I think many will choose the 27" over the 21,5" due to the possibility to upgrade later on if necessary. Base model 27" plus added goodies will not be much more expensive compared to maxed out 21,5". Sadly for me both options are too expensive (had hoped for fusion drive as standard)..
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Do they not have a fusion drive smaller than 1TB?
I would really like one of those if I order a 27", but I keep most of my "stuff" on externals, rather than on my computer. I'd honestly be good with a 64GB SSD in my iMac.
I feel like i'm making too many concessions with this new iMac (well, 2-3, but that's still too many).
I've already convinced myself to get a 27" since the RAM is user upgradeable.
To get over it and just buy a USB SuperDrive.
And now i'm trying to convince myself that adding $250 to the price for a 1TB Fusion Drive that i'll use about 30GB of is a-ok.
And I really don't see this as an actual re-design. I'm no computer engineer, but I don't understand what could possibly be the benefit of making a desktop computer thinner.
I may just put an SSD in my current 21.5" iMac and be happy for another couple years.
I would really like one of those if I order a 27", but I keep most of my "stuff" on externals, rather than on my computer. I'd honestly be good with a 64GB SSD in my iMac.
I feel like i'm making too many concessions with this new iMac (well, 2-3, but that's still too many).
I've already convinced myself to get a 27" since the RAM is user upgradeable.
To get over it and just buy a USB SuperDrive.
And now i'm trying to convince myself that adding $250 to the price for a 1TB Fusion Drive that i'll use about 30GB of is a-ok.
And I really don't see this as an actual re-design. I'm no computer engineer, but I don't understand what could possibly be the benefit of making a desktop computer thinner.
I may just put an SSD in my current 21.5" iMac and be happy for another couple years.
Well don't worry. Youre extremely wrong. The previous was useless with anything Adobe, which has a nearly exclusive relationship with nVidia for acceleration of AE and Premiere. The new models solve that and can now be used professionally again for FCP X or Premiere/AE. It would be nice to have FW800 built in, or A DVD, but external is ok.
You're not? Perhaps just narrow minded and stubborn? What in the world do you do with your Mac that would justify your comments and needs? Perhaps you are only desperate for bragging rights?
FWIW, I came to the same conclusion and ended up building a machine. I'm running an X79 board, 3930K Hex Core proc, 16gb PC 1600, GTX 670 hitting 20K+ Geekbench and I have less than $2k in it WITH a 27" IPS LED display (Korean panel from eBay, same panel in 27"screens/iMacs). ML is rock solid, never a single KP. It's beyond what a Mac Pro twice the cost will perform at and certainly the new max config iMacs.
It is not for the faint of heart and it's not going to be a vanilla install (requires some tweaking and compromises..ie. no machine sleep, no speedstep) but it's also been a very fun project. I'm overclocked to 3.8ghz (4.2ghz in win 7 where I get 23K geekbench!).. those are very conservative overclocks and beyond easy to configure with these boards. Even at stock speed she pulls over 16K.
The thread that got me going: X79
Good to know...
Can I ask you a couple of questions?
You've used a SandyBridge-E CPU, and on the hackintosh forums they seem to say that builds with Pro CPUs have a couple of issues (no sleep, bad power management meaning the machine runs at full power all the time so fans are crank to the max all the time), what's your experience?
Myself I'll probably build more of a iMac equivalent, best in class 4-Cores i7 but with a desktop GTX 680 since they are supported by ML 10.8.2.
The most annoying point for me with the iMac BTO is that I was hoping I was going to be able to build something with a bigger SSD (around 256GB) and create myself a fusion drive with it, but the only SSD option is plain mad.
At least with a Hackintosh I'll be able to chose my SSD (right now there are a more differences in concepts with Intel trying to offer more standard IO which might be nice) who knows I might even go full nuts with a PCIe SSD ^^.
Still I'm going to have to research quite a bit to not go mad while building it.
Wee hours of the early morning, and I just ordered mine! A maxed-out 21.5 incher.
My Christmas present to... myself!!
My Christmas present to... myself!!
The photo does realistically show how thin it looks from that perspective. Everyone knows that it has a buldge on the back to hold the hard drive and hardware.
Well, buying imac for its cost and not having SSD is joke.. HDD is bottleneck nowadays, so pimping your machine with even hex core does not matter now, as slow hdd will kill it... thats all, now go and buy one to show apple that fanboys do not care about technology, all they nee is apple brand
And some of the photos taken at an angle just to show off the bulge are deceiving as well. Especially when you then look at it straight on from the back. The thinness was just a consequence of Apple saying they're done with the optical drive, and laminating the display to the cover glass. I'll be interested to hear how the reflection is. If they were able to significantly reduce the glare that would be a huge improvement.
My budget is 2k. Should I go with the base 27 with fusion or the 1999 model with faster CPU/GPU?
Thanks
Thanks
Your last statement is spot on, definitely do your research. And I couldn't agree more; I probably would have gone with a new iMac 27 if they stuck with standard sata-III as the previous gen did. I was one of the first to pull apart a 2007 Aluminum iMac for HD replacement and document the process so that doesn't worry me much.
I will mention that you if you want the very easiest Mac like install and don't necessairly need to geek out to the bleeding edge (x79/sandy-e) then this is the way to go: Kakewalk
The guy has done a great job at creating a very smooth installer with little to no tweaking necessary and has documented all of the boards he directly supprots. Gigabyte boards are the best for it, he has a good list of boards and even some full builds on his 'Computer Builds' link. In my dinking around with h@cks, this was by far the smoothest install process.
That said... yes, for my X79 sandy-e setup there is no sleep, no power-management so you have to disable speed-step in bios and the cpu runs at a constant Ghz (3.8ghz in os x for me... dialed in 4.2ghz in win7). That's not to say it is running full tilt/full load, they idle at low temp... not as low as with speed-step enabled of course, but a reasonable 36-38 for me. Under full load (rc5/folding/pi95) I hit about 68. As far as fans, I use all quiet PWM fans and the fan noise, while there, is not an issue. When under load it does ramp up as expected, but they definitely don't run at full blast when idle.
Hope that helps some! FWIW, the Gigabyte GTX 670 Windforce OC is a fantastic card.... works OOTB in ML.
Great minds!
I opted for the exact same configuration with the addition of a SuperDrive for importing music (Apple Lossless) and the occational software install. Plus AppleCare of course. I'll upgrade the RAM myself later and save a little money. I've been hobbling for years on a late-2006, low-end iMac (which I'll be recycling). Really looking forward to this upgrade. Should hold me for at least another six years.
I opted for the exact same configuration with the addition of a SuperDrive for importing music (Apple Lossless) and the occational software install. Plus AppleCare of course. I'll upgrade the RAM myself later and save a little money. I've been hobbling for years on a late-2006, low-end iMac (which I'll be recycling). Really looking forward to this upgrade. Should hold me for at least another six years.
I am looking at getting the 27" iMac but am unsure wether or not I should get the 1TB Hard drive or the 1TB Fusion Drive. The Standard is set at 7200 rpm. Is that good enough?
In New Zealand its an extra $400 for the Fusion Drive
All HDDs are crap, in terms of speed, no matter how many RPMs they are. Either get the fusion drive or plan on getting your own SSD for a DIY replacement.
If you're gonna spend $1000s on a state of the art new iMac, there's no sense in hobbling it with outdated storage tech.
Yes, but IIRC the restriction is you can't install Windows on the SSD portion.
See http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/11/review-the-mac-mini-takes-the-ivy-bridge-to-fusion-town/3/
d'oh! makes sense... didn't realize they were using smaller form-factor drives on that model!