Gadgetory

I'm gonna be upfront with you guys when I saw that Apple had updated the iMac I didn't really think about it twice I mean it's just a refresh and they didn't make a bunch of noise about it but then I saw that it came with up to a core I nine eight core processor at that point I had all kinds of questions like how the heck are they gonna cool one of these in a standard iMac does this make the iMac Pro basically pointless and how quickly can we get one well let's answer that last one first it takes about a week as for the rest of it stay tuned because we are about to find out the hot docs uses the Ergo Docs design which keeps you comfortable typing away for long periods of time and features qmk firmware and hot swappable key switches check it out at the link below within its iconic trapezoidal box and sandwiched between three pieces of protective styrofoam we find the beast with its glossy 27-inch 5k Retina display front and center I've got a praise Apple for their multiple layers of protection to ensure that your iMac reaches your desk without any scratches or scuffs but I do think that there's room to improve on the amount of non recyclable material that they use for packing the same can also be said for the i/o it's mostly great actually we've got two Thunderbolt three ports and more than enough type-a super speed USB s for the average desktop especially when you consider that Wi-Fi is integrated and the magic keyboard and Magic Mouse need to be charged so infrequently that they can share a cable but dang it Apple if we're gonna shower you with praise for including 10 gig Ethernet on the iMac Pro and the Mac Mini then you have got to expect the opposite when you don't do it it's not even an option here which is a real shame because you're stuck either accepting 2005 level network speeds or shelling out several hundred dollars for a Thunderbolt 2 10 gig Ethernet adapter as for the rest of the design Apple has taken the if it ain't broke don't fix it approach remaining fundamentally unchanged since 2009 in fairness it's somehow still looks pretty sexy but the bezels and especially the chin bar are just massive for a modern machine and we feel like even timeless designs do need to be refreshed once in a while that said the 2019 iMac does have one welcome remnant of that bygone era user expansion apples still rocking it with four easily accessible ddr4 sodium slots which means unlike Anthony when he purchased this machine for a review you can skip the Apple tax and install your own memory to not only save yourself a little cash but to push your system RAM capacity to a staggering 128 gigs that's double what Apple has available on their store for about the same price so Apple I don't want to beg it's not dignified but I will whatever the next iMac looks like please don't take this away from us between this iMac and the Mac Mini you've shown us that there are still some people there who care it's not too late to change enough about the future though let's take a look at the machine we had today so we kidded ours with the top-end kora 999 hundred K F and that F means that it omits the Intel HD graphics that typically come along for the ride in consumer chips in favor of slightly improved thermals unfortunately while our unit also has dedicated graphics we opted for the Radeon Pro rx5 ATX figuring that if we needed a lot more horsepower we could get more with our Radeon seven in an external enclosure no onboard GPU means that Intel's Quick Sync video encoding is out of the question here it's a good thing that Apple is big on OpenCL so onto our performance analysis then we're gonna focus mainly on the IMAX CPU performance with emphasis on how well Apple managed to cool our beastly eight core hyper-threaded CPU if they managed it at all and actually it keeps our core I 9 going over even long workloads with core temperatures hovering around the low to mid 92 greem Arc now to be clear that's higher than what I'd be comfortable with and that's especially true once there's some dust in the cooler a couple of years later but it's actually better than I expected and if like us you have concerns about the long-term health of any machine that's running hot enough to cook instant noodles you can use a piece of free software called max fan control to bump up your fan speed so then at full our temperatures looked a lot more sane without our machine becoming unreasonably loud but not all of the news here is good or even necessarily bad some of it's just kind of weird while our CPU frequency is constant which would indicate that we're not throttling let's just overlay the base clock on this graph and ooh if we're a little off there aren't we let's zoom right in on the first minute of the temperature and CPU speed grass and that's weird too it's not even thermal throttling so it kind of smells like a power limit issue sure enough then if we look at the package power using Intel's power gadget we're actually running at around 80 watts sustained instead of the 95 that they rate this chip for now it's unclear whether this is a deliberate measure to protect constrained VRMs or if it's because of a firmware bug but what we do know is how it impacts performance so in some of our tests we got similar performance to our comparison 9900 Kay but heavier loads like Cinebench revealed the 6% difference that we would expect from lower clock speeds so it looks like Apple managed to tame the beast but they only did it by removing some of its venom which is sort of cheating we did find outliers the other way though this is really interesting so in this blender render we managed higher performance than our reference comparison CPU this one took us a little while but here's what happened remember that controversy over motherboard manufacturers basically factory overclocking Intel CPUs by removing some of Intel's recommended constraints well around that time we switched to running all of our benchmarks at Intel recommended turbo boost settings which is something that we can't manually control on the iMac so then it looks like what Apple has done is played around with the turbo clock speed dials a little bit provided that the chip does not exceed their power limit which actually resulted a continuous boost clock speed of 3.8 gigahertz in this test as a sanity check we ran our comparison 9900 K with its limiter disabled and a beefy cooler and it performed better still so now you know which leads us then to the price it's actually pretty reasonable compared to building your own comparable desktop setup with the same features this is something we've talked about before and it's happening again if you want that hardware max were generally expensive so the question then becomes should you buy one at 2700 US dollars for the core i9 version you're looking at someone who needs the hyper thread performance of the kora 999 hundred K as well as excellent if not the best multi-threaded performance 8 course really is a nice sweet spot and an excellent 5k display so we're looking at photographers video editors and other visual media professionals looks like they kind of nailed it in fact ironically in some ways they nailed it a little too hard because it's actually a better machine for a lot of those users than the iMac Pro and that computer is nearly twice the price so that if you're one of those people who needs that magic blend of performance and dorm friendly form factor you really can't go wrong unless paying for computers that don't perform quite as the specs indicate and come with a mouse that you can't use while you charge it just straight up rubs you the wrong way you know it rubs me the right way though our sponsor for today's video ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction they've even got real people working at their customer service center and not robots you pay only for what you use with the average ting bill coming to just 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