Buying a new iMac, but "how much" iMac to get?

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Level 1

20 points

Buying a new iMac, but "how much" iMac to get?

I'm trying to figure out "how much" iMac my wife needs for her birthday gift. She has one that's a few years old and seems to run pretty slow for her.

She uses InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, iTunes, Word, Chrome, an FTP program, and some remote login programs at the same time. She does NOT edit videos or music or anything like that. All print design and photo editing.

I know she needs a 27 inch iMac, but...

1) Can I stick with the 3.3 GHz option or do I need to bump that 4.0 GHz?

2) Do I need to max out the ram to 32 gigs or will 16 gigs be enough?

3) Will the "AMD Radeon R9 M395 with 2GB video memory" do the trick or do I need the "AMD Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB video memory" for what she does?

4) I suspect she needs a 1TB hard drive since the current one is 500 gigs and getting fuller by the day, but which hard drive option (flash vs fusion) makes the most sense?

ANY help and advice from those who know the ins and outs of these machines would be GREAT appreciated! Thank you!

Posted on Nov 17, 2015 1:44 PM

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Answer 1

pokey b

Level 4

1,893 points

Nov 17, 2015 2:04 PM in response to WriterApple

I am using a mid-2010 21.5 inch i-Mac and running several of those programs. I have 12 GB RAM and it runs well with that, would probably be OK with 8 GB. Yes, a large HD is a good idea. This machine only has 500 GB but I recently purchased a 4 TB Seagate drive for Time Machine back up as I expect tp also move to a newer i-Mac fairly soon. 8 GB of RAM was also fairly recent and did help with speed and runnability. The 3.3 G Hz would probably be fine for your wife but you could stay ahead of the curve by going better. I think the 16 GB RAM will be plenty. For a back-up drive I'd say don't waste money on a SSD, a conventional HD will do fine for that but for the OS yes, a SSD will improve speed and performance greatly. Good luck with the new machine !

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Answer 2

Nov 17, 2015 2:44 PM in response to WriterApple

Bump to 4 GHZ and Max the Ram to 32 and R9 M3995X with 4 GB Video.... FusionDrive with 1TB

She will Love it and so will you. Remember In Design, Photoshop, Illustrator are very large resource hog and it is smart to have More Ram and Graphics card will show just how good your system will run.

Cheers and Good Luck, You will Love it.

Don Morgan

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Answer 3

cdhw

Level 4

3,588 points

Nov 17, 2015 5:00 PM in response to WriterApple

What are the model and specs of her current iMac that 'seems to run pretty slow for her'?

C.

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Answer 4

John0001

Level 2

395 points

Nov 17, 2015 5:30 PM in response to WriterApple

I believe your best bet is to find out why it seems slow now. From what you posted, it's unlikely the CPU. Going for 32GB of memory is kind of silly in 2015 as you need to be doing professional level editing, or a whole lot of application development to even come close I often challenge folks to show me a screen shot of using close to 16GB of memory and most professionals cannot come close w/o running VMs with over specked amounts of memory. For the GPU, the AMDX versions are fort house doing serious high res (2.5k+) video editing, 3D design, or gaming, but even then understand the iMac uses the mobile (laptop) GPU which is well underpowered compared to a desktop GPU. I maxed out the 2014 iMac 5K with the 4GHz CPU, AMD 295X GPU, 8GB of memory, and the 512GB SSD. I can flawlessly do professional level development with several VM instance of CentOS running (CPU & memory intensive), and do modern 3D gaming very well too (GPU intensive).

SEe see what resources are used most when she is using the iMac and base your specs from there.

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Answer 5

WriterApple Author

Level 1

20 points

Nov 17, 2015 6:28 PM in response to cdhw

Great question about the current specs!

iMac 27 inch, Mid 2011, 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3, AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1024 MB, with a 1 TB SATA disk.

A lot of that is Greek to me, unfortunately. When I look at the current options, for example, I have no idea whether Core i5 vs Core i7 really makes a difference for her.

(And I do note that she has a bigger hard drive than I thought, but she's currently only using 426 gigs of it.)

Does that help at all?

Thank you!

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Answer 6

cdhw

Level 4

3,588 points

Nov 18, 2015 1:59 AM in response to WriterApple

This is quite a high-spec machine and in many respects a replacing it with an iMac is not going to make more than a marginal difference.

My advice would be to start from the assumption that it is 'slow' because of software issues and follow the diagnostic method recommended in the many 'My iMac is slow after I installed a new version of OS X' questions on these forums. These normally start by posting an EtreCheck report and using Activity Monitor to keep an eye on the 'Memory Pressure' while the machine is in use and a review of any third-party extensions and 'maintenance/antivirus' utilities. Some Chrome extensions can bring a Mac to its knees!

Once you are sure that all is in order, I suspect that adding a solid-state drive would make a noticeable difference to the speed of opening and closing files. Adobe software has a bit of a reputation for needing a lot of RAM, and it's pretty cheap at the moment, so you could try installing more. If the memory pressure is not being driven out of the green on a regular basis, however, more RAM won't make any difference.

C.

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