Imac 27 3.4 i7 anyone?

kirkster · 7 Jul 2011 at 18:58

Thinking of buying a 27inch. For £140 for faster CPU and another £70 for video RAM.

Me thinking that these will be for the life of the machine. So go for it now. I am not broke but for the sake of an extra £200 or so on student (OU) discount. Use for Virtual machines for my work, some light gaming, video and photo editing and light surfing.

How long do these imac systems keep running for lifetime wise?

Am I thinking right?

Cheers, K

AbsenceJam · 7 Jul 2011 at 19:10

The extra 300Mhz won't be something you notice or really make a difference to the life of the machine. The extra VRAM would likely help you for games since the iMac has such a high resolution, it may help it last a little longer also.

Buy yourself some more RAM if you use a lot of VM's and look at the drive upgrades because they're not easily user upgradable.

QwaF · 7 Jul 2011 at 19:24

Im fairly sure the i5 doesn't have hyperthreading. It isn't just a 300mhz clock speed difference.

Spit · 7 Jul 2011 at 20:26

I would totally get the 3.4 and 2Gb vram. The imac is not upgradable and if you appreciate speed then the £200 will be a good investment.
The iMac's keep there value as well.

Elric · 8 Jul 2011 at 10:41

Agree with the above, buy it now and just use it for a few years. The Core i7 is worth the extra over the i5 as it's 300Mhz and HT2, the gfx vram extra is less so but for most it's a one shot deal.

snow patrol · 8 Jul 2011 at 10:55

i have the same - got a 3.4 and 2gigs of vram. Then bought 16gigs of ram for about 110 quid from crucial and installed that straight away. It runs os lion like a dream...several firefox windows open (each with several tabs), logic, lightroom, itunes all open on separate desktops - never any need to close a program really!

The only thing i slightly regret is not forking out for an ssd drive. Partly for the speed increase, but also because the seagate 1tb drive that i have tends to make a small noise all the time, even when idle. At first it was annoying but now i've got used to it. Look into 'imac 1tb hard drive noise' on google and you'll see that it's a common problem.

keogh · 8 Jul 2011 at 13:35

snow patrol said:
i have the same - got a 3.4 and 2gigs of vram. Then bought 16gigs of ram for about 110 quid from crucial and installed that straight away. It runs os lion like a dream...several firefox windows open (each with several tabs), logic, lightroom, itunes all open on separate desktops - never any need to close a program really!

The only thing i slightly regret is not forking out for an ssd drive. Partly for the speed increase, but also because the seagate 1tb drive that i have tends to make a small noise all the time, even when idle. At first it was annoying but now i've got used to it. Look into 'imac 1tb hard drive noise' on google and you'll see that it's a common problem.

I'm similar, I wish I got the SSD with my 2.93GHz 27" iMac, the 1TB drive makes noises every now and then and gets quite annoying. Not too loud to drive you crazy, and you do get use to it, but you sometimes end up listening for it and it annoys.

The speed increase of the SSD wouldn't go amiss either. I will get round to upgrading it myself one day I think, but not to keen on opening up £1700+ worth of kit, not the same as building/modding PC's which was too easy.

LordSplodge · 8 Jul 2011 at 14:39

The 300mHz isn't worth the money. The extra vRAM is. However the best thing is to whack 16GB of RAm in there (not from Apple though).

I'd say an SSD but the Apple one is a little pricey. I would say go for the 2TB drive as that isn't user upgradeable.

kirkster · 8 Jul 2011 at 16:22

snow patrol said:
i have the same - got a 3.4 and 2gigs of vram. Then bought 16gigs of ram for about 110 quid from crucial and installed that straight away. It runs os lion like a dream...several firefox windows open (each with several tabs), logic, lightroom, itunes all open on separate desktops - never any need to close a program really!

The only thing i slightly regret is not forking out for an ssd drive. Partly for the speed increase, but also because the seagate 1tb drive that i have tends to make a small noise all the time, even when idle. At first it was annoying but now i've got used to it. Look into 'imac 1tb hard drive noise' on google and you'll see that it's a common problem.

Thanks guys for the replies.

So tell me how this SSD upgrade works please? I get the SSD and the 1TB drive right... So OSX goes on the SSD and the 1TB drive used for storage? I take it that the hard drive spins down when not in use and thus making the machine quiet?

Is a SSD accessible or is that buried in the machine innards with the ITB drive? I am thinking that with the max number of rewrites the SSD might not last for more than a few years and start to develop bad cells. "Ordinary" drives seem to run forever nowadays (sorry to the guy readign this whose drive just gave out but you know what I mean)

I think I am goign to get the 3.4 and teh 2Gig Vram.

Would like your thoughts on the SSD guys?

Thanks

kirkster · 8 Jul 2011 at 17:00

...also just checked out the price of the 1Tb and the 256Gig SSD - gee, an extra £350.... Boy... and that's on top of £1660 and that's with Edu discount !!!

So we'd have a 2100 machine after I'd put 16 gig RAM in it. That seems a lot of coin for a computer...

-|ScottFree|- · 9 Jul 2011 at 05:44

Well then it really depends on what you want to do with it. If you are going to utilise the power that these add ons provide, you have to swallow the extra costs. If you are, as you describe using of for a little bit of editing and gaming and light surfing.. then do you really need all the bells and whistles... you dont need 2 tb drives, get extenal drives. You dont need SSD, they are ridiculously overpriced from apple.

If you are not heavily video editing then you dont really need the i7.... the i5 would surfice... although for that amount, it may future proof you system a bit more.

Whatever you decide... enjoy it mate!!

Johnny|lucidcomposure · 10 Jul 2011 at 11:47

deffo Core i7.
Deffo Vram

SSD only if you can.

Spit · 10 Jul 2011 at 19:45

-|ScottFree|- said:
Well then it really depends on what you want to do with it. If you are going to utilise the power that these add ons provide, you have to swallow the extra costs. If you are, as you describe using of for a little bit of editing and gaming and light surfing.. then do you really need all the bells and whistles... you dont need 2 tb drives, get extenal drives. You dont need SSD, they are ridiculously overpriced from apple.

If you are not heavily video editing then you dont really need the i7.... the i5 would surfice... although for that amount, it may future proof you system a bit more.

Whatever you decide... enjoy it mate!!

You will be happy when you start using it tho