Apple’s new iMacPro has an impressive 200%-300% speed bump.
Last week I received a pelican case from Apple with a very special Mac inside of it… It was an iMac Pro configured as a 10 Core 3GHZ Intel Xeon W, 2TB SSD, 128 GB RAM, Vega 64 Radeon.
After unpacking the (to be expected) beautiful Space Grey hardware, keyboard, mouse and trackpad, it was time to get down to the brass tacks, I had ONE question that I needed to answer: how fast is this thing, and how much time will it save me in my everyday imaging tasks?
I found a very consistent set of results: a 2X to 3X boost in speed (relative to my current iMac and MacBook Pro 15”) a noticeable leap from most generational jumps that are generally ten times smaller.
Whether you’re editing 8K RED video, H.264 4K Drone footage, 6K 3D VR content or 50 Megapixel RAW stills – you can expect a 200-300% increase in performance in almost every industry leading software with the iMac Pro.
I’ve seldom seen a jump this dramatic before on any new generation of Macs – 20%-30% speed increases are the norm … NOT 200%-300% increases. That’s SIGNIFICANT. (Feel free to jump straight to the test results below if you have a short attention span or are a numbers person..)
Basically, if you’re debating whether or not to purchase the iMac Pro you should ask yourself just one question: how much is your time worth to you? Would you rather be waiting for images and video to render or export, or do you want to go back out and shoot as quickly as possible? For me the answer is easy: when compared to the previous generation iMac or the current top of the line 15” MacBook Pro, the iMacPRO tears through footage and images, allowing me to spend less time behind a computer, and more time shooting.
After just under a week I can tell you that I won’t be using any other mac anytime soon.
I’ll detail the result below for every piece of software that I ran these tests through – because at the end of the day it’s all about the numbers when you’re shooting 1-5 Terabytes per day of 8K RED footage, or shooting 7,000 fifty Megapixel stills on a Canon 5DsR, let alone churning through 8K VR footage or playing back 4K MavicPRO footage. It’s safe to say we’re shooting and processing more an more data than we could ever have imagined just a few years ago – and one’s time behind a computer can be a TRUE pain point.
In short – this is a KILLER machine for any serious photographer, filmmaker, or VR producer. Period.
I can see a lot of people taking advantage of the nearly 3,000 MB/S transfer speeds to the internal SSD, let alone the four Thunderbolt 3 ports to go thru footage much less painfully. In fact most of the drives cannot come close to taking advantage of the transfer speeds – YET. However when you copy multiple media at once to a fast raided drive you’ll quickly see the benefit of this machine. DITs (Techs who copy cards on still or film sets) will love this machine for its portability and speed (and easy to swap base w/ VESA mounts that can transfer back and forth much more easily than the previous generation iMac.)
Several important disclaimers:
- I used the latest MacOS High Sierra 10.13.2 on this an a lot of the software I used has not yet been optimized for the new OS let alone this machine.
- I did not use a MacPRO because I couldn’t get one in time, and because I generally don’t use one because the Thunderbolt 2 ports aren’t fast enough for what I do. I also used my current iMac – an iMac 5K, 4GHZ Intel Core i7 w 32GB RAM and an AMD R9 4GB and 500GB fusion drive, as well as a brand new 15” MacBook Pro with 3.1GHZ Intel i7, 16GB RAM, Radeon Pro 560 w/ 4096 MB and 1TB SSD.
- I did the best to reproduce all of these tests using the exact same G-Tech and SanDisk 1TB SSD TB3 drives with the exact same data and timing it w/ a timer on the same builds of software.
- Needless to say people have been building monster PCs with liquid cooling etc – but I have been resisting that other pain point. These custom built-machines are an entirely different experience and level of user and no doubt would do better on footage such as the RED 8K footage for example that require extremely intense graphics card and CPU usage. Of note: Apple has made several statements that they are committed to the PRO Market … I don’t think this is their last PRO machine…
- Until this machine is officially released, I don’t know the exact price point – I will update that as soon as it’s available.
In these tests I used: Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Media Encoder, DaVinci Resolve, Insta360 Stitcher, BlackMagic Speed Test and Adobe Lightroom Classic.
I could go on an on about my thoughts on the machine but I think it’s time to cut to the chase and give you the empirical NUMERICAL results:
Final Cut Pro X:
I imported 10.96 GB of DJI Mavic PRO 4K, H.264, 23.98 fps footage, a total duration of 24 minutes 16 seconds of footage transcoded to Proxy ProRes422.
All 3 machines created low resolution Proxy footage in under 8 minutes which was impressive.
I then had the software render ProRes422 Optimized media from the H.264 source media:
iMac Pro – 7minutes 56 seconds
iMac – 15 minutes 47 seconds
MacBookPro 15” – 19 minutes 55 seconds
In Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve, I imported 1 hour and 17 minutes of RED 8K Helium Full Frame footage shot at 60 fps and exported it to 4K ProRes 422 footage, here are the resulting export times:
iMac Pro – 2 hours 6 minutes
iMac – 7 hours 15 minutes
MacBookPro 15” – 6 hours 5 min.
I processed 6K Stereo (3D) VR Insta360 PRO footage through their Insta360 Stitcher software, a 56 second clip, here were the export / processing times:
iMacPRO – 5 minutes 55 seconds
iMac – 11 minutes 09 seconds
MacBookPro 15” – 32 minutes
I imported 788 still CR2 (RAW) Canon 5DsR 50 Megapixel images or 50.74GB of images and then…
I had LR build 1:1 Previews
iMac Pro – 25 minutes 26 seconds
iMac – 50 minutes 45 seconds
MacBookPro 15” – 46 minutes 40 seconds
I applied a look (color correction in the Develop module) and Exported 788 JPEG files at full resolution or 14.79 GB of JPEGs averaging 9 MB each
iMac Pro -31 Minutes
iMac – 1 hour 17 Minutes
MacBookPro 15” – 1 hour 4 minutes
I ran Black Magic’s software to test the speed of all 3 internal drives and found the following average speeds:
iMac Pro – Write 2996MB/s / Read – 2450 MB/s (2TB SSD)
iMac – Write 664MB/s / Read – 720 MB/s (500GB Fusion Drive)
MacBookPro 15” – Write 1743 MB/s / Read – 1400 MB/s (1TB SSD)
I used RED’s conversion Cine-X Software to test playback with a RED (RAW) 8K, Full frame, 4 minute 1 second file (59.68GB) at 60 fps:
At 1/2 resolution I could play back (before hitting memory / CPU & GPU limits)
iMac Pro – 14 seconds of smooth playback before buffering (if I let the computer process and render the file, it was able to render the file using the 128GB of memory and 10 cores in minutes and and playback in full screen 75% of the 60 fps clip.)
iMac – 4 seconds of smooth playback before buffering
MacBookPro 15” -1 second of smooth playback before buffering
At 1/4 res I found the perfect balance:
iMac Pro – I was able to play the clip back at 1/4 res for a full 4 minutes before buffering – the first time I’ve been able to do that on a Mac at 8K in RED Cine-X – and I could truly judge the movement, sharpness and overall detail of the clip in full screen mode
iMac – 1 minute 25 seconds w stuttering playback before buffering
MacBookPro 15” -8 seconds of smooth playback before buffering
I had issues w/ High Sierra and couldn’t work reliably with RED footage. However I was able to play the Mavic 4K footage reliably on all 3 machines full screen mode at 1/2 resolution. Both the MacBook Pro 15” and the iMac started to stutter (with any movement in frame or when panning / tilting) when played at Full 4K resolution – noticeably so on the MacBook Pro.) The iMac did well with playback at full resolution, however I couldn’t scrub the footage at all. The iMac Pro was silky smooth at full resolution and scrubbing was nearly flawless.
Overall this is a wonderful machine that will satisfy all users out there – with the exception of the 0.1% of users who work in the 8K RAW RED world for example and want to transcode at 1:1 or faster with purpose-built machines. If you’re shooting 4K or pretty much any still camera available today, this Mac is unlikely to let you down. I know it’s tackled everything I’ve thrown at it and it’s the first machine that can keep up with me in an still edit of thousands of images or hundreds of minutes of video footage.
Can you run a Geekbench test and let us know the cpu and gpu results? Thx.
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Thank you for this review.
I wonder if you would have any time to benchmark a smaller batch of photos with LR classic and share the photo set. That would allow your readers to do a comparison on their current setups.
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:46 pm
@Timothy Hope, I will try – busy shooting this week and next!
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Love the real world review and honest opinion. Thanks!
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:46 pm
@Einar Johnson, Thank you!
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Can you please give detail about the VESA mount swapability. Currently you seem to be the only reviewer that has brought it up. Thank you.
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:46 pm
@Sam, Yes – they’ve made it MUCH easier to swap back and forth as opposed to the standard iMac … they made a point of letting me know that.
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Now all we need is for Apple to release updates so it can natively understand Nikon D850 RAW files.
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Nice review! Anyone know how many thunderbolt controllers there are? Lots of ports is one thing, but if they all share the same bandwidth it doesn’t really matter. I really want to see a comparison between this iMac pro and a ‘comparable’? win10 machine. Especially the Insta360 test. Adobe apps like After Effects and Premiere are important for me too… maybe MochaVR too. I’d be happy to do a Insta360 comparison on a dual Xeon, 64GB, GTX1080 system for comparison
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Why not use Final Cut Pro X with the RED footage?
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:47 pm
@Apple Guru, I ran out of time
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Thanks for taking the time to write this one up and run the speed tests. Excited to order one!
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:47 pm
@Guy Cochran, thanks!
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I hae one of the new 2017 iMacs with all the specs at the top. But the fan comes on all the time and you can see a noticeable performance difference in Premiere Pro. Plus the fan is kind a loud. Does the fan come on when playing footage and if so, does it seems loud?
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:47 pm
@Bob K, This one is EXTREMELY quiet.. possibly the quietest Mac I’ve had of all (except Mabook Airs of course)
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hi,I am a reporter from QDaily(www.qdaily.com), a technology blog in China. I have read your latest article about the review of iMac Pro. This is a wonderful and interesting article. We hope to get your authorization in order to be able to translate and post it on us. On the website. We will show at the beginning of this article that this article belongs to you, as well as copyright. Looking forward to your reply as soon as possible.Thank you very much.
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Any chance you can run a benchmark in the develop module (say time to scroll through 50 images in develop letting each fully render) – import and export are highly optimised for multi-thread but develop, where most photographers spend most of their time, is not.
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So…what would be the price of this wonder ?
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:47 pm
@Name, Just under $10K
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But you’re stuck with their display vs a NEC or BenQ… until they make a better display… this is no go
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The display is the weakest link. Better to have NEC or BenQ
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I agree!
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Hi! Did you have any compatibility issues with Adobe Premiere and did you use the latest version of Creative Cloud?
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:48 pm
@Michelle, I did w/ Premiere but mostly figured it out with latest updates. Adobe hasn’t had a chance to update for the new OS and definitely NOT for this machine yet
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if you shoot 7000 Canon images in a day, or even 700, you need a new brain more than a new computer. A new brain would give you judgement on what is worth shooting, and maybe even a concept of composition.
Much better gluing the shutter button down with super glue and going to lunch.
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:48 pm
@suzy, I shoot time lapses w/ 5 cameras at once. Go buy a clue.
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This looks like worthwhile upgrade. I wonder how fast it will be transcoding Tera 6k Raw footage into ProRes? Sadily I’m still forced to keep one PC around because so much of my software ( a few editing plugins like neat noise ) and Octane Render either require CUDA or work significantly faster with Nvidia CUDA. An all in one machine still eludes me :/
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Well I am not videographer just photographer and I am not sure if this machine would be that much beneficial to a person like me when iMac maxed up for half price delivers great results. Do not take me wrong but you were testing not the base model of iMac pro but double the price version with 10 cores and maxed up RAM and card… so I do not find this tests so relevant for us photographers … can you please share geek bench results from it..? Otherwise I am sure for video guys this is a heck of a pice of art but for still images, not so sure 🙂 happy shooting
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It’s a shame we’re still having so many issues with Adobe products and High Sierra these many months into the release. Thanks for doing the tests, very insightful
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Vincent Laforet Reply:
December 14th, 2017 at 11:49 pm
@James Drake, Agreed…
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Great blog post! I have ordered it with the 10 cores, 16gb gpu abd 64gb ram. Hopefully it will run my 5.2k CinemaDNG smooth (DJZi Inspire 2 X5S)??
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Thanks for the review. In the LR import tests, were you going from a card reader (what kind?) to each computer’s internal drive, or some other arrangement (e.g. importing, in-place, photos that were already on a drive)? And what was the arrangement of the LR export tests? Thanks again!
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That’s so awesome. A MacBook Pro that is 2 or 3X times faster would be ideal. This MacBook would be perfect for anyone looking to use netbeans. If it’s the first machine that can keep up with you, then I definitely need to try this bad boy.
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Wow! Apple really never fails to impress me..
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Vincent, I love your blog and reviews, just wish you had the time to update it more often. As for this review, while it’s honest and with full disclosure as always, the price of this so called speed demon is off the charts. And as others have said, stuck with the display. Now if they made the Mac mini half as good we’d be talking.
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I agree!
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Agree!
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