Gadgetory

so you might not have realized that but Apple just dropped a brand new 27-inch 5k iMac for under two grand and this is my review for starters dis lowers the cost of entry into the 5k iMac world by five hundred bucks previously the base model started at $24.99 that one's now 2299 and paves the way for the newer cheaper baseline model Apple still does though offer a non retina 27-inch iMac for $17.99 but you'd be crazy not to jump up to the 1999 model 200 bucks mortgage not only a 5k display but a faster CPU and graphics card so with that you're getting a quad core three point three gigahertz Core i5 processor eight gigs around a one terabyte 7200 rpm hard drive and for graphics a two gigabyte AMD r9 M 290 I'm not going to take you through the entire unboxing because chances are if you've seen one box and you've seen them all so how exactly does this new iMac perform and in Geekbench 3 on the single-core side it pumped out a score of three thousand three hundred seventy two and ten thousand seven hundred sixty three for multi-core now if you're curious about the performance on the baseline and the next step up in terms of processors are gonna be really close where I think most of you will see the biggest difference though is actually in storage the entry-level 5k iMac has a 7200 rpm hard drive which for me is a little hard to adjust to since anything I'm used to using is flash based it's not terribly slow by any means but in terms of performance edition out speeds of around 200 megabytes per second on both read and write now unfortunately I don't have a fusion model on hand but for reference my late 2014 5 K iMac which features pure flash storage dished out right speeds over 670 megabytes per second and read speeds over 720 megabytes per second so how exactly does that performance benefit you want to give you a really simple visual here's a file just under 2 gigabytes and by duplicating it you can really get an idea how much faster the process is on flash storage a fusion drive is a combination of a smaller flash drive or apps and frequently use storage live on that and then a larger mechanical drive for mass storage you can expect performance to be somewhere in between these two so next let's talk about what may be the most attractive thing about this iMac and that is the display 50 120 by 2880 otherwise known as 5k and definitely part of team Krispy that's 2 times the resolution vertically and 2 times the resolution horizontally of a non-retina 27-inch iMac and that results in four times the total amount of pixels now one of the things I see most often with the 5k iMac is why in the heck would I want a resolution that high isn't everything going to be super tiny without scaling yes but this is how it works and it's actually the main reason why the iMac is 5k instead of 4k the non retina 27-inch iMac has a resolution of 2560 by 1440 so 50 120 by 2880 is exactly double that both ways so screen real estate visually looks the same but for text and UI elements menus and so forth for every one pixel screen real estate there are four pixels crammed in that area and that's why it is so detailed on the other hand though it knows where a photo or video is in supported apps so instead of that four to one ratio it will actually give you the true one-to-one ratio so that's where you're able to get a full 4k window and still have screen real estate left over as far as graphics go with the AMD r9 M 290 running tomb raider at 2560 by 1440 on normal there is an average frames per second of 49 point 4 for reference the 4 gigabyte r9m 295 X on my late 2014 iMac was about 15 frames per second faster and those results were right on the money with Cinebench r15 as well now moving on from just graphics and more into the real world testing in Premiere Pro CC I compiled a three minute 1080p project that you guys can actually download and test yourselves links below but the baseline 2015 imac exported that project in 3 minutes and 35 seconds for the maxed-out 2014 imac did that in 2 minutes and 45 seconds jumping over to After Effects CC and again you can download this test and try it out yourselves but it took the baseline 2015 imax 6 minutes and 31 seconds to complete whereas the 2014 max out iMac was 5 minutes and 38 seconds so a pretty solid difference there now this next test the results were completely asked backwards and had me confused as hell to where I was running the test again and again I put together a really taxing Final Cut render test where it really utilizes the GPU and time and time after again the baseline iMac was faster it was faster by about 40 seconds every single time and I could not for the life of me figure out why so after a little digging and I think it's not a secret that the thermal design of the iMac is not going to win any engineering awards but because it was taxing out the GPU so much the maxed out iMac was getting so hot that it was throttling down now don't take this as some freak result where it's going to be like this for every single test as we saw with the others but if you're going to be doing any extensive 3d work you should probably look elsewhere and not the iMac simply because of the thermal design on top of that for most of you out there especially if you're trying to figure out where to best utilize your money in this iMac it's almost a better bet to invest that towards flash storage and third-party memory as opposed to maxing out the CPU and obviously the GPU if you really need a powerhouse machine and chances are you already looking at a Mac Pro or a custom-built PC anyways overall though I was really impressed with the total performance from this iMac aside from that 7200 rpm hard drive it didn't feel too slow but I think over time that is definitely going to be the bottleneck aside from that I do have 2015 15 inch macbook pro coach coming up as well so definitely subscribe if you don't want to miss that pricing availability everything else is linked down below this is Jonathan and I will catch you guys later