Hey guys, I bought a new Sandybridge i7 3.4 GHz iMac a couple weeks ago, with the stock 1 TB drive and 4 GB RAM. It's a beautiful machine, but it just doesn't seem to be as fast as I thought it would be.
I upgraded from a 1.8 GHz Core Duo iMac (early 2006 model) so I was expecting the new Mac to blow it out of the water -- and it does with certain things, but subjectively the "snappiness" doesn't seem to have increased enough to reflect five years of technological advances. I'm starting to wonder if something could be wrong.
The CPU seems fine. Handbrake crushes a movie in like 40 minutes. Booting up and launching apps doesn't seem too much faster than my old computer, though. iMovie still takes forever and a day to load clips in. The worst thing is that my wife has been complaining lately that iPhoto and other apps have been pinwheeling on her. Once I checked Activity Monitor shortly after her complaint and there was still free memory available (the green part of the pie chart). Oh, and I ran memtest all night last night and it came up clean.
I realize that hard drives are the slowest part of a computer, but I'm starting to wonder if something is not quite right with mine. There are no suspicious entries in the system log regarding pinwheeling, and the SMART data checks out ok. I can't figure out why we'd get so many pinwheels when there's still free memory. I think (but am not sure) that it happens most often when two users are logged in, but like I said there was plenty of free memory at the time.
So obviously this is kind of a lame post because it's all subjective, but for those of you with the new iMacs and the standard hard drive, is this computer crazy-fast across the board, or does disk I/O seem lacking? I'm not at home now but I'm happy to post disk I/O and boot time benchmarks, if that would help.
Thank you!
I upgraded from a 1.8 GHz Core Duo iMac (early 2006 model) so I was expecting the new Mac to blow it out of the water -- and it does with certain things, but subjectively the "snappiness" doesn't seem to have increased enough to reflect five years of technological advances. I'm starting to wonder if something could be wrong.
The CPU seems fine. Handbrake crushes a movie in like 40 minutes. Booting up and launching apps doesn't seem too much faster than my old computer, though. iMovie still takes forever and a day to load clips in. The worst thing is that my wife has been complaining lately that iPhoto and other apps have been pinwheeling on her. Once I checked Activity Monitor shortly after her complaint and there was still free memory available (the green part of the pie chart). Oh, and I ran memtest all night last night and it came up clean.
I realize that hard drives are the slowest part of a computer, but I'm starting to wonder if something is not quite right with mine. There are no suspicious entries in the system log regarding pinwheeling, and the SMART data checks out ok. I can't figure out why we'd get so many pinwheels when there's still free memory. I think (but am not sure) that it happens most often when two users are logged in, but like I said there was plenty of free memory at the time.
So obviously this is kind of a lame post because it's all subjective, but for those of you with the new iMacs and the standard hard drive, is this computer crazy-fast across the board, or does disk I/O seem lacking? I'm not at home now but I'm happy to post disk I/O and boot time benchmarks, if that would help.
Thank you!
