Worth upgrading from old 08 Mac Pro to i7 iMac?

[Steelbom]

Dad's got an old 2008 Mac Pro w/ 2x2.8GHz quad-core, 16GB 800MHz RAM, GTX 285 1GB, and a Crucial M4 512GB SSD. He uses photoshop, indesign, illustrator, pro tools, etc., pretty heavily, and I'm wondering if it might be beneficial for him to move to a 2013 (or newer) quad-core i7 3.5GHz iMac?

I think the i7 would be much faster than his current system?

 

[Rakehellion]

The iMac would be a downgrade. Just upgrade the CPU and graphics card in the Mac Pro if it's too slow.

 

[mmntech]

It uses two Harpertown Xeons based on the Penryn Core 2 Duo. The maximum CPUs they officially support are the X5482 which runs at 3.2ghz. Really boils down to how much those chips are going for on the used market. If you can get two of them at a decent price, you're laughing.

As for the GPU, it should support any PCIe card that OS X does.

 

[Steelbom]

The iMac would be a downgrade. Just upgrade the CPU and graphics card in the Mac Pro if it's too slow.

Really, in what way? The latest i7 iMac scores twice that of the 3.2GHz 08 Mac Pro in single core performance in Geekbench -- keep in mind, that the 08 doesn't have hyperthreading so it's just eight physical cores, and there's no turbo boost either.

It uses two Harpertown Xeons based on the Penryn Core 2 Duo. The maximum CPUs they officially support are the X5482 which runs at 3.2ghz. Really boils down to how much those chips are going for on the used market. If you can get two of them at a decent price, you're laughing.

As for the GPU, it should support any PCIe card that OS X does.

See above. Also I can't imagine the X5482 would be much of an upgrade? It's a 400MHz bump in clock speed. The i7 is a much newer architecture, at 3.5GHz and will turbo higher when all cores aren't in use.

Is there a better way to compare CPU performance with this system?