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new(er) IMac, what to buy and why?
davev
Registered Users Posts: 3,118 Major grins
I have a 20" IMac that I've had for about 4 years.
This is the same IMac that I changed out the 250 GB hard drive to a 750 GB hard drive a couple of years ago.
At that time, I was using a 30D, 8MP camera, and the speed of that machine was fine for processing photos.
Now that I have a 5DMKII and a 7D with much larger files, I find the speed is no longer there.
So looking at the new IMac's, and not being in the market for a new computer for a while, some of the options have me lost.
I'm going to start off with 4 Gigs of RAM no matter what.
The question comes from i5 and i7 intel chips, and 512MB or 1GB of video memory.
What combo will give me the most bang for the buck, an i5 chip with 1GB of video, or an i7 with 512MB video memory?
This question comes from looking at the refurb's page.
Although I'd like to have a 2TB drive in it, with the refurb it looks like I'll have to change out the drive at a later date.
To save $400, and being able to get by with the lesser drive for a year or so, I figure I ought to be able to replace
the 1TB drive with a 4TB for much less than the savings I'll get.:D
So, what do you think?
An i5 with 1TB of video, or a i7 with 512MB of video?
Thanks in advance.
This is the same IMac that I changed out the 250 GB hard drive to a 750 GB hard drive a couple of years ago.
At that time, I was using a 30D, 8MP camera, and the speed of that machine was fine for processing photos.
Now that I have a 5DMKII and a 7D with much larger files, I find the speed is no longer there.
So looking at the new IMac's, and not being in the market for a new computer for a while, some of the options have me lost.
I'm going to start off with 4 Gigs of RAM no matter what.
The question comes from i5 and i7 intel chips, and 512MB or 1GB of video memory.
What combo will give me the most bang for the buck, an i5 chip with 1GB of video, or an i7 with 512MB video memory?
This question comes from looking at the refurb's page.
Although I'd like to have a 2TB drive in it, with the refurb it looks like I'll have to change out the drive at a later date.
To save $400, and being able to get by with the lesser drive for a year or so, I figure I ought to be able to replace
the 1TB drive with a 4TB for much less than the savings I'll get.:D
So, what do you think?
An i5 with 1TB of video, or a i7 with 512MB of video?
Thanks in advance.
dave.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
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Comments
I have a ? regarding your i5/i7 chip/vid mem. Are you talking inherent/built in memory or are you speaking about a graphics card solution? Because a graphics solution is a better way to go. However back to back the i7 is the way to go in that contest.
Have you considered upgrading your present graphics card? I see the new iMac comes with a Radeon HD5750...that card and the three below it are very good for the price!
4TB?? that is a lot of storage ( files) to lose should one fail!
Bottom line on the power and mem: GO as big as you can $tand!
I don't know if my 20" IMac's graphic card can be upgraded. I think it's permanent on the main board.
4TB in a couple of years is what all computers will have in it. Every year it gets bigger.
4 years ago, the typical HD for an IMac was 250GB, now it's 1TB.
The power isn't as big as I can stand, it's as big as I can afford.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
The i5 supports dual channel memory so 2 or 4 2Gig chips will max the memory bandwidth it is capable of.
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I was going to mention that earlier, but the iMac page said otherwise~
Weird!
As far as incl. 4TB, that is a mistake! They may do it, but that is not smart!
It is truly rare that a graphics card cannot be upgraded. Have you looked up the spec's for your machine? Or called Apple?
From the searches I've done, it appears that the video card isn't a card, it's a chip on the logic board.
I guess I could try to un-solder it, see if I could find another newer chip to solder back in, or I could just
take a hammer to the IMac now cause either way, by the time I'm done, it probably won't work.:D
The 2 IMac's that I'm looking at are Here i5 and Here i7.
As it appears that the graphics chip is not easily changed, I'm guessing that the i5 with a 1GB chip set is the way to go.
For the most part, all I use this machine for is photo processing and internet.
I understand that 4GB of RAM isn't all that much anymore, but that is something that can be added to at a later date. (plus it's a lot more than I have right now)
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
No, no...I ought to have been more clear. Yes, our Motherboards/chips come with a graphics controller. but many if not most dating back..years, have slots called pci slots to add graphics cards to them. You don't have to remove anything, you just add, and stir!
Adding a graphics card can help a situation out, gamers know this too. However Nothing beats raw processing power. Hence I'd go with the i7. The graphics card will not make up the difference. And that memory their talkin there, it's video memory! Almost all of these things are built for and with gamers in mind.
I did a rework on an older machine earlier this year to find out HOW the biggest gains could be had. I had already maxed out the 8Gb of Mem. I added and went thru two different graphics cards and a SSD.
The SSD was the biggest gainer I found. And the $300 Radeon card performed almost as well as the $1000 Nvidia card (OUCH, that hurt!).
I looked over your intended purchase. It has upgradable memory, which is useful. And a very nice graphics card built by radeon!
It's too bad you cannot just get an upgrade on the guts of the machine without having to buy another monitor. Your Money would go a lot further if ya could.
I had a chance to do a geekbench test on my Imac and got a number of something like 2400.
If you submit that to their web site, it will compare your machine to others of the same maker, or pc's, or all of them.
I saw that an IMac with an i5 processor (2 core) came up with a number of 6743, and i5 2.8G (4 core) was 8309, and an
i7 (4 core) with a 2.93G was 9111.
So it looks to me that if I spend a couple of hundred more dollars now, I may be happier with this machine longer,
so I'd save money in the long run.
Just for some info, an IMac is an all in one machine, it has no PCI ports, for that matter it has no internal ports at all.
I'll see if I still have a photo of the inside of mine when I installed a new hard drive.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
Ya. Read that just now. Seems you're older machine is stuck with it's graphics.....much like a Laptop~
That'd be great!
SO you figured it out sounds like!! Go with as much power as you can afford to go with.
personal question? Why iMac? versus some-other-MAC?
Price for one, I like the all in one design of it and the clean desktop that it leaves.
Very few wires lying around, stuff like that.
Of course the fact that I've been using one for over 4 1/2 years with no problems other that the fact
that it's getting a bit dated is a large reason why a second one will be coming into the house.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
Those are very good reasons! The no-problems thing really jumps out!
Enjoy~
Did you make up your mind???
I'm currently running a 3 year old Macbook off a 20inch monitor and it is brutal!
Planning to move up to the new 27 inch iMac and having the same debate.
Is that i5 one you linked to the July 2010 update?
Mind posting your thoughts when you get it?
Thanks!
My site | Non-MHD Landscapes |Google+ | Twitter | Facebook | Smugmug photos
Did you make up your mind???
I'm currently running a 3 year old Macbook off a 20inch monitor and it is brutal!
Planning to move up to the new 27 inch iMac and having the same debate.
Is that i5 one you linked to the July 2010 update?
Mind posting your thoughts when you get it?
Thanks!
My site | Non-MHD Landscapes |Google+ | Twitter | Facebook | Smugmug photos
This is the one that I bought, pretty much top of the line for an IMac. LINK
I've only had it for a day, but wow, is that screen huge.
I have to turn my head to view all of it, it just doesn't fit in my field of view.
I just downloaded Geekbench to compare the old to new.
Older machine, around 2400, New I7 that's pretty much empty (I haven't had time to load it up yet) 9238.
That's higher than the score I read on the net.
Another thing about the screen, if you have it set to the largest display, 2560 x 1440, a picture of say
1200 x 800 looks like a postage stamp.
I'll probably end up running it at what I ran my 20" at, 1920 x 1080.
So, one day in, not a lot to report. I'll post an update in a week or so.
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
Wouldn't that make the entire screen fuzzy, which is an awful waste of such an expensive, capable monitor/computer? (LCDs do not scale as well as the old CRTs did.) It seems better to run any LCD display at its native resolution and if you want to see the picture bigger while editing, use your image editing app to zoom in on it.
I do set my default zoom level higher on the web browser I use on my big monitor. Much preferable to killing the sharpness through lowering the monitor resolution.
So help me out.
I click on displays and I get a list, from 640 X 480 up to 2560 x 1440.
Which one is "native"?
Basking in the shadows of yesterday's triumphs'.
You can never go above the native resolution ;-)
For a 27" display, the 2560x1440 (or whatever) is the native resolution. Running it at less than that will probably be a bit blurry as interpolation is necessary.
The iMac 27" has a confirmed native resolution of 2560x1440.
Same TFT panel as the NEC PA271w and the Dell U2711 and they are also 2560x1440.
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