27-inch i7 iMac
Wednesday, 06 October 2010
For this particular Mac setup, destined for an artist/photographer who works almost exclusively in Adobe Photoshop CS5, a Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad (separate review to come) combination was added for another $122 via Apple’s online Build To Order.
The total retail price, with the new GST, for this setup came to $4402.02, plus the extra RAM.
This particular iMac was ordered with just the bare minimum 4GB RAM. This was done to save money – the buyer got some approved third party 1333MHz DDR3 RAM and I put that in the other two slots (of four) for another $500 or so. It’s a five-minute job and the booklet that comes with the Mac tells you how to do it.
[Left — the iMac on its face on a towel, as directed, to expose the RAM slots. The two tops slots have chips in already – I installed two 4GB chips into the empty bottom slots.]
The hardest things are: do you have the right Phillips No2 screwdriver? You need this to get the access panel off. And you have to be a bit brave, if you’ve never done it before, to press the RAM home properly.
All good. Why? The configurator on the Apple site lets you pick 4GB (2x2GB) RAM, or 8GB (4x2GB) for another $399, or 2x4GB for an extra $818, or the max of 16GB for 4x4GB RAM SODIMMs for an extra $2044, so you can see why it was sensible to order the stock RAM, leaving two slots free. If the buyer ever wants another speedup, she can buy another 2x4 GBs at some point to replace the 2x2s with.
It arrives in one big, plain cardboard box, It takes a bit of effort to slide the iMac box out, as it weighs 20kgs and it's a snug fit.Once it's on the desk, it really dwarfs the 20-inch this artist had been using before, as you can see if you scroll down – there's a picture of them together near the end of this article.
As a build to order, the Trackpad is integrated into the keyboard box along with the mouse (left).
64-bit mode
An odd thing about OS X Snow Leopard is that it can run 64-bit native, yet defaults to 32-bit.
You can boot it into 64 by holding the 6 and 4 keys down on startup. This is a pretty silly situation, so I downloaded a little free app called K64Enabler which makes it boot 64-bit on every startup. This is much better for this particular Mac, as it will be used for massive Photoshop composites.
To tell what mode you are running, open About This Mac in the Apple menu then click on More Info..., you get System Profiler. Click on the Software parent tab on the left, and you will see a line on the right that says “64-bit Kernel and Extensions:__” – the last part will either say Yes or No.
If you have over 4GBs of RAM, a late model Mac (including the laptops) and you intend to use Photoshop, Logic or Final Cut or suchlike, I strongly recommend running in 64-bit mode, which can give you 250% faster system call entry and 70% faster user/kernel memory copy.
So, how fast?
This model of iMac beat the last generation of Mac Pro towers when it first came out a couple of months ago in some tests. So Apple almost immediately brought out all-new Mac Pros to compensate … these can now hit about three times the performance of this iMac, but cost thousands more.
I used two tests, Geekbench (the 64-bit version) and Cinebench. The beauty of these two apps is that they deliver figures meaningful for any computer: Mac, iDevice, PC, Linux or Solaris. Geekbench comes with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Cinebench concentrates on video performance and the speedup multiprocessing gives, while Geekbench concentrates on CPU.
I used a three-year-old 20-inch 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 3GBs RAM as a benchmark. This CPU, at different speeds, still powers the MacBook, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac mini, but has recently been joined by Intel’s Core i3, i5 and i7 in Apple’s PCs.
The three-year-old clocked an overall Geekbench score of 2877.
A six-month-old 13-inch MacBook Pro with the same chip running at 2.66GHz was a lot faster, at 3963. This has a 1.06GHz bus instead of an 800MHz bus, and 4GB RAM.
The i7 iMac clocked 10,850. Adding an SSD (still prohibitively expensive, to my mind) would improve this score. I added in a few more tests I have conducted over the last few years as a comparo – higher is better, with the new 27-inch at extreme right:
You can really see the advantage these new i-series Intel chips give over the Core 2 Duo – I expect that CTD to be taken out of all Macs within the next few months, as prices come down.
PrimateLabs has a section that lets you compare Mac results to all sorts of other results, by the way.
How about Photoshop? I didn't do any extreme timings, but as a general indicator, it takes ten seconds to boot on the 2007 MacBook Pro. That's achieved under three seconds on the new i7 iMac.
How about video?
The new iMac range comes with four video card options. The 21.5-inch models have either an i3 dual-core or i5 quad-core processor, and they are teamed with an ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics processor with 256MB of video RAM, or an ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics processor with 512MB VRAM respectively.
The bigger 27-inch model comes with an i5 teamed with an ATI Radeon HD 5670 graphics processor/512MB VRAM, or as the also-quad-core but more powerful i7 Intel processor.
The i7 27-inch – as tested – gets the same ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics processor, but with a whopping (for Apple) 1GB of GDDR5 memory.
This is where Cinebench comes in. That older Core 2 Duo has much lesser video card (left) – an ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB VRAM, resolving 1680x1050 pixels in 32-Bit Colour.
This achieves 5.36 frames per second OpenGL rating in the Cinebench test, and a 1.11-point CPU rating, 0.57 points for a single CPU and a multiprocessor ratio (how successfully it handles multi-processing) of 1.94 times. The slightly more sophisticated 2007 MacBook Pro 15-inch that's been my everyday machine for three years has an NVDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 128MB VRAM. It's 32-bit colour, driving a display of 1440x900 pixels. It delivers a GL frame rate of 7.04, a CPU rating of 1.14pts, a single core rendering 0.63 and a multiprocessing ration of 1.83x. Not bad for an ageing machine that's been through the mill.
The new 27-inch gets an OpenGL score of 34.99fps. That's almost 6.53 times better than the older iMac, and nearly five times better than the MB Pro.
Cinebench also measures the test unit's CPU and not just the GPU (Graphics Processor Unit). The 27 gets 5.45 points for CPU (4.78 times better than the old MB Pro), and 1.19 points for a single core. The multiprocessor ratio via those four cores and Intel's 'Hyperthreading' technology fetches an impressive 4.61x.
On the Cinebench site, the 2.8GHz i7 scores 32.26 overall from its four-core/8-thread i7 CPU and ATI Radeon 5750 video card, but that’s well pipped by the kinds of cards PC gamers get to enjoy – examples are an 8-core 16-thread 3.33GHz Quadro FX 5800/PCI/SSE2 (Cinebench 45.52) and by the 12-core 2.62GHz ATI FirePro V8750 (FireGL) with a Cinebench score of 48.73.
So as usual, while you may be able to well and truly beat these iMacs with specs of some PCs, for Mac fans, the new i7 iMac offers outstanding performance and all the graphics glory and usability power we have come to love.
You can see a lot more speed tests and comparisons at the BareFeats site.
To look at, it's clear Apple has been steadily refining the iMac design from model to model, making it ever sleeker. Below – alongside a 2008 20-inch model.
Conclusion — all in all, even with the GST increase, this configuration delivers impressive bang for your buck. The lowliest of the new Mac Pro towers doesn't really compete spec-wise, even though it's expandable, considering it costs more and you have to add a screen to that – and it doesn't even come with WiFi built in.
What's great — cost effective power you can throw anything at
What's not — if anything's missing, its Blu-ray and USB 3, which is even faster than FireWire 800 (but barely available yet).
Needs — a serious worker keen to go deep into apps like Final Cut Pro or Photoshop, but with limited desk space and/or aesthetic appreciation. For well under $5000, WOW! This thing's powerful.
4.5/5
Apple iMac 27-inch i7, $4402.02 (plus c$500 for an additional 8GB RAM)
System — 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB, 2TB Serial ATA Drive, 8x double-layer SuperDrive, ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB GDDR5 SDRAM, pple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (International English) and User Guide (English), Magic Mouse + Magic Trackpad
Contact — Apple NZ or your favourite Apple Reseller.
