Gadgetory

today's video is sponsored by very desk yo guys johnathan here and these are two of Apple's newest 21.5 inch IMAX one you absolutely should not buy the other is more powerful you might think only a couple hundred dollars more and surprisingly a really good value which is not something you'd normally say in the same sentence with Apple so I'm gonna stack them side by side even throw in a MacBook Pro but before we do that let's check out a word from today's sponsor very desk so if you work on a computer chances are you are sitting way longer than you actually should if you're looking to get into the standing desk world the very desk Pro Plus hit stand solution is awesome first off what I really appreciate its the fact that it comes pre-built out of the box there's no mess around with manuals no instructions no tools you are just instantly ready to go what's also cool is that this will work with your existing desk over the top it's sturdy it's really well built and super simple to adjust they come in multiple colors configurations so if you want to learn more make sure you guys check out the link below and again big thanks to very desk for sponsoring this portion of the video so this is the iMac that you shouldn't buy the base line of 4k 21.5 inch iMac and it's not bad machine by any means in fact the performance is surprisingly good but the fact that Apple includes for whatever reason a 5400 rpm hard drive in 2019 is crazy all the Mac books the MacBook Pros the Mac minis the iMac pros come with really fast SSDs as the base storage option even the bigger brother the 27-inch iMac comes with the fusion drive as the base option so the fact that it's not the same in the smaller IMAX is a little odd to be fair the 5400 rpm hard drive isn't as slow as I thought it would be you're getting read and write speeds about a hundred megabytes per second which isn't bang your head into a desk slow but you're definitely going to feel it and not in a good way in day-to-day tasks enter this iMac to step up which comes in at $14.99 us it's gonna get you a fusion drive a six core CPU as opposed to the quad core on the base model and better graphics so it kind of seems like a no-brainer now the fusion drive isn't going to compete head-to-head with a pure SSD it's just not possible what it is though is part SSD part mechanical drive and honestly the majority of the storage is the mechanical portion so you're getting that benefit of the capacity and you are going to get certain benefits of like boot times and loading apps fancy talk and tech gibberish aside what does that translate to in real life in terms of boot time the 5400 RPM imac boots up in about 50 seconds which might not seem that long but when you compare it to the fusion drive which comes in at 20 seconds that difference is night and day now performance on that fusion drive initially is kind of amazing like you run that test and you're like oh my god this is crazy fast once you give it a little time and it kind of runs this course you'll see the advantage is in that initial burst because after it levels out to about a hundred megabytes per second both read and writes so clearly there is an advantage jumping from that 5400 rpm hard drive up to the fusion drive but if you're curious what advantages an SSD would get you I took about 183 gigabytes of footage and transfer that from our jellyfish server down to a 27-inch iMac with a pure SSD and that took about five minutes which is really freakin fast for comparison on the 5400 rpm equipped iMac and the fusion equipped iMac that same task took about 30 minutes which is a huge difference so if you really truly care about speed jumping up to an SSD might not be a bad option alternatively what would make a great companion to that fusion iMac is to grab a samsung t5 SSD they're small a compact smacked it to the back and you got a super machine from there there's no arguing I'll be the first to admit the current iMac design is looking a little outdated that chin that bezel it just doesn't feel like something from 2019 so Johnny I it's time for an update ugly chin & bezels aside the display is really good like where else are you gonna get a beautiful 21.5 inch true 4k display that packs a six-course cpu pretty decent graphics a wireless keyboard and mouse out of the box all for that price point in terms of Io it's gonna be the exact same as the bigger 27-inch iMac you're gonna get a headphone jack SD card slot 4 USB ports 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports in the flavour of USB C and gig Ethernet now I realize Linus tech tips is doing the Arthur fists in those sandals right now with the lack of 10 gig Ethernet on these iMacs you can however thanks to Thunderbolt 3 pick up an adapter like this it's about 150 bucks and that will give you full-fledged 10 gig Ethernet to both the 21 or 27-inch IMAX some of the biggest fan of synthetic benchmarks but for reference here is how that i5 6 core CPU stacks up against the quad core i3 model there's a pretty big jump in terms of multi-core performance but what's really interesting is how close that I 5 6 core iMac hangs with the maxed out I 9 Vega MacBook Pro it's kind of crazy same thing with OpenCL you're getting performance jumps as expected but was really cool if you can throw vega 20 into this 21 inch iMac now clearly this isn't Linus tech tip so gaming isn't going to be the focus and again you should not buy a Mac of any kind if gaming is your sole purpose build your PC if you do want to do some light gaming no testing out rise of the Tomb Raider with a synthetic benchmark at 1440p low on that baseline iMac you're looking about 22 frames per second and jumping up to that next level up that's gonna get you about 29 I am much more a fan of real world example so what that translates to on the 560 X equipped iMac you can run Tomb Raider at 1080p on medium whereas with the 555 X you're looking at 1080p on low also for whatever it's worth I know cuphead isn't the most graphically intensive game it's annoying and super friggin hard but you were able to run both at 60fps at 4k on both of these machines so jumping back to how surprised that was with performance on these smaller imax most of the time on the bigger 27-inch iMac Pro I've been messing with the 27-inch non pro as well but opening up Final Cut and exporting one of my recent projects that went live on YouTube the air pods clone video which is 4k around 6 minutes the export times kind of blew my mind the quad core i3 iMac exported the project in 3 minutes and 35 seconds and again that's not that bad for the baseline option the 6 core i5 clocked in at 3 minutes and 15 seconds and then thrown in that Vega 15 inch MacBook Pro that was really fast at 2 minutes and 58 seconds it is worth noting that background rendering with this project was turned on and yeah that is how most Final Cut users will use Final Cut but to push things up a notch to make them a little more extreme I turned back a rendering opened up some red a.k raw footage and then export of that to 8k ProRes and that was honestly a bigger jump in performance between these models the quad core i3 imac clocked in at 6 minutes in 40 seconds the 6 core i5 model was a huge jump at 3 minutes and 3 seconds and then that 15 inch of Vega MacBook Pro was 2 minutes and 38 seconds which is really freakin fast so with that there was a pretty big jump in terms of performance with the i5 iMac and the i3 a lot of that had to do with CPU but also had a lot to do with the GPU so again for 200 bucks more you're getting a huge performance jump a faster Drive and that kind of makes this the no brainer option aside from that thank you guys so much for watching hopefully enjoy the video and you want to see more comparisons against the 27-inch iMac maybe a more extensive test against the MacBook Pro let me know by dropping a like this is Jonathan and I will catch you guys later