Unless something has been fixed, Photoshop doesn’t scale very well:
Hm. I’d buy a decent sized SSD (256 GB or more), lots of memory and stick with middle-of-the-road CPU. Adobe apps don’t scale very well by adding more CPU cores.
If you want to save money, buy a iMac now with a SSD and wait on the server-class CPUs until you actually do start 3D rendering, then buy a (much cheaper, non-Apple) server class machine you can hide in a closet somewhere and do your rendering for you. At least that’s what I’d do. And the Mac Pro won’t run Photoshop or Illustrator any better than the iMac.
Remember if you start 3D rendering in “a year or two”, machines in a year will be significantly faster for the same cost as buying now.
3D rendering will benefit a lot more from a decent GPU (a workstation GPU line might be best, but even a gaming GPU will help).
Image and video applications are also beginning to take advantage of GPU acceleration for other computational tasks.
I’d rather invest in an SSD, lots of RAM (RAM is cheap… well not sure about Macs), and a decent GPU (workstation grade or otherwise) than on an expensive 12 core system.
Thanks, guys, for all the ideas. Right now, I’m leaning toward a 6-cor CPU, 3.33GHz, with 16GB memory and 2-TB hard drives, for less than $4000. It’s cheap enough that I’ll be more inclined to upgrade to something better when it’s available. If I spend $7000 now, I’ll be more inclined to keep it, even when something better comes along.
But I still haven’t totally ruled out the top-of-the-line iMac, which is even cheaper. My only objection to the iMac is that, if I do keep it, it can’t be upgraded like the others.