False. My 2008 Imac has a 7200 rpm
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's New iMacs Up to 20% Faster Than Previous Models in Geekbench Testing
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
False. My 2008 Imac has a 7200 rpm
Buying my first new Mac since 2006.
I'll be getting the 21" 4K...what upgrades are worth the extra money?
I'm thinking of doing the 2tb fusion and upping to the i7. Should I bother with 16g of ram?
thanks for the advice
I'll be getting the 21" 4K...what upgrades are worth the extra money?
I'm thinking of doing the 2tb fusion and upping to the i7. Should I bother with 16g of ram?
thanks for the advice
If you're keeping it for nine years, I would recommend 16GB of RAM.
True, but
Sticking a 7200 into the new iMac shell is asking for trouble really. Its like the smallest NAS enclosure ever and they don't work reliably with 7200 rpm either.
The bigger issue is that flash memory should be now cheap enough to redesign the case to not need the HD bulge but its not.
I'm not sure why it's not mentioned in any reviews, but if you CONFIGURE (in the Apple Store) one of the new 27" iMacs you can get the 4.0 Ghz Skylake chip. Only $250 more than the i5. That's a big deal. And in an article about benchmarking, it's pretty key - even if you can't test it.
It wasn't as small as this one. Heat is a big problem with high spinning drives.
I remember using 10000rpm disks.... Those cooked...
Anyway, if density is very high, 5400 would have very good performance.
They're not 2005 5400 rpms.
Upgrading up is not really expensive and people who buy this thing mostly for the screen, can buy it cheaper by not getting the SSD.
It's not "cheap". I just think it's worth it in the long run due to how much difference it makes and how difficult it is to do yourself. ...and it's warrantied. Just my two cents.
I'm sending the late 2014 I bought last week back now 
Agree 25GB flashRAM on a 52000rpm disk drive will cost you A$300 or $US200 more than a 1TB 5200 spinner. Only other thing you get is the slightly improved AMD M390 GPU (some claiming in theory it could be 50% improve on peak performance) with same 2GB of GDDR5 RAM as the AMD M380. It's all marketing baloney. Oh wow a fusion drive. It really six that non of these specs are even available on the Apple website unless you dig and even then the 25GB FlashRAM part of the Fusion drive is in an obscure info pop-up. Nothing on the GPUs if you wanted to compare. And no comparisons from Apple telling us how much better they are. They are claiming the PCIe bus is giving the Fusion drive 50% improvement on 2014 model, but I'm wondering if they are comparing with a 5200 drive.
All up, buy the 27" and DIY an SSD drive if you can afford it, cheaper than their crap hybrid drive with 24GB FlashRAM or over priced undisclosed manufacturer SSDs with no 3 or 6 year warranty you get at OWC. By the time I put OS X & iWork on that 25GB+1TB Fusion drive, where will I fit Adobe CC?! Let alone if I just wanted to record some 100GB of live video to the SSD for later transfer to an Ext Drive. for a professional machine at pro prices very disappointing Apple.
Agree 25GB flashRAM on a 52000rpm disk drive will cost you A$300 or $US200 more than a 1TB 5200 spinner. Only other thing you get is the slightly improved AMD M390 GPU (some claiming in theory it could be 50% improve on peak performance) with same 2GB of GDDR5 RAM as the AMD M380. It's all marketing baloney. Oh wow a fusion drive. It really six that non of these specs are even available on the Apple website unless you dig and even then the 25GB FlashRAM part of the Fusion drive is in an obscure info pop-up. Nothing on the GPUs if you wanted to compare. And no comparisons from Apple telling us how much better they are. They are claiming the PCIe bus is giving the Fusion drive 50% improvement on 2014 model, but I'm wondering if they are comparing with a 5200 drive.
All up, buy the 27" and DIY an SSD drive if you can afford it, cheaper than their crap hybrid drive with 24GB FlashRAM or over priced undisclosed manufacturer SSDs with no 3 or 6 year warranty you get at OWC. By the time I put OS X & iWork on that 25GB+1TB Fusion drive, where will I fit Adobe CC?! Let alone if I just wanted to record some 100GB of live video to the SSD for later transfer to an Ext Drive. for a professional machine at pro prices very disappointing Apple.
MacBook Pro 13-inch Hard Drive Replacement Instructions
Back in the day Apple didn't thought switching out a SATA drive was too difficult to do it yourself. They provided instructions for how to do it without losing your warranty. It was common knowledge among Apple customers that you should buy only the entry model and upgrade RAM and HDD yourself. That's what justified the price of the whole computer. Now we have high entry prices combined with high but unavoidable upgrade prices plus a strong dollar.
An SSD or Fusion Drive is not only worth it in the long run, it is an absolute necessity since three years ago. Almost every old Mac still in use must have one by now. To even offer a computer with nothing but spinning disks in 2015 is an insult to humanity. A 24GB/500GB Fusion Drive should be standard in every desktop Mac.
In US there's consumer protection law that says Apple cannot void your warranty doing HDD/SDD swaps yourself. In Australia you must pay a licensed Apple tech to do it Apple are telling me (haven't checked with any consumer protection body though).
So I've been reading around and instead of the A$300 / Fusion drive from Apple (which has only 25GB of SSD compared the to the 256GB in previous model lowed fusion drive upgrade) + marginally better GPU you could buy a bootable TB 2 ThunderBay 4 (full/mini) RAID enclosure from OWC. An empty ThunderBay 4 mini RAID including RAID software (better than hardware RAID they claim) without any SSD/HDDs in it will cost you US$429 / A$603.
A hardware two bay RAID which could be made into a Fusion drive is US$245 / A$345.
A single ext TB 256GB SSD from US$328
Best yet for a single ext USB 3.0 (plenty fast enough for a single SSD) 480 GB SSD US$249 / A$350. I think that's better value than Apple's A$300 25GB int SSD/1 TB 5200 Fusion drive. Get the bottom option and use the internal drive for Time Machine or expansion ;-)
Given that no internal replacement drives are yet available due to the <s>AppleTax</s> proprietary PCIe connectors and it's a very demanding (read not for beginners) upgrade job in the previous model external solutions are the only way.
Last edited:
Thats the 27" model though isn't it. People are moaning about the 21" having 5400 which is significantly smaller.
I don't mean to stick a log on the fire but every imac release for a decade has been followed by a thread on here with people bishing about the hardware specs. It's been screen glare, mobile gpus, issues with heat, yellow screens, hard drive size/speed, lack of up-gradability, too many ports, too few ports, pricing, etc..
Obviously this product has never been meant to be about $/output and most people will just not understand the value proposition this product provides. You're either a fan of the product or you're not.
Obviously this product has never been meant to be about $/output and most people will just not understand the value proposition this product provides. You're either a fan of the product or you're not.
Intel used to have 50-100% performance improvements every generation change but for the past 6 years we've seen incremental 10-20% bumps. It's fathomable that the ARM processors will also start to reach an efficient frontier where "easy" gains are gone and you have to fight for ever point of improvement.
It's always easier to play catch-up then it is to be the leader and maintain the margin of the lead.
thanks for the insights, rmsanger.
obviously people wouldn't be discussing if they don't consider iMacs a "value proposition" in the first place. it's just sad to see Apple using marketing BS in such a overt way, of course many won't get the difference but will notice the speed difference b/w base and mid 27" iMac models. A$300 for a 25GB Flash SSD is BS in anyones language.
and while were on ports if Apple could put three USB ports and a FW800 on my old MBP I don't see why the new one I just bought only gets 2 USB and 2TB. That way I get to buy a US$178 dock for ethernet and enough USB ports, yay!
Hi everyone i am new I wanted to ask a few things. I bought a new 21.5 inch iMac late 2015 model and did a geek bench and it gets the same score as a 27 inch 2015 model with a nivida graphics card. Is this right has the cpu's and iris graphics 6200 done so much for it?
I run my iMac from a external ssd 128gb os and apps only on it.
I see the 64 bit score for the 2013 iMac model :
IMAC 2013 27inch 3.5ghz gtx 780m 4gb apple
11867 geek bench score 64 bit
This is my score and i want to know if its okay ??
Geekbench Score
3523
Single-Core Score
11879
Multi-Core Score
Section Description Single-Core Multi-Core
Integer Processor integer performance 3676 13557
Floating Point Processor floating point performance 3721 14390
Memory Memory performance 2823 3505
Geekbench 3.3.2 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)
System Information
iMac16,2
Operating System Mac OS X 10.11.2
Model iMac16,2
Model ID iMac16,2
Motherboard Apple Inc. Mac-FFE5EF870D7BA81A iMac16,2
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5575R CPU @ 2.80GHz @ 2.80 GHz
1 Processor, 4 Cores
Processor ID GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 71 Stepping 1
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB x 2
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB x 2
L2 Cache 256 KB x 2
L3 Cache 4.00 MB
L4 Cache 128 MB
Memory 8.00 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
BIOS Apple Inc. IM162.88Z.0206.B00.1508281353
Like I said I am new to all this... Just wanting some clarity that there can be such a good improvement over the years ??
Thanks
I wanted to ask a few things. I bought a new 21.5 inch iMac late 2015 model and did a geek bench and it gets the same score as a 27 inch 2015 model with a nivida graphics card. Is this right has the cpu's and iris graphics 6200 done so much for it? I run my iMac from a external ssd 128gb os and apps only on it.
I see the 64 bit score for the 2013 iMac model :
IMAC 2013 27inch 3.5ghz gtx 780m 4gb apple
11867 geek bench score 64 bit
This is my score and i want to know if its okay ??
Geekbench Score
3523
Single-Core Score
11879
Multi-Core Score
Section Description Single-Core Multi-Core
Integer Processor integer performance 3676 13557
Floating Point Processor floating point performance 3721 14390
Memory Memory performance 2823 3505
Geekbench 3.3.2 for Mac OS X x86 (64-bit)
System Information
iMac16,2
Operating System Mac OS X 10.11.2
Model iMac16,2
Model ID iMac16,2
Motherboard Apple Inc. Mac-FFE5EF870D7BA81A iMac16,2
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5575R CPU @ 2.80GHz @ 2.80 GHz
1 Processor, 4 Cores
Processor ID GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 71 Stepping 1
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB x 2
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB x 2
L2 Cache 256 KB x 2
L3 Cache 4.00 MB
L4 Cache 128 MB
Memory 8.00 GB 1867 MHz DDR3
BIOS Apple Inc. IM162.88Z.0206.B00.1508281353
Like I said I am new to all this... Just wanting some clarity that there can be such a good improvement over the years ??
Thanks
My 27" 5K late 2014 is seriously fast and I adore it. I can't imagine needing anything faster. Mind you, I did max out all the specs. I wont be changing this one for many a year I hope.