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iMac Advise - Overkill for its use

Blujelly

Blujelly

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 2, 2012
1,275
477
South East England
Hi there,

Thinking of heading down the route of iMac's. I'm going to get grilled for what I'd be using it for I can see it coming already :p so don't grill to hard.

Mostly used for heavy gaming (I know there not 'gaming' machines), recording and iMovie and general usage on top, will be used mostly every day to be fair.

I'm thinking the below spec, I was thinking of the 2TB fusion drive which I know has 128Gb flash drive, but my thoughts were go with the 256Gb flash and buy an external WD 2TB Cloud drive.

That way I can put the applications on the flash drive and my library + data (and the other half's) and on the external and stream from everywhere, I would also have another 500gb external HD which I could back up the external HD.

I'm also going to upgrade the RAM to 16Gb

If you have any other recommendations for what I should maybe do let me know.

4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
  • 8GB 1867MHz DDR3 SDRAM - two 4GB
  • 256GB Flash Storage
  • AMD Radeon R9 M390 with 2GB video memory
 
For your use an upgrade on the CPU is pointless it won't help your gaming at all but upgrading to the best graphics card will make it the best gaming machine it can be. So take the stock i5 that comes in the configuration that allows the upgrade to the M395X.

Either the 2TB fusion or the 256 SSD will be fine do what you want there.

Upgrade the RAM yourself it's got a RAM slot in the back, order 16Gb as 2 x8GB and slot it in for a total of 24GB.

Of course I will suggest you buy a desktop PC for gaming you will get far better performance for cheaper but miss out on that 5K screen.

Blujelly said:
Hi there,

Thinking of heading down the route of iMac's. I'm going to get grilled for what I'd be using it for I can see it coming already :p so don't grill to hard.

Mostly used for heavy gaming (I know there not 'gaming' machines), recording and iMovie and general usage on top, will be used mostly every day to be fair.

I'm thinking the below spec, I was thinking of the 2TB fusion drive which I know has 128Gb flash drive, but my thoughts were go with the 256Gb flash and buy an external WD 2TB Cloud drive.

That way I can put the applications on the flash drive and my library + data (and the other half's) and on the external and stream from everywhere, I would also have another 500gb external HD which I could back up the external HD.

I'm also going to upgrade the RAM to 16Gb

If you have any other recommendations for what I should maybe do let me know.

4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
  • 8GB 1867MHz DDR3 SDRAM - two 4GB
  • 256GB Flash Storage
  • AMD Radeon R9 M390 with 2GB video memory
Click to expand...
 
Samuelsan2001 said:
For your use an upgrade on the CPU is pointless it won't help your gaming at all but upgrading to the best graphics card will make it the best gaming machine it can be. So take the stock i5 that comes in the configuration that allows the upgrade to the M395X.

Either the 2TB fusion or the 256 SSD will be fine do what you want there.

Upgrade the RAM yourself it's got a RAM slot in the back, order 16Gb as 2 x8GB and slot it in for a total of 24GB.

Of course I will suggest you buy a desktop PC for gaming you will get far better performance for cheaper but miss out on that 5K screen.
Click to expand...

24Gb RAM would that be to much for its usage or would that be enough?
 
It's never too much but sure buy 2 x 4GB and have 16Gb if you like, games rarely use more than 8GB currently (X plane 10 being a notable exception) so it'll make little difference but if it was me thinking into the future I would add the 16Gb and then consider swapping the 8GB out for another 16GB in the future if I ever needed 32GB.

However the most important thing from my post was the advice to concentrate on the graphics card not the processor that will be the thing that impacts your gaming
 
Samuelsan2001 said:
It's never too much but sure buy 2 x 4GB and have 16Gb if you like, games rarely use more than 8GB currently (X plane 10 being a notable exception) so it'll make little difference but if it was me thinking into the future I would add the 16Gb and then consider swapping the 8GB out for another 16GB in the future if I ever needed 32GB.

However the most important thing from my post was the advice to concentrate on the graphics card not the processor that will be the thing that impacts your gaming
Click to expand...

Ok sounds good to me so keep the 8Gb RAM add addition 8x2 16gb RAM (with the option to increase to 32Gb if need be), standard i5 processor that comes with it and increase graphics card.

What would you recommend for storage? As I said I was thinking of dumping most of the applications on a 256Gb flash then buying an external WD 2TB Cloud drive for everything else. I assume that wouldn't be a problem as the network HD would show in iTunes (top left corner)

Then that way anyone on the same network can view the files?
 
Yep all sounds good but I'd wait for some more opinions to chime in before you go with it, There may be something I haven't considered.
 
if you´re planning on using a networked drive for imovie files, think again! that won´t work, it´ll be way to slow. For itunes and other stuff, sure. But don´t try to edit files in imovie that aint stored on the imac itself or on an external usb/tb drive.

Otherwise I think it looks good. I agree on the i5 and best graphic route, aswell as standard 8gb ram from apple and another 2x8gb that you install yourself :)
I would probably go with the 2TB fusion drive, it´s fast enough and you don´t have to have external hdd´s with silly wires everywhere.
 
Trixster said:
if you´re planning on using a networked drive for imovie files, think again! that won´t work, it´ll be way to slow. For itunes and other stuff, sure. But don´t try to edit files in imovie that aint stored on the imac itself or on an external usb/tb drive.
Click to expand...

my thoughts would be to edit on the iMacs flash drive then transfer over to external and then view them via the network HD, wouldn't that work?
 
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