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Real-world performance of the 1.4GHz i5-4260U 21.5" iMac
- Thread starter yjchua95
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I haven't seen much action on Youtube about this Mac yet apart from a few unboxing videos. Someone on my thread comparing the iMac to the MBA said they had a shot of it and found to be very slow in deed.
I saw that post. It didn't help that the 5400rpm drive slowed it down even more.
The 256GB SSD really makes all the difference, that's why the Air can perform so much faster.
I must admit that here, the HDD is not great when combined with that CPU. My HDD on my imac is far from slow though, and I have even had a few people think it is a fusion drive when showing them boot up times as app launching.
Not really seeing as people have stated that the new 1.4Ghz iMac boots in 2 minutes (and that would be new with hardly and programs on it or disk space used). My iMac has a HDD and boots in 35 seconds and I have a massive amount of software and a few games.
What HDD is that? A 3.5" one?
Is this a typical boot? What's the output when verbose booting? I assume the two versions of OS X are the same, and that all connected peripherals are identical also?
If "some people say it boots slowly" is your criterion for the CPU in the new iMac being slow then I'm not sure we're on the same level of technical discussion.
I have a 2.5" 1Tb HDD in my iMac and boot up time is 35 seconds. I am running the latest version of 10.9. The new one has a 2.5" 500Gb HDD and boots in 120 seconds. That will be down to the processor (I'm not sure if Apple move CPU compute lines to the GPU to be processed for the boot up, if they do then the difference is GPU perfromace would also be working against the new iMac).
The user that posted the bootup time of the new 1.4Ghz iMac also posted other tests they carried out and he/she said that that basic tasks like watching Nexfix in full screen lagged the computer.
Why don't you ask the one that was posting results instead of me on external device... (I believe that they were using it in an Apple store as I don't see him/her buying it) so that would mean do external devices and only the Apple software installed).
The number of apps and games on your HD has no impact on your boot time, why would it? Only programs that launch on startup could extend your boot time.
What do you think the GPU is doing during bootstrap exactly, such that it would be a performance bottleneck during boot. There's no GPU offload during boot.
The primary bottleneck on the startup routine is the hard drive access speed. Everything else waits for the HDD.
However, your unscientific test is to state that the new iMac is slow because someone "said" it booted in 2 minutes and you're comparing it to your own iMac. Without seeing the output of a verbose boot we can't really draw any conclusions. Maybe the other iMac is looking for a network boot that times out, maybe it has an external USB drive attached that takes a long time to spool up when the USB bus is polled for boot devices, maybe the original poster didn't time the boot accurately and was just guessing at 2 minutes...
There are lots of reasons, none of them scientific.
The other poster claiming that other things "lagged" the computer - what was the network latency? What else was the CPU doing at the time?
Yes it does -_-
A 5400 RPM Hard Drive has a read and write speed of around 90-100 MBps. This is when you firsts get the HDD, as all data is written on the outer edge of the drive. With more data in the disk, the disk fills from the outer edges to the inner edges. When data reaches the inner edges of a Hard Drive (i.e the drive is almost full), the data transfer speeds of the Hard Drive drop down to around 50MBps. This is not a sudden drop, but a gradual lowering of Data Access speed.
I thought this was common knowage... are thniking of SSD's?
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This is not my "unscientific test", but someone else's. I was mearly stating what others have posted and compairing them to my iMac. So you can stop your moaning and wait for the real tests...
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Wow, you really don't know what you're on about.
A modern HDD is composed of a number of different platters stacked up, and a number of different drive heads. When data is written to the drive, the controller places it in such a way to minimise access time where possible, so a string of data will be split over a number of platters in a pattern that matches the rotation speed of the disk. This is entirely controlled by the drive controller - i.e., the OS doesn't know what is happening at the bare metal.
As the drive fills, those synchronous blocks (which aren't actually physically synchronous, nor necessarily on the same platter) are less frequent, but certain filesystems (HFS+ included) will attempt to move blocks around automatically to speed up access. This doesn't mean that they all get put "on the outside edge" -it simply means the drive controller places them where access time is reduced, but there are a number of ways to do that.
Hard drives don't work like that. I thought this was common knowledge... are you thinking of a record player? [sic]