Another dilemma: i9 vs i5 3.7 GHz on 27" iMac

[cannondale1974]

I appreciated all the comments on the other thread I started (Awesome wife bought me an iMac) Returned that one today and will definitely go SSD. Talked to a very knowledgable guy in the Apple store that does a lot of video and photo editing like myself. He was a big proponent of going with the i9 vs i5 3.7 GHz. The price is quickly escalating so what do you guys think, is the i9 worth the extra $400? I read a ton of threads on here and looks like many have ordered the i9 but looks like there may be some heat issues also? If it were up to you, would you go i9 with 1T SSD or i5 3.7GHz with 2T SSD? Both scenarios would put me at $3000 which is the absolutely most I want to spend. (really above our budget but what the heck, right?)

 

[Zen_Arcade]

Go i9 and wait for refurb if you simply must have the ssd.

Edit - do you qualify for government/veteran or edu pricing?

 

[3SQ Machine]

I've seen some Macrumors members go with the i5 3.7 (still a VERY powerful chip) because it runs cooler. Seems consensus that the i9 is always faster, but not "as fast" as it could be given iMac cooling. Up to you whether to spend the extra money.

You can always give the i9 a two-week trial run, install Intel Power Gadget, and keep an eye on temps + fan noise to see if you're getting your money's worth of performance from this pricey chip. I've done that with my mac purchases and been glad I did as I've returned those that I felt I couldn't live with long-term without penalty.

 

[Zdigital2015]

I appreciated all the comments on the other thread I started (Awesome wife bought me an iMac) Returned that one today and will definitely go SSD. Talked to a very knowledgable guy in the Apple store that does a lot of video and photo editing like myself. He was a big proponent of going with the i9 vs i5 3.7 GHz. The price is quickly escalating so what do you guys think, is the i9 worth the extra $400? I read a ton of threads on here and looks like many have ordered the i9 but looks like there may be some heat issues also? If it were up to you, would you go i9 with 1T SSD or i5 3.7GHz with 2T SSD? Both scenarios would put me at $3000 which is the absolutely most I want to spend. (really above our budget but what the heck, right?)

My Certified Refurbished i9/1TB SSD/Vega48 was $2929, just in case you want to max out the GPU on top of it. The 2TB version is $3269, if you can get one when they pop up.

 

[cannondale1974]

Go i9 and wait for refurb if you simply must have the ssd.

Edit - do you qualify for government/veteran or edu pricing?

I don't qualify but after reading several websites it was recommended to purchase through the Apple educational website for a 10% discount. Evidently they don't check credentials or something to that effect. Not sure how "ethical" this is but seemed like it was pretty common. I have been checking the refurb section often but it seems like they never have the exact configuration I want.
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I've seen some Macrumors members go with the i5 3.7 (still a VERY powerful chip) because it runs cooler. Seems consensus that the i9 is always faster, but not "as fast" as it could be given iMac cooling. Up to you whether to spend the extra money.

You can always give the i9 a two-week trial run, install Intel Power Gadget, and keep an eye on temps + fan noise to see if you're getting your money's worth of performance from this pricey chip. I've done that with my mac purchases and been glad I did as I've returned those that I felt I couldn't live with long-term without penalty.

Good advice, I'm sort of leaning towards the i5 3.7 due to cost. After watching countless youtube videos and reading enough to make my head spin I think I've settled on the Vegas 48 GPU which will cost $400 more. I do some video editing so I really want smooth editing and rendering. I like the idea of a cooler running maching also. I have the i7 in my present 2010 iMac, the new i5 3.7 should be a step up from that right?
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My Certified Refurbished i9/1TB SSD/Vega48 was $2929, just in case you want to max out the GPU on top of it. The 2TB version is $3269, if you can get one when they pop up.

Wow, that is a fantastic deal! Those are the exact specs I'd like to have also. Did you have to wait a long time to find that configuration? I even looked on the refurb tracker and most everything with the specs I want are sold out. I want to go with the Vega48 GPU also, and definitely 1T SSD (2 would be even better)

 

[JacobHarvey]

Good advice, I'm sort of leaning towards the i5 3.7 due to cost. After watching countless youtube videos and reading enough to make my head spin I think I've settled on the Vegas 48 GPU which will cost $400 more. I do some video editing so I really want smooth editing and rendering. I like the idea of a cooler running maching also. I have the i7 in my present 2010 iMac, the new i5 3.7 should be a step up from that right?
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Yes the 6 core i5-9600K is significantly faster than that pretty old 4 Core Lynnfield i7-870 (even taking into account its hyperthreading). The i5 runs at significantly higher frequency, has 2 extra cores, and is several generations ahead regarding improved CPU architecture and lithography process (14nm vs 45nm). It is also a much more power efficient CPU

 

[Wolf1701]

I've seen some Macrumors members go with the i5 3.7 (still a VERY powerful chip) because it runs cooler. Seems consensus that the i9 is always faster, but not "as fast" as it could be given iMac cooling

bought that (i5 9600k, 580, ssd 512), added 32 GB, geekbench 5 multicore around 5800+ (after ram upgrade). Temperature idle around 40/42c celsius. Quiet but not dead silent, 1200 rpm mostly (99%)of the time, but I do only a lot of 'office' multitasking with dual monitor, no video/audio editing. I also have a MacMini 2018 i5 and noticed how amazing it is with h265 encoding (I suppose that the T2 do the job).

Bought the i5 (2460$ 7.7% tax here) with the idea to change more often the iMac (usually was 4-6 year) to be able to switch to the new tech (arm/amd, navi, T2, screen size, cooling, ...) with a good reselling value.

 

[Ledgem]

Get the i9.

Here's my reasoning:
1) The internal storage at 2 TB will likely be wasted. That's fast storage that is ideally used for data that is being used frequently. If you're just archiving on it then you're wasting it. Get a Drobo, Synology, QNAP, etc. instead for archival and light to moderate access. If you're taking as much video and photo as I am, 2 TB isn't going to be enough anyway. (FWIW, I'm working with a 512 GB Apple SSD and I clear data from completed projects, archiving it onto a Drobo that currently has over 9 TB of capacity in a RAID 5-equivalent array (no data lost if one hard drive goes down) and that can easily be upgraded to a much higher capacity.)

2) Storage can always be upgraded in some form, but unless you're a technical wizard, you can't upgrade your processor. Aside from getting more bang for your buck with HDDs over SSDs, if you want a better "internal" (boot) drive you can do that with Thunderbolt 3-based drives. You can buy large SSDs that perform better than Apple's and that may come in at more competitive price points. (Apple recently adjusted the prices on their SSDs so the price difference isn't dramatic as it once was, but I'd wager that'll change in the next few months.) The only downside is that you'd have something hanging off of your Thunderbolt 3 port, which for a desktop isn't a big deal. So get the best processor that you can.

3) "Heat kills electronics" is true, but an oversimplification. Apple and Intel aren't in the business of building devices that will be known for early failures. There were some studies indicating that it's not raw heat, per se, but thermal stress (that is, how many times a device goes from a powered-down state with zero voltage flowing through it and at room temperature to a powered-on state running much hotter) that really shortens components' lifetimes. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be powering down or suspending their computers - there's definitely no widespread series of failures associated with those behaviors - but on this point, aside from ensuring that you're not plugging up the cooling vents, don't worry about it.

I would only go with the i5 if you weren't intending to try to keep this computer for as long as possible, or if you were near-certain that you'd never touch the i9's capabilities. Even then, I'd still recommend keeping the internal storage at 1 TB, or even less.

 

[Sam Marks]

You can get an idea of how thermally limited is the i9 iMac when you compare it to other supposedly thermally limited computers such as a laptop.

In my case I compared the iMac i9 9900K to an inferior i7 9700 inside a relatively thin laptop. The evidence is that single core GB5 score of the laptop was higher than the iMac i9 score (in fact higher than any existing Mac). The multicore score of my i7 9700 laptop was only 5% less than my iMac i9 9900K.

On the GPU front, the humble GTX 1660 ti in my laptop (6GB DDR6 RAM, mid-tier card, laptop version, a €200 upgrade vs the €540 upgrade of the Vega 48 in Europe) is, in my experience, far superior to the Vega 48 of the iMac, both when rendering, when doing machine learning modeling and when playing high end games.

The GTX 1660 ti of my laptop in GB5 OpenCL compute scores over 62,000, 38% higher than the score obtained by my iMac's Vega 48 (around 45,000). And it runs much cooler and very silent when pushed. Based on the benchmarks, it would be close to the Radeon 5700XT or Vega 64, at least in OpenCL. Thanks to a proper heat management and a good thermal design.

If a laptop design can put two silent and efficient fans inside a laptop, each for CPU and GPU, with clever heat dissipation design I wondered why the much expensive iMac has only one fan for both CPU and GPU, having much more space inside.

I can not comment on the iMac with i5 or Radeon Pro 580X.

Moreover, the i9 iMac it ended making much more noise with this single fan and having less performance out of its components. Lastly, my laptop also have a silent mode were it is dead silent and it allows still a very interesting level of performance (it has also a performance mode and an battery saving mode). I use it in a music production studio and the results are fantastic. The performance of my laptop is also superior to the MBP 16 with a similar configuration for a fifth of the cost (64GB RAM, 4TB fast SSD, etc.).

In fact, as I commented in various threads, my i9 Vega 48 iMac died after registering very high temperatures/high fan noise when I pushed it the night before (I returned it).

 

[cannondale1974]

Yes the 6 core i5-9600K is significantly faster than that pretty old 4 Core Lynnfield i7-870 (even taking into account its hyperthreading). The i5 runs at significantly higher frequency, has 2 extra cores, and is several generations ahead regarding improved CPU architecture and lithography process (14nm vs 45nm). It is also a much more power efficient CPU

Great info, thank you. What is your take on the i5 vs. i9? Definitely go i9 for semi-heavy video editing? Most of my editing is in iMovie currently but I have Premier Pro and plan on getting more in depth with it. I heavily use Lightroom and would like that speedy as well but that program shouldn't be as taxing as video editing I would think.
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Get the i9.

Here's my reasoning:
1) The internal storage at 2 TB will likely be wasted. That's fast storage that is ideally used for data that is being used frequently. If you're just archiving on it then you're wasting it. Get a Drobo, Synology, QNAP, etc. instead for archival and light to moderate access. If you're taking as much video and photo as I am, 2 TB isn't going to be enough anyway. (FWIW, I'm working with a 512 GB Apple SSD and I clear data from completed projects, archiving it onto a Drobo that currently has over 9 TB of capacity in a RAID 5-equivalent array (no data lost if one hard drive goes down) and that can easily be upgraded to a much higher capacity.)

2) Storage can always be upgraded in some form, but unless you're a technical wizard, you can't upgrade your processor. Aside from getting more bang for your buck with HDDs over SSDs, if you want a better "internal" (boot) drive you can do that with Thunderbolt 3-based drives. You can buy large SSDs that perform better than Apple's and that may come in at more competitive price points. (Apple recently adjusted the prices on their SSDs so the price difference isn't dramatic as it once was, but I'd wager that'll change in the next few months.) The only downside is that you'd have something hanging off of your Thunderbolt 3 port, which for a desktop isn't a big deal. So get the best processor that you can.

3) "Heat kills electronics" is true, but an oversimplification. Apple and Intel aren't in the business of building devices that will be known for early failures. There were some studies indicating that it's not raw heat, per se, but thermal stress (that is, how many times a device goes from a powered-down state with zero voltage flowing through it and at room temperature to a powered-on state running much hotter) that really shortens components' lifetimes. I'm not saying that people shouldn't be powering down or suspending their computers - there's definitely no widespread series of failures associated with those behaviors - but on this point, aside from ensuring that you're not plugging up the cooling vents, don't worry about it.

I would only go with the i5 if you weren't intending to try to keep this computer for as long as possible, or if you were near-certain that you'd never touch the i9's capabilities. Even then, I'd still recommend keeping the internal storage at 1 TB, or even less.

Fantastic info, I really appreciate it! I'm definitely going SSD, may have to make the i9 a must have as well. What are your thoughts on the GPU? Big upgrade going to the Vegas48? I watched one video where the tech guy giving advice strongly advised the Vegas48 chip for video editing. I really don't want to encounter any lag or stuttering when editing. Thanks again. Oh, and yes I'd like to keep it as long as possible. My 2010 27" iMac with i7, 4 gig of RAM (gasp), and 2T HHD is still going decently strong although it has slowed down quite a bit. No where near as fast as our 2015 MacBook Pro with SSD.
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You can get an idea of how thermally limited is the i9 iMac when you compare it to other supposedly thermally limited computers such as a laptop.

In my case I compared the iMac i9 9900K to an inferior i7 9700 inside a relatively thin laptop. The evidence is that single core GB5 score of the laptop was higher than the iMac i9 score (in fact higher than any existing Mac). The multicore score of my i7 9700 laptop was only 5% less than my iMac i9 9900K.

On the GPU front, the humble GTX 1660 ti in my laptop (6GB DDR6 RAM, mid-tier card, laptop version, a €200 upgrade vs the €540 upgrade of the Vega 48 in Europe) is, in my experience, far superior to the Vega 48 of the iMac, both when rendering, when doing machine learning modeling and when playing high end games.

The GTX 1660 ti of my laptop in GB5 OpenCL compute scores over 62,000, 38% higher than the score obtained by my iMac's Vega 48 (around 45,000). And it runs much cooler and very silent when pushed. Based on the benchmarks, it would be close to the Radeon 5700XT or Vega 64, at least in OpenCL. Thanks to a proper heat management and a good thermal design.

If a laptop design can put two silent and efficient fans inside a laptop, each for CPU and GPU, with clever heat dissipation design I wondered why the much expensive iMac has only one fan for both CPU and GPU, having much more space inside.

I can not comment on the iMac with i5 or Radeon Pro 580X.

Moreover, the i9 iMac it ended making much more noise with this single fan and having less performance out of its components. Lastly, my laptop also have a silent mode were it is dead silent and it allows still a very interesting level of performance (it has also a performance mode and an battery saving mode). I use it in a music production studio and the results are fantastic. The performance of my laptop is also superior to the MBP 16 with a similar configuration for a fifth of the cost (64GB RAM, 4TB fast SSD, etc.).

In fact, as I commented in various threads, my i9 Vega 48 iMac died after registering very high temperatures/high fan noise when I pushed it the night before (I returned it).

Sorry to hear about your issues with the i9 Mac, hopefully that was an isolated event. Your current laptop is a PC? I would have a hard time going back to the PC world, have been in love with Mac products since getting my first iMac 10 years ago. They certainly aren't perfect, there's just something "special" about them. Just curious, when you pushed it the night before, did it run for several hours at very high temps, rendering etc?

 

[Zdigital2015]

Wow, that is a fantastic deal! Those are the exact specs I'd like to have also. Did you have to wait a long time to find that configuration? I even looked on the refurb tracker and most everything with the specs I want are sold out. I want to go with the Vega48 GPU also, and definitely 1T SSD (2 would be even better)

I followed the Certified Refurbished pages for several months as I was debating between a 2019 15" MacBook Pro or a 5K iMac. I have a 2010 that hasn't been powered on for about three years (failing HDD) and a 2013 maxed out (Core i7 3.5GHz/32GB/3TB Fusion/GTX 780M) that has the initial signs of HDD failure.

I purchased the iMac the day they became available on the Refurbished Store and I have seen them back for sale a few time since then. Given the holiday season, I would expect that in 30-60 days they will back in there in quantity. If they are, don't hesitate. I missed getting the 2TB SSD version and have yet to see that exact model (Core i9/8GB DRAM/2TB SSD/Vega 48) show up again on the Refurbs page. It is a tedious to keep checking, but is worth it considering the money I saved. It was also after Apple reduced the cost of the higher tier BTO SSD upgrades, which also made a considerable difference. Good luck!

 

[Sam Marks]

After 10 years using OSX without any problem I was very afraid of switching to Windows again. In fact, I have prepared OSX Catalina for installation in this PC laptop (that is specially configured to be able to run OSX and other OS). Blue screens, Driver issues, viruses and malware, instability, incompatible soft, registry nightmares, latency, etc. were my Windows memories of the past.

But in the end I gladly discovered the hugue advances of Windows 10 Pro, which for me it is now very close to OSX in functionalities and ease of use. My transition is going fantastic. I put in standby the installation of OSX for the moment. I have installed on Windows the same programs that I use in OSX and they run perfectly. Sometimes I forget that I am using Windows 10. Even the keyboard commands are configured in my keyboard to imitate the OSX ones. I can read and write all mi OSX formatted disks in W10 and viceversa. Much of the interesting things of OSX are now present in W10 (symlinks, aliases, fast file searching by file indexing, apps/task bar that can be automatically hidden, preview of files, etc.)

Regarding my new iMac problem, the night before I pushed the computer by arranging a big music production session with a lot of virtual instruments and virtual effects tracks. The fans were at maximum speed but the cpu and logic board reached high temps. After saving the session in my DAW I played Fornite during 2 hours with automatic GPU settings. This also pushed the fan to a very noisy level and the temps high (my room temp was high that night, outside we had 36°C at night and inside over 32°C, now we have -9°C outside hahaha). I do not have A/C in the studio.

The following morning the iMac started to do strange things, like random restarts without kernel panic info. The frequency of the random restarts increased and there was a moment when the computer refused to reboot anymore. It was dead. This was certified by the Apple tech service, not only by me. I returned it. 2 possibilities I see: factory or asembly defect (individual) or overheating problems affecting the logic board (my usage required better thermal management). I did not obtain any official explanation from Apple on my case, only my money back (I was lucky).

 

[Ledgem]

Fantastic info, I really appreciate it! I'm definitely going SSD, may have to make the i9 a must have as well. What are your thoughts on the GPU? Big upgrade going to the Vegas48? I watched one video where the tech guy giving advice strongly advised the Vegas48 chip for video editing. I really don't want to encounter any lag or stuttering when editing. Thanks again. Oh, and yes I'd like to keep it as long as possible. My 2010 27" iMac with i7, 4 gig of RAM (gasp), and 2T HHD is still going decently strong although it has slowed down quite a bit. No where near as fast as our 2015 MacBook Pro with SSD.

It depends on what type of video you're editing. Are you editing multiple 4K streams, or doing heavy visual effect rendering? Since you mentioned that you're using iMovie at present then I'm guessing the answer to those questions is "no," in which case I'm not sure that you'd benefit much from the Vega. (It's actually worth noting that iMovie won't be able to fully utilize your i9, either - unless they changed this recently, Apple artificially limits how many cores it can use. So if you start a render and look at your processor usage, don't be disappointed if it's only 25% or something like that.) Lightroom might have more of a performance difference, but you'd have to look around for that; I use Capture One, which reportedly handles GPU/CPU resources better. Even with Capture One, the Vega would likely be overkill.

My thinking is that even the base GPU will be worlds better than your current system, and it should work well for your uses. Stick with that, and if it becomes limiting (say, when you're upgrading your software and find that your needs are more demanding), go the eGPU route. AMD is on the verge of releasing a new GPU architecture; in 1-3 years, when you'd likely be thinking about a GPU upgrade, your eGPU options will outclass your current GPU upgrade options. As long as you're comfortable with some potential tinkering (sliding a GPU card into a chassis), I'd think that preferable to spending a few hundred dollars to upgrade the GPU in the iMac.

The following morning the iMac started to do strange things, like random restarts without kernel panic info. The frequency of the random restarts increased and there was a moment when the computer refused to reboot anymore. It was dead. This was certified by the Apple tech service, not only by me. I returned it. 2 possibilities I see: factory or asembly defect (individual) or overheating problems affecting the logic board (my usage required better thermal management). I did not obtain any official explanation from Apple on my case, only my money back (I was lucky).

For what it's worth, this doesn't sound like a classic heat damage problem. I guess we'll never know what it was, but I don't think heat is what killed it.

 

[Sam Marks]

After all, it is possible that I got a faulty unit, very bad luck. I did not want to test another unit again. This pushed me to try the "dark side" (aka W10) momentarily. Luckily, the dark side is no so dark anymore. W10 Pro has improved a lot of things. And it allows me to use my existing usb audio interfaces that Catalina is not supporting for the moment. When working with my preferred pro software I can not tell the difference between OSX and W10.

I was happy paying the Apple tax when it was a 30% or 50%. But now, the Apple tax has sky rocketed to 400%, in my case, comparing my new laptop to a comparable MBP 16 (4tb ssd, 64GB RAM, top CPU, etc.).

 

[cannondale1974]

It depends on what type of video you're editing. Are you editing multiple 4K streams, or doing heavy visual effect rendering? Since you mentioned that you're using iMovie at present then I'm guessing the answer to those questions is "no," in which case I'm not sure that you'd benefit much from the Vega. (It's actually worth noting that iMovie won't be able to fully utilize your i9, either - unless they changed this recently, Apple artificially limits how many cores it can use. So if you start a render and look at your processor usage, don't be disappointed if it's only 25% or something like that.) Lightroom might have more of a performance difference, but you'd have to look around for that; I use Capture One, which reportedly handles GPU/CPU resources better. Even with Capture One, the Vega would likely be overkill.

My thinking is that even the base GPU will be worlds better than your current system, and it should work well for your uses. Stick with that, and if it becomes limiting (say, when you're upgrading your software and find that your needs are more demanding), go the eGPU route. AMD is on the verge of releasing a new GPU architecture; in 1-3 years, when you'd likely be thinking about a GPU upgrade, your eGPU options will outclass your current GPU upgrade options. As long as you're comfortable with some potential tinkering (sliding a GPU card into a chassis), I'd think that preferable to spending a few hundred dollars to upgrade the GPU in the iMac.


For what it's worth, this doesn't sound like a classic heat damage problem. I guess we'll never know what it was, but I don't think heat is what killed it.

I'm doing simple video editing at the moment, 99% in iMovie working with 1080 and DSLR video at 1080, usually 24 or 30 fps. Simple titles, very little transitions and usually add a music track. I'd like to delve into some multi cam stuff but not sure when I'll jump to 4K. Ironically I've been shooting and editing video for 10 years but never made the leap to a more professional editing software. The eGPU route is very interesting, I'm leaning so much on here! So all I need to do is remove the back of my iMac and simply plug in a new GPU? I could probably handle that down the road. Maybe the 580 GPU will suffice, that would safe $400 on the initial purchase.

 

[Wolf1701]

The "e" in eGPU stands for external...

 

[Ledgem]

I'm doing simple video editing at the moment, 99% in iMovie working with 1080 and DSLR video at 1080, usually 24 or 30 fps. Simple titles, very little transitions and usually add a music track. I'd like to delve into some multi cam stuff but not sure when I'll jump to 4K. Ironically I've been shooting and editing video for 10 years but never made the leap to a more professional editing software. The eGPU route is very interesting, I'm leaning so much on here! So all I need to do is remove the back of my iMac and simply plug in a new GPU? I could probably handle that down the road. Maybe the 580 GPU will suffice, that would safe $400 on the initial purchase.

As the poster above mentioned, eGPU means external GPU. The Thunderbolt protocol essentially allows externally connected devices to be viewed as if they were connected directly to the motherboard, and while the bandwidth is still superior for devices on the motherboard, Thunderbolt 3's connectivity carries enough bandwidth that the performance hit is fairly small (and depending on the device, non-existent).

So there's no need to remove any casing on your Mac, you just plug something in to the Thunderbolt port. When I referenced sliding a card into something, it was a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. The graphics card still needs to insert into something to draw power from and communicate with, which is where the enclosure comes into play. In many ways it's easier than fiddling with the inside of a computer, but bears nothing that the enclosures aren't exactly cheap. On the bright side, they should last you a good, long while, and once you have an enclosure you can swap out what's inside of it.

 

[cannondale1974]

As the poster above mentioned, eGPU means external GPU. The Thunderbolt protocol essentially allows externally connected devices to be viewed as if they were connected directly to the motherboard, and while the bandwidth is still superior for devices on the motherboard, Thunderbolt 3's connectivity carries enough bandwidth that the performance hit is fairly small (and depending on the device, non-existent).

So there's no need to remove any casing on your Mac, you just plug something in to the Thunderbolt port. When I referenced sliding a card into something, it was a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure. The graphics card still needs to insert into something to draw power from and communicate with, which is where the enclosure comes into play. In many ways it's easier than fiddling with the inside of a computer, but bears nothing that the enclosures aren't exactly cheap. On the bright side, they should last you a good, long while, and once you have an enclosure you can swap out what's inside of it.

Great info, that's really interesting stuff! I researched eGPU's a little, the enclosure's aren't exactly small but does seem like a nice way to upgrade your GPU down the road. I appreciate the advice!