I currently have a dell laptop with a 2.7ghz dual core  i7 with 8gbram. I have edited a few 4K clips but its really slow and laggy. I am sick of windows and am looking to upgrade to an iMac but don't want to spend the money on a brand new one. Was looking at 2013 models with the quad core i5s. Was wondering if anyone here uses a IMAc for their edits and how well it handles 4K workloads?

I'm not one who knows computers (I had to look up the specs on mine for this post) but I purchased an iMac 27" with Retina 5K Display specifically for my drone footage.  It as Intel Core i5 Quad 3.2 GHz and Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm.  1 TB memory.  I'm using Adobe Photoshop and sometimes iMovie for editing.  I really like the computer and haven't found that it's bogged down during editing.  They suggested getting Fusion Drive but I was already spending every single cent I could scrape up so the extra $300 was not going to happen.  The only thing is I wish I could have afforded more than 1 TB memory.  I'm using a 5 TB external drive to hold my raw footage then transferring what I need to work on to the computer.  Not the best but seems to be working okay.  Hope this helps.

I had the same but slightly opposite scenario...
I was sick of paying premium for sluggish Mac and moved to Windows
Got my PC last year, build it myself and Im happy as a pig in a sh#&$

Sorry for not really helpful post. Just a different perspective here
Anyway, I feel your pain brother !  

You need newer and faster and NOT older and slower... Look into MSI, VR series but you are talking around $7000

If you want to work in 4K,  the only iMac you can buy is the 21.5 inch retina 4K, or a 27 inch in 5K. About how well it handles 4k workloads, for me it's ok, but if you are looking for a professional standard, I would counsel you, to look for another type of computer, fast (i7) with a very good Ram, as big as possible (32Gb DDR3/1600Mhz.), a very good graphic card for 4K, two SSD disks, one for the sistem and another one for previous and renders, and of course a 4K monitor

Use Final Cut X and create proxy files and you should be fine!

I found that with using proxy files (FCPX on Mac or Vegas Pro 14 on PC) you can breath life into an old system. However, I agree that the best solution is a modern Core i7 machine with as much RAM as possible and SSD hard drives. With proper, modern hardware either platform will work. I have Magix (formerly Sony) Vegas Pro 14 on a Core i7 PC that I built 5 years ago and Final Cut Pro X on a new MacBook Pro 15". Both platforms are more than adequate for 4K video editing. The Mac really shines when you have ProRes source, like from the Inspire 2 X5S. H.264 files can be "optimized" upon import which turns them into ProRes files. H.265 doesn't work on the Mac but I transcode those files into ProRes with a 3rd party program and they work like a charm.

Another vote for Windows + proxy files.  I've never used a mac, for video editing, but just get as beefy a CPU and disk drive (ie, SSD) as you can.

Yes, you need a beast to edit 4K, and you can get that more affordably in a Windows PC. A gaming PC is often the perfect platform for video editing since these days most have SSD's, lots of RAM, I7 CPU and a powerful GPU. You can also get a free version of Davinci Resolve software and use the optimized (proxy) files for editing. An old Apple machine is just not going to cut it for 4K. I would always use the optimized (proxy) files for editing if you are using a single workstation for editing. 4K is difficult to work with for any single machine of today's standards.

Bullflyer Posted at 2017-4-16 12:54
If you want to work in 4K,  the only iMac you can buy is the 21.5 inch retina 4K, or a 27 inch in 5K. About how well it handles 4k workloads, for me it's ok, but if you are looking for a professional standard, I would counsel you, to look for another type of computer, fast (i7) with a very good Ram, as big as possible (32Gb DDR3/1600Mhz.), a very good graphic card for 4K, two SSD disks, one for the sistem and another one for previous and renders, and of course a 4K monitor

Agree with all you say except a 4K monitor. You don't need that for most editing. You can always zoom in to check detail, and most likely you will be running in proxy mode.. You can always play the final result on a 4K TV to check it out. Although 32 GB's of RAM is great, 16 GB is usually enough. The bottlenecks are most often CPU/GPU and disk access, the reason for SSD.

I'm in the same situation.  My PC is a Dell Vostro that has CORE i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10 GHz, 16 GB Ram, a Samsung EVO 850 SSD 500 GB primary drive.  The primary drive is running out of space, so I re-installed two 500 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drives.  Now it's bogging down, I assume because of the Hard Drives.  I replaced the original GPU with a used Asus GeForce 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 Graphics Card.  Would installing a PCIe RAID card help with performance?  Or, do I need to spend the money on more SSD storage?  Can't yet afford to replace the whole rig.

Thanks

kewald Posted at 2017-4-18 14:03
I'm in the same situation.  My PC is a Dell Vostro that has CORE i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10 GHz, 16 GB Ram, a Samsung EVO 850 SSD 500 GB primary drive.  The primary drive is running out of space, so I re-installed two 500 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drives.  Now it's bogging down, I assume because of the Hard Drives.  I replaced the original GPU with a used Asus GeForce 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 Graphics Card.  Would installing a PCIe RAID card help with performance?  Or, do I need to spend the money on more SSD storage?  Can't yet afford to replace the whole rig.

Thanks

The two things that will help with speed is to change those spinning drives to SSDs and to install a good GPU card. RAM is not that critical, the CPU is though, but it is hard to upgrade that without replacing the motherboard. Generally speaking a 6 core i7 processor is better than a 2 core. For the GPU, I recommend the Radeon RX480.

best cpu  i7-4970K or new i7 CPU   

GPU  970

kewald Posted at 2017-4-18 14:03
I'm in the same situation.  My PC is a Dell Vostro that has CORE i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10 GHz, 16 GB Ram, a Samsung EVO 850 SSD 500 GB primary drive.  The primary drive is running out of space, so I re-installed two 500 GB 7200 rpm Hard Drives.  Now it's bogging down, I assume because of the Hard Drives.  I replaced the original GPU with a used Asus GeForce 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 Graphics Card.  Would installing a PCIe RAID card help with performance?  Or, do I need to spend the money on more SSD storage?  Can't yet afford to replace the whole rig.

Thanks

SSDs are magnitudes faster than hard disks. A RAID controller and multiple hard disks will only give you a small performance gain in comparison.

The Dell displays tend to be very colour accurate and clear.

You could try browsing this list: https://pc4u.org/best-laptop-for-video-editing-photo-editing/

iMac 5k user here. My setup is 3.2 i5, standart 8gb of RAM, Radeon m390, 1TB Fusion. No problems with photoshop, I did some 120 megapixel panoramas and had no problems correcting it. As for video, I started to use FCXP, my advice would be transcode media (proxy) and the start editing. Two times iMac crashed on editing 4k footage from P4P when I tried to use very graphic intense effect. Otherwise it works well, for fluent rendering you need to wait 5-8 seconds before you can preview your changes smoothly. My plan is to upgrade the RAM section. My advice would be to choose i7 (as it has Hyper-Threading and suits video editing very well). I do not like Windows (even I used them) so can't comment about PC.

I am using a Dell XPS 7760 All In One with an i7 -6700 CPU @ 3.40ghz, 16GB Ram and AMD Radeon graphics card with dedicated RAM. System handles 4K with no problems using Cyberlink Power Director 15 for editing.

Hello bro, I have a problem with the gtx 760, i7 4470k 2 TB hd 120SSD 16 Ramddr3 and I can not even see what I'm recording because it locks everything

I agree with DroneLady.  anyone who is SERIOUS about either photo or video production, needs to convert to the dark side, i.e. MAC.  The force is strong on the dark side, and with Mac, you don't have all that extra working programs (like virus protection, etc...) that lag your computer when trying to do high definition work.  Seriously, My Macbook never lags, and the last Macbook I owned and used, kept up with PCs for seven years as opposed to a PC computer having a life span of about two years.  -GO MAC AND YOU'LL NEVER GO BACK.

am using a Dell XPS 7760 All In One with an i7 -6700 CPU @ 3.40ghz

Slightly off topic.  Ok, way off topic....   I'm a pc guy.  I'm not going to deny that.  I have an ipad for my phantoms and that works fine.  I have no real complaints.   BUT


How the heck do you look at files on an ipad?    How about just transferring a file from an ipad to a pc?  There's nothing that I can see on the ipad that allows me to get to the files level, unless i want to transfer files to icloud or thru itunes.   

Thanks for any input!

Windows 10 home is great for doing what u want. The ram should at least 16 gig or more get away from the laptop goto desktop with a 1060 or higher graphic card