Buying an iMac - 3.2Ghz w/ GT 755M vs 3.4Ghz w/ GTX 775M?

[deen85]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the market to buy a new 27" iMac - my uses at the moment are fairly minimal (business applications, Office, watching HD movies, etc) but I may like to get into programming/photo editing/graphic design/video editing in the near future.

I'm debating between the two options for a $200 upgrade:
- i5 3.2 Ghz w/ GT 755M GPU (1GB video memory)
- i5 3.4 Ghz w/ GTX 775M GPU (2GB video memory)

Will also be getting a 1TB fusion drive (unless people think the SSD upgrade would be worth it over a Fusion drive?), and self-upgrading w/ 3rd party RAM.

Just wondering if anyone out there has any opinions on how much of a performance boost, and necessity it is for me to pay for this upgrade. I'd imagine the CPU won't be much of a difference, but the graphics card seems to be a pretty significant upgrade - just not sure if only gamers will see the difference (I'm not a gamer at all - I play zero games).

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[yjchua95]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the market to buy a new 27" iMac - my uses at the moment are fairly minimal (business applications, Office, watching HD movies, etc) but I may like to get into programming/photo editing/graphic design/video editing in the near future.

I'm debating between the two options for a $200 upgrade:
- i5 3.2 Ghz w/ GT 755M GPU (1GB video memory)
- i5 3.4 Ghz w/ GTX 775M GPU (2GB video memory)

Will also be getting a 1TB fusion drive (unless people think the SSD upgrade would be worth it over a Fusion drive?), and self-upgrading w/ 3rd party RAM.

Just wondering if anyone out there has any opinions on how much of a performance boost, and necessity it is for me to pay for this upgrade. I'd imagine the CPU won't be much of a difference, but the graphics card seems to be a pretty significant upgrade - just not sure if only gamers will see the difference (I'm not a gamer at all - I play zero games).

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm one of those who think a 256GB SSD is better than a 1TB FD, out of reliability reasons. A FD still has a HDD sector, so if that part fails, the entire FD drive is toast. Think of it as a 128GB SSD and a HDD in an RAID 0 fashion.

Besides, for pure speed (even if it's not noticeable in everyday usage), the 256GB SSD is faster (720MB/s read and 650-670MB/s write, compared to FD's 500MB/s read and 200-400MB/s write).