Thanks Swizi, thats a clear answer, and I guess that means its an i7 for me whether I get an iMac or an MBP.
Re: your question, I am using an old 15" MBP (late 2014) for editing both FCPx and Cheetah3D. Its an i7 with 16GB RAM and SSD - OK for editing but renders are slow, and I'm looking to upgrade.
My default choice will be a new iMac - but only i5 is available over here and it takes over a month to get the i7 variant. This will be great for FCPx, and I guess some improvement over my old MBP.
However, sometimes I need a mobile solution, so I was hoping to get a 13" MBP and use an eGPU. This is also OK for FCPx editing, but apparently I will need an i7 if I want an improvement over what I have now.
rgds/ RandyQ
Good luck with the new hardware, I'm sure it will work out alright. I have the same laptop as you, but I use it mostly for when I travel. I have a 2015 5k iMac at work, that has an i5 in it. My longer animation renders I run on my 2012 MacPro tower at home. I've done several upgrades over the past few years. So it can render relatively fast. The clock speed isn't that great (3.4Ghz) compared to the newer i7 / i9 chips, but I did upgrade it to two 6-Core X5690's. Which gives me 12 cores total. So it works relatively well in multi-threaded apps. I haven't tested for the exact speed difference, but my guess is it's probably at least x4 faster than my work iMac for C3d rendering.
Here's a rundown of the hardware and what I paid:
- MacPro5,1 dual tray, 32Gb RAM, 1Tb HD on eBay = $600 (shipping included)
- Two X5690 Xeon CPUs: eBay $200
- GTX1080FE (8Gb) - Got this one from MacVidCards that has the flashed EFI so I can see a boot screen. Think I paid around $900, which was about $150 more than stock PC version before flashing at the time (several years ago). Pretty much paid for this with one freelance job. A non-flashed version will work, but no boot screen. Some people are also now putting AMD RX580's in these, since they will work in Mojave (but still no boot screen). The MVC guy has a flashed version of this card too that gives a boot screen.
- Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD: I think this was around $150 when I got it.
- OWC Accelsior S PCI Card for SSD: $50. This gives me much faster access speed to the SSD. Plugged into the second x16 slot.
- USB3.1 4 port PCI card: $50. In x4 slot
- 4TB HDD for a Windows BootCamp install. I think this was around $150
I'm not sure what country you're in, but I think some of these used MacPro4,1 and MacPro5,1 will start coming down in price even more than they have the last few years. So if you ever wanted to eventually set up a dedicated machine for rendering, you could find a dual slot one and upgrade it. You wouldn't even need all the other stuff I put in mine. Mainly just the multi-core CPU's would do nicely for C3d rendering. I've seen some people posting on Reddit about finding some occasionally in the $200 range (caveat, this is in the US, so it can vary depending on location). The 5,1's are the easiest to upgrade though when it comes to the CPU's. The 4,1's require a delidded chip (fancy name for the metal cover). Which can be a p.i.a. to do. The CPU swap for my 5,1 took about 15 minutes to do. Basically like putting Lego's together (but I did use a guide).
https://www.reddit.com/r/macpro/
https://www.reddit.com/r/appleswap/
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardwareswap/
I know this may not be something you're interested in, but if you are and have any questions, just let me know! I'm sure the i7 iMac will be enough to cover what you need.