What mac to buy for several hour rendering per day?

Question

Hello everyone, I'm new here, I work as the editing & prodcuting executive in a distribution and production compady. I work on 2 PCs using Adobe Premier Pro and eveything is going fine, but some clients are requiring rendered videos using Final Cut. So we decided to buy a mac computer and a FInal Cut x.
I never worked on mac and I dont know much about them, what's the best mac to buy? I visted the Mac store and found the folloing 6 options to buy from:
iMac 21.5" quad-core i5 2.7GHz/8GB/1TB/Intel Iris Pro Graphics
iMac 21.5" quad-core i5 2.9GHz/8GB/1TB/GeForce GT 750M 1GB
iMac 27" quad-core i5 3.2GHz/8GB/1TB/GeForce GT 755M 1GB
iMac 27" quad-core i5 3.4GHz/8GB/1TB/GeForce GTX 775M 2GB
MacPro quad-Core and Dual GPU  E5 3.7/12GB/256/ Dual AMD D300 2GB each
MacPro 6-Core and Dual GPU  E5 3.5/16GB/256/ Dual AMD D5003GB each
What is the best option to buy? its obvious that the last Mac pro is the most powerful one, but for instant can I work on the 4th option just fine? cause financially it seems good, but can it handle like 50 hr of rendering per month for 3 years for example? and how much time saving would it be if I choose option 5 or six? and one last question, is ther's anyuthing that option 5 or six that they an do and option 4 can't do? (other than the speed of finishing rendering tasks)... thanks in advanced

Answer 1

Some really good replies here!
To help the original poster, what you're trying to do is really commercial work as opposed to hobbiest usage. For commercial use it would be much to your advantage to go with a more robust machine that can handle the heat better and that is the Mac Pro. The cabinet is much larger, there is more room inside for heat dissipation, fans for the logic board and fans for the graphics card(s), heat sinks, etc.
Weigh the incremental cost of the Mac Pro against the cost of what would happen if you were in the middle of a project, spent hours working on it, and the system failed causing the data to be lost. Most likely there would be a lot of other video files that hadn't been archived yet and who knows what would happen to them.
That doesn't mean to say that nothing would ever happen to the Mac Pro but the odds are it would be less. Another fringe benefit of going with a Mac Pro is it has more upgrade and "future-proof" capability.
Speaking of robustness. A Time Capsule could be a useful addition and, for your use, and better yet, a RAID system (Mac friendly for minimum maintenance) is almost a requirement down the road. And with your anticipated usage, that would be a short road!
Another comment I'd like to add in is that FCPX likes lots of memory on the graphics card. 1GB is workable but 3GB would be super and the rendering time would be reduced immensely.