Base i5 - max i5 - waiting for new i5

[Christian92]

Hello,

I know that there are a many threads regarding the configuration but I have still some questions for a new iMac.

I am a web and app developer who uses multiple VS Code windows, browser windows and Xcode at the same time on my 2017 base 13" MacBook Pro connected to two 4k monitors.
Some media tools like Affinity Photo or Designer and virtual machines are also regularly used at the same time. Every two month I also edit some videos.

My MacBook gets noisy and hot really quick and begins to stutter if I use some more advanced VS Codes and websites.

Thats why I want a iMac with the main configuration:
- 27" 5K
- 512 GB SSD
- 24GB RAM
- i5

Now I can't decided which processor and GPU are the right for me.
I plan to keep the iMac for 10 years.

Will my tasks and the overall experience improve (or be future proof) with a better processor (3.8 vs 3.4) or even more cores (new base i5).
The iMac 3.8 will also have a better GPU (580 with 8 GB VRAM) but I don't know if I would require even the 570 GPU (4GB VRAM).
I rarely play games, I only want a really fluid interface and workflows on the two 4k monitors and the iMac 5k.

Basically I "could" wait for a new iMac until November, but I want one now, because I spent so much time looking for possible rumors and on the other hand configure some 2017 iMacs...

 

[alien3dx]

Hello,

I know that there are a many threads regarding the configuration but I have still some questions for a new iMac.

I am a web and app developer who uses multiple VS Code windows, browser windows and Xcode at the same time on my 2017 base 13" MacBook Pro connected to two 4k monitors.
Some media tools like Affinity Photo or Designer and virtual machines are also regularly used at the same time. Every two month I also edit some videos.

My MacBook gets noisy and hot really quick and begins to stutter if I use some more advanced VS Codes and websites.

Thats why I want a iMac with the main configuration:
- 27" 5K
- 512 GB SSD
- 24GB RAM
- i5

Now I can't decided which processor and GPU are the right for me.
I plan to keep the iMac for 10 years.

Will my tasks and the overall experience improve (or be future proof) with a better processor (3.8 vs 3.4) or even more cores (new base i5).
The iMac 3.8 will also have a better GPU (580 with 8 GB VRAM) but I don't know if I would require even the 570 GPU (4GB VRAM).
I rarely play games, I only want a really fluid interface and workflows on the two 4k monitors and the iMac 5k.

Basically I "could" wait for a new iMac until November, but I want one now, because I spent so much time looking for possible rumors and on the other hand configure some 2017 iMacs...

I'm using 21 in IMAC

I used VSCODE(react native) daily,PHPSTORM,XCODE,Android Studio on stock 21' . I also rarely play games, but if you close all the app, you still can play fortnite.

I used two monitor.

Performance Vise
1. OSX is a bad memory management, it will cache 'em all ram . So even you had 40 GB ram, it will used up till 90% till no swap.

Just go to 27" and base ram, it should much better then me .

 

[mj_]

1. OSX is a bad memory management, it will cache 'em all ram . So even you had 40 GB ram, it will used up till 90% till no swap.

Au contraire, my friend. macOS has the typical UNIX memory management: it uses up every single bit of available RAM for caching. Free RAM is wasted RAM - why would you want to have 10GB of free RAM instead of 10GB of cache? Once the system actually needs to use that RAM it will simply overwrite the cache, which isn't any slower or faster than overwriting "empty" RAM. Which is never really empty but filled with random values anyway, so there's absolutely no difference.

@Christian92 Even the base 2017 iMac 5K i5 will be much faster than your current MacBook Pro. It has four physical cores and a much higher TDP, meaning that it'll be running at higher clock speeds for a much longer period of time without throttling. Plus, it has four actual physical cores whereas your MBP only has two physical but for virtual cores. Generally speaking, the CPU upgrades Apple offers are never really worth the money - even the difference between the base i5 and the top of the line i7 they sell is negligible, especially considering they're using the exact same cooling solution for both, the 65W i5 and the 95W i7. The latter is faster on paper but will be throttling more often due to excess heat, and in the end it won't be much faster than the i5. Pro tipp: don't buy your RAM from Apple. They'll charge you an arm and a leg for it. Instead, get it on the free market and put it in yourself - it takes 2 minutes and it'll save you a lot of money.

However, if you don't really need an iMac right now you might as well wait until the end of the year. New iMacs might be released later this year - nobody really knows whether or not Apple is going to actually incorporate Intel's latest hexa-cores into their base-line iMacs this year due to their proximity to the iMac Pro's octa-core base model. It's possible that they'll keep the quad-core i5 around for quite a while and offer the hexa-core i5 as a costly upgrade.

 

[alien3dx]

Au contraire, my friend. macOS has the typical UNIX memory management: it uses up every single bit of available RAM for caching. Free RAM is wasted RAM - why would you want to have 10GB of free RAM instead of 10GB of cache? Once the system actually needs to use that RAM it will simply overwrite the cache, which isn't any slower or faster than overwriting "empty" RAM. Which is never really empty but filled with random values anyway, so there's absolutely no difference.

@Christian92 Even the base 2017 iMac 5K i5 will be much faster than your current MacBook Pro. It has four physical cores and a much higher TDP, meaning that it'll be running at higher clock speeds for a much longer period of time without throttling. Plus, it has four actual physical cores whereas your MBP only has two physical but for virtual cores. Generally speaking, the CPU upgrades Apple offers are never really worth the money - even the difference between the base i5 and the top of the line i7 they sell is negligible, especially considering they're using the exact same cooling solution for both, the 65W i5 and the 95W i7. The latter is faster on paper but will be throttling more often due to excess heat, and in the end it won't be much faster than the i5.

Pro tipp: don't buy your RAM from Apple. They'll charge you an arm and a leg for it. Instead, get it on the free market and put it in yourself - it takes 2 minutes and it'll save you a lot of money.

If it overwrite , it is okay. But what i see it just push the old usage to swap or compress. As i wanted to knew is what all those compress 6 GB just to open OSX and then if the usage out of 8 GB ram it moved to swap . The only way to clear the ram is push all the program to max and close it on the spot and release the ram. The easiest choice as mention buy more ram not to do swap but in my life windows, i never even used swap at all 8 GB DDR3 and 8 GB DDR3L

** this is my opinion see 4 GB ram mac mini and 8 GB imac.

 

[mj_]

Again: there's a very smart algorithm behind all this that has been developed 40 years ago and fine-tuned ever since. Of course the kernel moves old unused data to swap because again: it uses every bit of RAM it can get its hands on for caching. If there's stale data in RAM that hasn't been accessed for a long time, such as for example old caching data that might still be relevant though, the kernel will move that to swap and load it from swap if necessary. It is much faster to load the data from a single location on the hard drive (swap is usually kept in large blocks aligned along the sectors for faster sequential read and write) rather than reading it from small chunks of fragmented data all over the hard drive. For the same reason it compresses "older" data - at the end of the day it's much faster this way. Your suggestion to "clear" the RAM is counterproductive you're not really clearing anything - you're replacing valuable cached data with worthless cached data, thereby effectively slowing down the system. Just let the macOS kernel take care of memory management for you and stop worrying about it - like I said it's algorithm that has been fine-tuned and optimized for 40+ years by some of the smartest developers on this planet.

Windows does the exact same thing. XP has already implemented a caching memory management unit, and starting with Windows 8 and 10 Microsoft has implemented the exact same mechanisms as UNIX has been using for 40+ years. Windows 10 will swap out unnecessary data when idle before it clears up cache if deemed beneficial.

 

[alien3dx]

Again: there's a very smart algorithm behind all this that has been developed 40 years ago and fine-tuned ever since. Of course the kernel moves old unused data to swap because again: it uses every bit of RAM it can get its hands on for caching. If there's stale data in RAM that hasn't been accessed for a long time, such as for example old caching data that might still be relevant though, the kernel will move that to swap and load it from swap if necessary. It is much faster to load the data from a single location on the hard drive (swap is usually kept in large blocks aligned along the sectors for faster sequential read and write) rather than reading it from small chunks of fragmented data all over the hard drive. For the same reason it compresses "older" data - at the end of the day it's much faster this way. Your suggestion to "clear" the RAM is counterproductive you're not really clearing anything - you're replacing valuable cached data with worthless cached data, thereby effectively slowing down the system. Just let the macOS kernel take care of memory management for you and stop worrying about it - like I said it's algorithm that has been fine-tuned and optimized for 40+ years by some of the smartest developers on this planet.

Windows does the exact same thing. XP has already implemented a caching memory management unit, and starting with Windows 8 and 10 Microsoft has implemented the exact same mechanisms as UNIX has been using for 40+ years. Windows 10 will swap out unnecessary data when idle before it clears up cache if deemed beneficial.

If so smart, a 4GB ram would survive like normal linux flavour or windows .. .

 

[mj_]

Are you kidding me? What are you, 12? What do RAM requirements have to do with the sophistication of a memory management algorithm? macOS simply requires more RAM by default than what you refer to as "normal" flavor of Linux. However, have you ever tried running Windows 10 with just 4GB of RAM? It's just as painful as running macOS with 4GB of RAM. And you know why? Because it's 2018 and both Windows 10 and macOS 10.13 REQUIRE more than 4GB of RAM to run smoothly. It's as plain and simple as that. And it has absolutely zero, nada, null, zilch to do with memory management.

Anyway, I give up. You clearly have absolutely NO grasp of what you're talking about. You have a prejudice against the UNIX memory management logic, which is identical on any flavor of Linux and Windows as well, because you seem to be thinking you're smarter than the brightest engineers that have been working on and expanding this algorithm for 40+ years. In addition, you mix up memory management with memory requirements and seem to be unable to grasp the difference between these two. And you don't seem to be interested in even trying to understand what I'm trying to explain.

Please do us all a favor and stop giving bad advice about stuff you are clearly utterly clueless about.
Have a good day, I'm out of here.