650M or 660M

I'm trying a good balance and comprise for my next iMac. Photography editing (RAW files of a D800 and soon an X-Pro 1) is my main hobby, followed by iTunes (music listening and streaming content to my Apple TV), and finally a bit of gaming (Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 and Portal 2, mostly). I may boot camp to Windows for some other games, but I'm not TOO big of a gamer like I used to be.

The iMac's I'm looking at are the same in CPU, RAM, and Fusion Drive, but the difference is the GPU (650M on the 21.5, and 660M on the 27).

There's an $80 difference in the two. Is the 660M worth the extra $80.

Also, I prefer the 21.5 size, but wouldn't mind the 27 if it's worth the 660M GPU.

Thoughts?

Steve121178 said:

As you prefer the 21.5 size, get that.

There's a negligible difference between the 650 & 660. If you are in no immediate rush I would hold out for the refresh which would be around September. I would expect to see 7xx GPU's in the new models.

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I've been weighing that too. It'll be the 2nd gen of putting this slim desktops together, plus I'm hoping for 7xx series GPU's or at least higher end 6xx series in the 21.5's as well as going back to 7200RPM drives in the 21.5's. I hope they have better SSD options and have it like the new Macbook's so that it's much faster. I actually prefer to have an all SSD setup.

In the end, I can wait. I'm in no rush. I'm finding with these current configurations, I'm having to make too many compromises. The good GPU's and the faster drives are in the 27's.

The 21.5's seem over priced since you can't upgrade and are forced to pay an extra $200 for another 8 gigs (and I need the full 16 gigs for photo editing). Frankly, that's too much.

Even with the much needed fusion drive, that's another $200, since Apple decided to go with slow 5400rpm drives, which is a problem when I go to game on boot camp. Combine that with the gimped VRAM on the GPU's, I'm not getting that much power for the price. A $1499 computer suddenly becomes a $2000 computer because Apple gimps the baseline and forces you to the overpriced upgrades.

I went with the 21.5" with Fusion and 16GB's of RAM.