Tower vs iMac for FCE

HI,
I am in the process of purchasing a new workstation for FCE. Most of the productions will be under 30 minutes. If I configure an iMac and a Tower the same will there be much difference in the processing power? I am just wonder whether it is worth the extra $1K or whatever it will be for the tower--is a 3Ghz the same on both machines? Is the tower faster accessing the HD?
Thanks so much.
Scott

It depends on your needs, desires and budget.
The iMac has 1 dual-core processor and 1 internal hard drive.
The Mac Pro has 1 or 2 quad-core processors and will fit up to 4 internal hard drives. You can also change the video card and add other internal hardware.
Yes, there is a difference in processing power, but not because of the Ghz alone.
No, there won't be a difference in HD access speed for the first (internal) HD.
Yes, the MacPro will access the 2d, 3d or 4th internal HDs faster because they would all be SATA 3GHz drives ... compared to the iMac where you would have to use an external FW400 or FW800 drive if you wanted more than 1 drive.
But both are very capable machines and if your 30 min videos are not overly complex you won't see much practical difference between the machines.
I hope this helps ...

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Hey Guys
I'm considering buying an iMac for HD video editing. I will be using FCE.
I'd like to receive your feedback on which iMac configuration would be the most suitable.
Specifically, how much performance improvement can one expect by upgrading from 2.66 Ghz to 2.93 Ghz? What about upgrading the type of graphics card and video memory? Will the performance improvements be significant?
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Message was edited by: max55
Message was edited by: max55

There is some marketing speak here. This is the way graphics processing is described on the iMac site.
20-inch and 24-inch model with 2.66GHz processor
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
24-inch model with 2.93GHz processor, one of the following:
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NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
This is the way graphics processing is described on the Mac mini page
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 128MB or 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
This is the same as the MacBook and the 13" MacBook Pro and the low end 15" MacBook Pro. The 2.66GHz iMacs use shared memory and are in the same configuration.
Only the 2.93Ghz iMac, some of the 15" MacBook Pros, the 17" MacBook Pro, and the Mac Pro have dedicated graphics processing that does not have to call on separate resources. I think all the lower end machines will have graphics issues with the FxPlug filters.

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Tower vs iMac for FCE

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