 Core iMac will do just fine, as oppposed to really utilizing all the cores in a 14 or 18 core machine.

Thanks for the insight! 😊👍🏼

Editmvp - This is interesting - I'm on a 2019 iMac (see my Spec) with an external monitor and Gtech media drive on one TB3 port and an AJA BoB on the other for a client monitor, and I'm getting a LOT of fan noise, editing all day on MC2018.12.13 and dndxhd36 media.

Only other difference being I'm screensharing via Zoom all day - do you think it's Zoom that could be causing the fans to spin up?

Ah the dreaded fan noise! Just my personal experience, but definitely the Zoom conferencing could be pushing your iMac to the limits, especially if you're also driving a second monitor. Have you tried eliminating the second monitor whilst Zooming? It's a lot of pixels to be pushing. I don't know if any of the video chatting apps are optimized... maybe FaceTime for macs.

Of course, now that Apple Silicon has arrived, it's a whole new ballgame. I suspect an Apple Silicon-native Media Composer running on an iMac with an M1x or M2 chip will be whisper quiet on heavy loads. Hope springs eternal!

I don't run Zoom on my Media Composer system, but Zoom makes the fans come run on both my 2019 MacBook Pro and a 2nd 2019 iMac in my office after about 45 minutes online.  Because I often run Media Composer and After Effects or Media Encoder at the same time and rarely hear any fan noise, I believe the main issue is with Zoom.