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Please Help/Video,Audio,Graphic?

R

RAWandVITAL

macrumors member
Original poster
May 8, 2013
54
25
Hi all,

So I want to first say that I purchased my iMac back in 2010. I also purchased Applecare. A year or so later the iMac was getting super hot like a furnace. It was thought to be a logic board so they ordered the part two separate times which cost around a grand each. Thankfully with Applecare I didn't have to pay anything. After the second time Apple said they couldn't fix the issue and they ended up giving me a brand new Newer iMac model at that time! Freaking amazing. I love this company.

With that being said I now have an iMac (27-inch, Late 2012) model vs my 2010 model.

So my first question is, is the newer iMac they gave me better than the older iMac that I had?! New one has an i5 quad core where the old one had an i7 although the new one is 3.2GHz vs the old one being 2.93.... So yeah, my question is, is the newer machine better than the older machine?

The specs on the first faulty iMac was the following:

PROCESSOR 065-9512 2.93GHZ QUAD-CORE INTELCORE I7
MEMORY 065-9452 8GB 1333MHZ DDR3 SDRAM - 4X2GB
HARD DRIVE 065-9454 1TB SERIAL ATA DRIVE
GRAPHICS 065-9457 ATI RADEON HD 5750 1GB GDDR5
OPTICAL DRIVE 065-9458 8X DOUBLE-LAYER SUPERDRIVE


The specs on the new iMac are the following:

3.2GHz quad core-intel Core i5 with 6MB L3 cache (Turbo Boost up to 3.6)GHz
8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM
1TB 7200-rpm hard drive
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX Graphics Processor with 1GB of GDDR5 Memory

My second question is, I want to dump a load of RAM in this sucker. I found a deal on Newegg for the following RAM
Crucial 8GB DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Memory for Apple Model CT8G3S160BM

I was going to get 32GB of RAM for 170 bucks. Not bad....

I do a lot of video editing and photoshop work. I mean a lot and when I was trying to do it on my iMac it felt like it was having a tough time performing. Heck, my 2014 macbook pro tears through my video work vs my iMac. I would think my iMac would be more powerful than my macbook Pro but it's not. So would duumping 32GB of Ram into my iMac help with the workload with seeing the other specs above. I understand CPU and GPU are equally important and it's not all about the RAM but I don't know the tech stuff behind CPU and GPU... Heck, does my iMac even have a GPU?!

Anyways, I was planning on buying the RAM tonight as I have a coupon code. So let me know if buying 32GB of RAM should greatly, GREATLY improve the workload my iMac would be able to handle?

Thanks so much in advance guys! Seriously.

Oh yeah, the other RAM available on Newegg is
Does it really matter which I choose? I believe all meet the requirements for my iMac. Is there any preference between the RAM listed above?
 
Well I already purchased 32GB of ram. So my only question is the specs. Is the newer iMac much better than my original? Much appreciated.

Thanks!
 
The i5 processor is faster and has much more optimization inside of it. But you gave up on some multi-thread capability in the i5 has one logical core per physical, where your older i7 had two logical cores per physical.

Here is where the the 'it depends' comes into play. If you have an application that does utilize as many logical cores as it can get, and doesn't utilize any of the command optimizations, then the i7 would be faster than the i5. For example, if you were recoding a whole batch of WAV auto files into MP3, then your older i7 could do it faster as it could encode 8 songs at a time vs the i5 that could encode 15% faster but only do 4 tracks at a time.

In most general times, the i5 would be about 15% faster and gets an average test PassMark of 6565, where the i7 got a PassMark of 5481.

For video editing, you might be coming out even in the wash as the newer i5 has better instruction code, and the video card GPU is much faster and can be called on for encoding video that will put you ahead of the game for the important things. Depends on what processes you do.
 
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roadkill401 said:
The i5 processor is faster and has much more optimization inside of it....For video editing...the video card GPU is much faster and can be called on for encoding video that will put you ahead of the game for the important things. Depends on what processes you do.
Click to expand...


His 2010 iMac had an i7 "Clarksdale" CPU which is several generations old. His 2012 iMac has an i5 Ivy Bridge CPU which has Intel's Quick Sync feature for high speed video encode/decode. However the software must use this -- FCP X does, Premiere Pro does not. That one feature can accelerate encode/decode by 4 to 5 times.

While the GPU is useful for rendering effects it cannot generally help with encoding on the most common codecs. Long-GOP encoding (e.g, H.264) is inherently serial and not amenable to the type of parallelization that GPUs offer. But each block of video can be encoded by a separate CPU thread, so the more cores the better for this task.
 
So JOE, are you saying my iMac would chew through video on FCP X so much better than Premiere Pro?
 
RAWandVITAL said:
So JOE, are you saying my iMac would chew through video on FCP X so much better than Premiere Pro?
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. It would be vastly faster for encoding (exporting) single-pass H.264 but that is only one aspect of editing. If you are on Premiere Pro, I would suggest staying there since it is a huge learning curve to switch. If you are on an earlier version such as CS6 and are considering whether to pay $50 per month for CC vs the one-time $300 price of FCP X, that is a more complex decision.
 
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