Buying a 27" iMac late 2013, need advice.

[zaafarj]

My 2011 MacBook air got water damaged so I'm in the market for a new computer. Before this happened I was planning on buying a Windows gaming rig but now I'm looking more towards an iMac becuase I don't like Windows and the iMac seems to have the best graphics card and a large display. I'm interested in interface design and I use Adobe illustraitor a lot. I plan on bootcamping windows to play games and I also plan on buying the oculus rift when it hits retail. I've settled on the highest model 27" iMac with upgraded i7 processor and gtx 780m graphics card. In Canada with student pricing plus tax the price will come to $2,871.68. Is this too much money for a spec'd out iMac? Should I wait for the next generation? Should I consider the retina iMac?
Also the iMac comes standard with 1tb hdd, I want to upgrade it to a 1tb fusion drive or a 256gb ssd and I'll use an old external hard drive for more space. If I bootcamp I'll be left with very little space for each. Which solution do you think is better?

I understand I'm asking a lot but I'm mostly asking to make sure im not making any stupid mistake.
Thank you in advance to anyone that replies.

 

[ixxx69]

My 2011 MacBook air got water damaged so I'm in the market for a new computer. Before this happened I was planning on buying a Windows gaming rig but now I'm looking more towards an iMac becuase I don't like Windows and the iMac seems to have the best graphics card and a large display. I'm interested in interface design and I use Adobe illustraitor a lot. I plan on bootcamping windows to play games and I also plan on buying the oculus rift when it hits retail. I've settled on the highest model 27" iMac with upgraded i7 processor and gtx 780m graphics card. In Canada with student pricing plus tax the price will come to $2,871.68. Is this too much money for a spec'd out iMac? Should I wait for the next generation? Should I consider the retina iMac?
Also the iMac comes standard with 1tb hdd, I want to upgrade it to a 1tb fusion drive or a 256gb ssd and I'll use an old external hard drive for more space. If I bootcamp I'll be left with very little space for each. Which solution do you think is better?

I understand I'm asking a lot but I'm mostly asking to make sure im not making any stupid mistake.
Thank you in advance to anyone that replies.

Most people aren't going to know the value of Canadian dollars, so it's hard to discuss prices without you providing price comparisons to other configurations you're look at. Also, you haven't indicated what the exact specs are of the Mac you're considering, i.e. what speed i7, how much RAM, etc. What most have found is that by the time you trick out a base iMac, you could get a retina iMac with similar specs for just a little bit more money. It's also key to know because you might be way overspending on the CPU and RAM when the money would be better put to a larger SSD.

256GB is pretty small to share with Windows Boot Camp, especially if you're going to need to store a lot of games in the Boot Camp partition. In my experience, Windows OS and Windows software seems to take up a lot more than on the Mac. A typical Windows setup with several large games can get to a 100GB pretty quickly. If you could swing the 500GB SSD, I think that would be a great route to go.

For such a loaded Mac, and considering Boot Camp, and you'll have an external HDD, I'd skip the Fusion drive and stick with the SSD.

 

[zaafarj]

Thank you!
The specs of the system are basically the ones found on the highest tier of the 27". I only modified the processor and graphics card.

This is the configuration for the iMac:
3.5ghz quad core i7 haswell processor
8gb ram
nvidia GeForce gtx 780m 4gb gddr5

im concerned that if i go with the retina, a lot of the cpu and gpu will be put on strain from the high resolution screen, but at the same time, retina is so beautiful.

Thanks for the ssd help, I think I'll be able to stretch my budget for a larger ssd.