Base 570 and 512 SSD or 580 and Fusion

[AndyR]

Long time Mac (mbp) user and looking at getting a 27”iMac to use mainly as a family computer. Myself it’ll be mainly photo editing, general use and ideally some light gaming in boot camp thanks to a stupid large steam library.

Where I live (NZ) apple don’t do return iMacs but some of the local resellers regularly do 10% macs in store. So that means I can basically get he 580 model but with the stock 2Tb Fusion drive for the same price as I would pay for a base 570 model upgraded to 512 SSD.

I already have a couple of 512 Samsung Evo 840 SSDs left over from and old pc I was using a while back so was going to use one of those for boot camp.

What would you guys do?

 

[tn-xyz]

most people on this board will tell you to go for the SSD-only configuration to eliminate the possibility of a faulty mechanical hard drive down the road, which will make your fusion drive completely inaccessible.

i wouldn't sacrifice a better GPU for a better drive setup, especially when you plan on doing some gaming.

the 2 TB fusion drive consists of a 128 GB SSD. if you're somewhat tech-savvy, you can replace the SSD with one of more capacity later on (ebay, original apple SSD). you can even de-fuse the setup and install the OS on the SSD drive, using the traditional hard drive for storage and other things.

 

[EugW]

Personally I would take a bigger SSD over a faster GPU any day, but I'm not a gamer.

In your shoes I'd save up a bit longer and get a faster GPU and a bigger SSD. The problem here is it sounds like you won't get the 10% discount for a config-to-order model. I consider the Fusion drive an anachronism in 2017, but one thing you could consider doing is to get a Fusion drive (2 TB or larger) and then split the Fusion so you actually have a dedicated OS and application drive for 128 GB, and keep the 2 TB drive for data.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Bootcamp will only install on the HDD of a fusion drive set up making windows and gaming slow for you, the ssd would give you all the speed in both windows and OS X a much better option assuming your gaming is fairly casual the 570 will be fine for you.

 

[mrchrispy]

580 over the 570 any day of the week.
As someone has already said, I'd look at splitting the fusion drive and using the 128GB for OS and 2TB drive for data.
I think you can bootcamp from the USB-C SSD.

I've 580 with 512SSD so bootcamp from the internal disk and have all the game library's on a USB-C drive (its mighty fast)