Struggling With a $50,000 Decision
With my hackintosh workstation that I built several years ago becoming increasingly unusable it was time to begin considering what I would get to replace my work computer and upgrade my set-up. Of course this was the cause of much strife as I can never just make a straightforward decision, overthinking the whole thing is a mandatory step.
Initially it seemed a no-brainer that I would purchase a Mac Pro, as I am a professional and I need a Mac. However the lack of a singular benchmark for MacOS that would represent video editing and has an accessible database of results cause me to look elsewhere to create my own Mac Pro benchmark.
In order to facilitate my decision I designed a way of creating an overall video editing score from Geekbench OpenCL GPU, single core CPU, and multi-core CPU benchmarks. I added all of the different configurations of iMac, iMac Pro, Macbook, and Mac Pro that I was considering as potential replacement computers. The range of prices went from $3,599 to $13,499 leaving out the most expensive configurations of Mac Pro as they are out of my current budget and the lower spec iMacs and Macbook Pros as I doubt they could offer me the performance I desire. By combining the scores from Geekbench using a completely arbitrarily weighted formula of my own invention I get a score that I dubbed the “K-Score” which gives a theoretical representation of video editing performance.
By calculating the $/Score you get a representation of what kind of value you are getting, how much relative performance per dollar spent. Sorting by this metric show that the computers towards the top of the list such as the iMacs are more ”worth it” while the Mac Pros towards the bottom do not make as compelling of a value proposition.
Even by sorting the list by K-Score you can see that the iMacs and some of the Macbook Pros beat out the scores of the cheaper Mac Pros! You are essentially spending thousands more dollars for worse performance, that’s insane!
If you’re curious about my final conclusions of what this means for my personal purposes you’ll just have to check out the video!
