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Considering an iMac.. Fusion / gpu question

sparkie1984

sparkie1984

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Dec 20, 2009
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a small village near London
Hi all.

I am considering getting the mid level 27" iMac with 390 gpu and 1TB / 2TB Fusion drive.

questions are:

1. will that GPU power the mac fine for basic use, I don't do any editing or gaming on it. Does anyone have one in this spec that can confirm whether it lags like the 290 apparently did?

2. is the flash portion the new fast PCIE flash? or is it comparable to the slower flash (like you'd buy for your pc).

3. with the 1TB flash portion being 24gb am I correct in thinking pretty much everything I want to open will have to load from the hard drive? if so its a pointless thing to have?


Thanks for any advice
 
sparkie1984 said:
2. is the flash portion the new fast PCIE flash? or is it comparable to the slower flash (like you'd buy for your pc).
Click to expand...
It's PCIe, but only 2-lane and won't perform as well as the dedicated SSD options (not that this will make a huge difference for basic use).
sparkie1984 said:
3. with the 1TB flash portion being 24gb am I correct in thinking pretty much everything I want to open will have to load from the hard drive? if so its a pointless thing to have?
Click to expand...
System files and apps will probably be stored on the SSD portion, not leaving much space for anything else. I recommend you get the 2 TB Fusion drive or 256 GB SSD with external storage.
 
Thanks, I suppose by the time I have added the 2tb fusion I may as well pay the extra for the top tier model and have the better graphics card.

Which is the way to go I think

However I do have a 6tb external drive so I could go for the 256gb flash and enjoy some true speed
 
sparkie1984 said:
Thanks, I suppose by the time I have added the 2tb fusion I may as well pay the extra for the top tier model and have the better graphics card.

Which is the way to go I think

However I do have a 6tb external drive so I could go for the 256gb flash and enjoy some true speed
Click to expand...

Personally, I would never even consider buying a fusion drive or anything with a spinning platter.

It does not "feel" that fast when you first move to solid state storage, until you try to go back to spinning media. Then the differences are unbelievable.
 
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sparkie1984 said:
However I do have a 6tb external drive so I could go for the 256gb flash and enjoy some true speed
Click to expand...
If you already have external storage, going with the 256 GB SSD is a good idea. It provides twice as much SSD storage as a 2 TB Fusion drive, and on the late 2015 iMacs is PCIe 4x.
 
I'm coming from a laptop with an SSD, if I were to get a Fusion drive, I'm pretty sure I'd be very disappointed. I'm very used to the near instantaneous access

As for the GPU, from what I've read, the iGPU is decent enough if you don't play games as you mentioned so it should be ok.

I think the 24GB flash portion of the Fusion drive is so small that it will only be holding the OS and not much more, that is the benefit of the Fusion drive was to hold oft used files, but now the size is inadequate.

Get the 2TB Fusion drive if you need storage and want the Fusion drive, that comes with a 128GB flash drive
 
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After a lot of thinking I have decided the 1TB Fusion is almost useless. The 2TB is pretty good if you are not a power user. But anyone doing intensive things like video editing or gaming on OSX or Windows should get the 512gb SSD and then use cheap external drives to store files.

Many people have expressed concerns about the Fusion drives ability to not break. Apple is a very greedy company so if it does break you are in big trouble unless you have a good technician in your area who can fix it. For peace of mind and guaranteed speed all the time the SSD is the way to go. Forking out for the 512GB isn't necessary for most, but it will be very convenient not needing to move files around as often.
 
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part of me wonders whether to invest some money into a 2009 mac pro I got out of a skip and put a PCIE SSD in it, bluetooth card and use that for a while until apple stock issuing spinning hard drives in their low end systems
 
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