Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Good Day,
I am going to buy a new iMac 21.5 inch 4K, 3.0GHz 6 core 8th Gen i5 , 8GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 560X 4GB GDDR5, 256 SSD. Is it powerful and fast enough for 4-5 years of usage or should I upgrade it? I don’t use the Mac for video editing, some photo editing with some Mac App Store games plus streaming 4K movies on Apple TV+
Thank You!
iMac Line (2012 and Later)
The performance of the bottom-end iMac with 8 GB and an HDD probably won’t be satisfactory, with either of those processors.
Computers are systems, and putting a fast component into a system with other and slower components won’t be beneficial to aggregate performance of the system.
The system speed is that of the slowest component. Not the fastest.
As stated above, 16 GB and a half-terabyte SSD will usually have a far greater effect on performance than the difference between i5 or an i7.
Not unless everything you’re doing is going to be processor-constrained. Which is rare.
I’m not a huge fan of using Fusion in this SSD era, either. That’s a small SSD trying to make a slow hard disk look less slow.
The bottom-end iMac is good for email, Photos, FaceTime, and light web browsing.
It’s also not particularly upgradable.
The performance of the bottom-end iMac with 8 GB and an HDD probably won’t be satisfactory, with either of those processors.
Computers are systems, and putting a fast component into a system with other and slower components won’t be beneficial to aggregate performance of the system.
The system speed is that of the slowest component. Not the fastest.
As stated above, 16 GB and a half-terabyte SSD will usually have a far greater effect on performance than the difference between i5 or an i7.
Not unless everything you’re doing is going to be processor-constrained. Which is rare.
I’m not a huge fan of using Fusion in this SSD era, either. That’s a small SSD trying to make a slow hard disk look less slow.
The bottom-end iMac is good for email, Photos, FaceTime, and light web browsing.
It’s also not particularly upgradable.
Another vote for 16GB RAM. RAM in a 21.5-inch is not user-upgradeable and Apple won't do it either. What RAM you order today is your "forever" RAM.
I'm also a big proponent of the SSD. The factory SSD in my 2017 iMac is close to 3x faster that the fastest Fusion drives for which I have benchmark scores.
If it fits in the budget, I would choose 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. The CPU choice won't make as big a difference.
Thank You So Much!
Thank You So Much for help!
You're welcome.
Which iMac, i5 or i7?
