Cost Effecient

[ApleSmaple1981]

Greetings all,

I am in the market for a desktop as I am in need of more power to compute HD video that I take with my DSLR.

I was thinking about getting a 21.5" but realized I cannot upgrade the internals.

My thought was this:

1. purchase the lowest end model of 27" that is currently available
2. upgrade the RAM to 32gb
3. put in a new HD (not sure which to get fusion or SSD etc.) any advice on this?

Any other suggestions are great! I get an apple education discount for being a teacher and with the $100 app card it makes it a better deal than refurbished. I could go used but am fearful of those selling fairly new iMacs.

Thanks in advance!

 

[robgendreau]

If you mean a DIY internal drive upgrade then check out ifixit's guide first to make sure you're comfortable with the disassembly and gluing back on the screen. Not impossible, but possible to screw up in a big way.

I'd also recommend a Fusion or SSD drive; they make day-to-day computing much faster. If you do a lot of video you're gonna probably end up with external drives anyway, so why not just get something with a big fusion drive from the get go?

And some refurbs from Apple, particularly older iMacs, might save you way more than you'd save with an educ discount. At least when I was a teacher the discount wasn't that much. They even have 2011 refurbs; those iMacs have the magnetically attached screens IIRC which means they're easier to take apart, if that's your goal.

Rob

 

[rkaufmann87]

Greetings all,

I am in the market for a desktop as I am in need of more power to compute HD video that I take with my DSLR.

I was thinking about getting a 21.5" but realized I cannot upgrade the internals.

My thought was this:

1. purchase the lowest end model of 27" that is currently available
2. upgrade the RAM to 32gb
3. put in a new HD (not sure which to get fusion or SSD etc.) any advice on this?

Any other suggestions are great! I get an apple education discount for being a teacher and with the $100 app card it makes it a better deal than refurbished. I could go used but am fearful of those selling fairly new iMacs.

Thanks in advance!

Remember if you upgrade the HD yourself this will invalidate your warranty. My suggestion, buy the 27" with base 8GB of RAM and upgrade the RAM yourself. However buy either a Fusion drive or SSD equipped machine to preserve your warranty. If you cannot afford that now then simply save longer until you can.

The thought of getting a refurbished machine from Apple is excellent advice too. You can save hundreds by doing so.

 

[ApleSmaple1981]

Thanks guys...

So for the internal drive I have two options:

1tb Fusion drive
256gb SSD

I will be doing a lot of video (raw huge files!) and picture editing, but I was hoping to keep the files on an external 4gb raid 0 HD enclosure...what would be a better option for internal HD for running my OS and software/files?

 

[maflynn]

If you are planning on keeping your data on an external drive then go with the SSD option.