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May 14, 2016 10:54 PM in response to marcsoucieby fox_m,★HelpfulGet the video card with the MOST vRAM. Usually that means you'll also be getting the i7 quad core with Turbo Boost (acts like an 8-core when you need it — and shows up as 8 cores with MenuMeters.) The 2013 iMac had a "back door" to easily add RAM, and if that's still the case - buy an extra 16G set from Crucial or some other 3rd party and add it yourself - you'll save (if I remember...) about $200. If I had to do it all over again, I would have also gotten the fusion drive, but the internal (regular) hard drive of the iMac gets a pretty decent read/write speed (about 130MB/s) but not what you really want with video editing. The internal SSDs offered are rather small, so I generally recommend building external SSD drives with enclosures. USB3 is fast. Thunderbolt would be better but it is still expensive. An SSD drive on USB3 is fairly impressive (I get about 300-400MB/s R/W for one and 370-435 on the other). You can get a USB3 enclosure for $10 - $40 (Amazon has a Kdlinks enclosure right now, limited time, for $9.95!) and you can find 500GB SSDs for less than $200 these days. I bought Crucial SSDs (I have a wee bit o' too much o' Scottish blood in me), but from what I've read, the Samsung EVOs are among the fastest (~500MB/s).
So - max vRAM if at all possible! (—whatever it takes to get that top of the line graphics card... you're gonna want it.) — and lotsa RAM (you can buy 8 with the mac + 16 from Crucial for 24 which will give respectable service) - Fast external drives are a nice plus.
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May 15, 2016 12:36 AM in response to fox_mby Karsten Schlüter,fox_m wrote:
... The 2013 iMac had a "back door" to easily add RAM, and if that's still the case ...
in addendum:
the new 21" dont allow swapping RAM, the 27" do ...
excellent summary for a dream-machine, F. McHoney ...
(we had a big lottery here this weekend - I didn't hit any single number,.... so, still a dream ...)