Help Guys..........Advice Required of my tech Friends

Same post is listed in the Apple forums but i want some advice regarding my purchase of a IMAC yesterday [still Boxed]

Please read below and feel obliged to tell me what you would do...........And no saying go get a gaming PC either ..


Hi all.

Yesterday after many years of looking at the Apple Macs i decided to go and buy myself a shinny new IMAC.

Bought it from Best Buy in Dudley and said at the time to the guy is this the fastest one on the market to which he replied yes.

After getting home i find that the model i have which is a 27inch I5 with a 2.7ghz processor and 4 gig of DDR 3 ram and a amd hd 6770m graphic card.

Now i have found out that there is a higher spec IMAC that has a processor that runs at 3.1ghz and a better graphics card 6970m.

Now they both look like they use the same I5 processors and the higher spec is another £250 ..............So do i take it back and get the higher spec and will it make a considerable difference or not.

I'm totally new to Macs so any information would be extremely helpful to me,i mean its still boxed and untouched but when i buy something that can not really be upgraded i want the best that's on offer from the start.

Thanks all......

Hi,
I have been looking at the new 27" imac aswell (i currently have the 2010 i3 21.5" version) but doing research i have come accross the same dilema as yourself, depending on what your doing the extra GFX power (around 70% difference from the 6770M and 6790M) and the extra power of the 3.1Ghz i5 compared to the 2.7Ghz version.
From my experiance of Macs it's worth the extra money in your case if your going to be:
Video Encoding with anything like Final Cut Pro
Running Simultanious OS'S ie. windows 7 and MAC OSX using something like VMWARE in cohearence mode.

As for upgrading i asked when i bought mine and the only thing they would allow at the time is RAM (i believe this still stands) which is really cheap when bought from kingston or crucial and 3 screws to change.

I found this bit of info about the CPU's
http://www.primatelabs.ca/blog/2011/05/imac-benchmar...
I also found this about the performance in general included the difference in graphics
http://www.barefeats.com/imac11b.html

Hope this Helps

Edited by deleted (Tue 06-Sep-11 20:37:55)

Yep, i'd say it all depends what you plan on using it with, imacs use mobile chipsets so performance on them wont be pushing games at high spec, not quite sure what performance you could expect out of it for games as i dont follow mobile chipsets.

If you plan on doing exotic stuff like editting then the upgrade would probably be worth it.

Cheers for all the information mate and a very interesting read,i'm not going to be doing anything like you suggested so may be I'm perfectly fine with what i have.

Basically its my love of gadgets and when i buy something new like a PC or IMAC in this case i always want what is the fastest and best at the time,i would have bought a MAC a few years back but like i said there are very few options to upgrade with a MAC and if i was still gaming on a computer then i would not have got what i have and i would have gone for a custom Built PC again.

I just love the way the IMAC looks and to me its a new OS and something i will have to get used to for sure,went out today and bought IMAC for beginners.

looking at the Apple Store you can customise the 27inch and basically have a beast of a IMAC.............I changed the Graphic card,picked 8 gig of ram and went for the faster i7 processor which will put thee price up from £1400 to just over £2000.............If i do it then i have to take this back to best buy.............But i think i will stick with what i have as i'm sure its going to be plenty fast enough for anything i throw at it.

Looking quickly at the spec and simple benchies:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6770M.439...

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6970M.430...

The 6970m is twice as fast as the 6770m.

So if you do want to play some games, then I would say that £250 is money well spent because why settle for a lot less with something that isn't as fast as you wanted.

It's Mac, not MAC btw.

Yeah i like my CAPITALS