Apple updates iMac line with Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors - Page 2

These myths again?


-Chris

Can it run Crysis?

Hoping there's hope in 10.6.5.

-Chris

Intel's site doesn't show the i3-550 as Turbo Boost...

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=48505

Where did the 3.6GHz i5 come from? I can't find it on Intel's site or the PC component site I usually shop on. Does it turbo boost above 4GHz?

One of these CPUs plus an SSD would make for a screamer of a box.

Edit: ah, wait - maybe it is the i5-680
http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=48504

This might be it: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=48504

If so, it turbos to 3.86GHz

Interesting. I bought a blu ray player without the wi fi antenna so when it boots up, I get a spinning gear for ten seconds and it's on with the show. Agree about the previews. Shouldn't have to drill through menus to get to your movie. If I want ads I'll watch TBS or AMC or TNT.

So long as you can get a third party blu ray burner, I don't see it being a deal breaker. But I understand people wanting one. If you're going to use iMovie and edit hi def video, what exactly are you supposed to do with your masterpiece? Break it up into little pieces and put it in DVD's? Share it with the Mobile Me web gallery?

Thanks. If you go to the home user section of their site and browse i5s it doesn't show up, I guess they show a limited range there so as not to confuse people.

It's clear that Apple's focus is not on the Mac lineup, but on the iPhone these days. While USB 3.0 isn't immediately necessary because of a relative lack of accessories for it, it is a desirable feature. There was a time when the Mac lineup would rush out new technology. Now, it's become a follower. I think it's clear that Apple's efforts is in gadgets, and not it's Mac lineup. That's a shame...

BD-Live movies don't MAKE you view the downloadable content and force you into a non-theater experience. I think the key is the user has to actually read the items being selected before pressing ENTER on the remote.



-Chris

Wouldn't be the first time there has been a special processor model or GPU designed just for Apple.
"Hey Intel, we like your i3, but we want you to turn on Turbo Boost on them"
"Ok"

No matte display = no purchase from me.

It seems pretty clear that they went 5750 to save nearly 20W in the thermal profile. It's a decent step up from the previous iMac and you are never going to see the highest end gpu or CPU in an iMac or a laptop. The 5750 delivers 90% of 5770's performance at <85% of it's power profile and is a good tradeoff.

For the enthusiast market (who does want the bleeding edge, latest and greatest, over clocked, etc)... I think Apple realizes they cannot compete, so why bother? These are the people who either won't be happy in MacOSX at all, or who will build a hackintosh to get there. And at the margins those companies are squabbling over, I'm sure Apple wishes you well in pursuit of that. The greatest thing that the move to Intel has done for Apple is to make the hackintosh possible. They aren't going to come out and say it (no way they are going back to the clone disaster), but I'm sure they'd be happy if you bought a copy of their OS.

I guess I'm surprised this didn't come with an HDMI out in addition to the mini-DP video/audio output.

Since that's the case I wish Apple would, once and for all, sell a mini-DP -> HDMI cable (not an adapter or dongle) that supports audio.

No matter, there is definitely a quad-core 27" iMac in my immediate future.

Very nice. The 2.93 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor (hmm, maybe the 256GB SSD is too small) is a great option for some more hard core Video Editing and Motion Graphics. Although nothing can beat out that 12 Core Mac Pro - my goodness. Well at least the iMac i7 is more affordable - relatively speaking.

Apple are STILL skimping on the GPU... despite Steam and other gaming platforms becoming more popular on Mac.

The 4670 is more than a generation old, and was an $80 GPU at the end of 2008. My 4890 in my self-built PC is at least 4x as fast in real world gaming, and is also almost 2 years old.

The 5670 is a little better (at least it's current gen) but it's still from the bargain bucket. Even the Mac Pro only has a 5770, which would lose in almost any (DX10/DX9) benchmark against my 2 year old 4890.

I understand the iMac is not supposed to be a high-end gaming rig and that heat could be an issue with really high end GPUs, but there needs to be a middle ground. I'd love to throw all in with an iMac and lose my PC tower, but GPU performance is important to me and Apple have ignored it, yet again.


The 5750 is a good GPU, but Apple plonked it into a machine that sports a 2560 x 1440 display, so it's going to choke. A 5770 will stuggle at that resolution, let alone a 5750 which has 10% fewer texture units and slower memory clock (meaning lower fill rate).

So no one noticed this?

Let me quote:


To give your iMac a real performance boost, configure your 27-inch iMac on the Apple Online Store with an optional 256GB solid-state drive. You can choose it as your only drive or have it installed in addition to the built-in hard drive, allowing you to store the operating system, critical applications, and important files on the solid-state drive and your other files on the hard drive.


Was this available before or it is new?

Thank you for agreeing, now if Steve is reading this thread, OS 10.6.5 will support TRIM and SSD's on all macs and MBP's

That is new, these are the first iMac with SSD option. Prior to today, only the MBP and Xserve had SSD.

I am wondering if the i3 and i5 chips have integrated graphics that is being ignored by the OS, or if they are somehow variants without an IGP.

Interesting that you can get an SSD + SATA drive via CTO at Apple.com, but not two SATA drives or two SSDs...

Quote:
Originally Posted by FineTunes
Now that Apple is moving to SSD options in their iMacs and Mac Pro's, it would be nice if the next upgrade in OS X will support TRIM commands and address some of the issues that are found with SSDs.


STEVE: ARE YOU READING THIS?????

The point is that you can have both SSD + HD.

I hope so, I have a Corsair RealSSD in my MacBook... it works great, but I am sure it could be even better. The rumor is that TRIM in OS X will need the latest hardware controller, which would be terrible especially as Windows 7 and Vista doesn't have this requirement.

I tried that with the original i7 iMac and ended up buying another PC tower 6 months later. I found that trying to turn an iMac in to a gaming machine just got me a noisy Mac and mediocre gaming performance. Separate boxes is the go.

Yes that is very nice. I would have preferred the lower end configuration to offer integrated graphics (320M) and BTO SSD, so you could configure the ultimate silent iMac. But it appears it's discrete graphics all round (which means +1 fan), and SSD is for the 27" only. So the Ultimate Silent iMac (TM) is not a possibility.

I would hope that any upgrade in OS X would be backward compatible to earlier SSD's that Apple supplied with the MA and MBP. Have a 17" 2009 MBP and have had no problems with my 256 GB SSD. See that OWC has some solutions @

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/inter..._SSD_Sandforce

only wish that Apple would offer some.

Also curious what happens if you are using VM Fusion and Windows XP (yea I run windows--but only to run Office 2007 and so I can read CD ROMS at the LA Law Library).

You seem to misunderstand what Turbo Boost is - it's a marketing name for the enginineering concept "Runs Too Hot".

It's not a boost, but rather a reduction from the full speed of the core - the marketing weenies turned the problem on its head to create a 'feature'.

I would say that paying for 1080p video on 27 inches and paying for high-bitrate, multi channel audio through stereo computer speakers, is throwing your money away. If you want home theater experience, invest the money into a home theater. Otherwise, accept the fact that computers are to HD video as Kia's are to motoring!

'Felating?' Learn to spell.

Question:

Is the speed bump from i3 to i5 worth the 150 bucks if I use it mostly for Photography through Aperture? I assume that getting the 1G video upgrade for sure is.

Opinions/advice? Thanks!

Is it odd that the MacBook Pros have i5's while the majority of the iMacs only have i3s? Obviously there's a large discrepancy in clockspeed.

According to Intel's spec page none of the i3's have Turbo Boost. Either Apple or Intel has wrong information.

Wow. What a bunch of whiners. As though any of the stuff they did not include, e.g., BR, was news.

It's a fantastic upgrade, esp. at the entry level price (and even more so with the education discount). The 21.5s will sell like hot cakes: I predict a mega-hit this back-to-school season.

And, the stock market likes it! Me happy.

If there's a dedicated card, any IGP is ignored by default.

Breaking this down... what speed/performance improvements does a Core i3 bring to the table...

Currently, I have a (early 2008) 2.66Gz C2D with 4GB RAM (20" model), with a ATi HD 2600 PRO GPU ... Am I going to see moderate or greatly improved performance? I don't do alot of gaming, but I did install Steam and get Portal and it seems to run fine on my current machine, but I have not ventured out to try other Steam games like HL2, etc...

I do some HD video editing and encoding and currently, it can take a few hours to render out a video of about an hour of length. Other than that, I don't do any real work on the machine.

This rumor can't be true. The same MacBook hardware booting to Windows supports TRIM. Driver and filesystem needs a bit of work.

-Chris

I keep seeing this kind of argument and it never quite makes sense to me. The Mac product line continues to outsell itself quarter by quarter, so why wouldn't this continue to be a focus for Apple? I'm going out on a limb here, but I would guess that Apple has different development teams for Mac, iPad, iPod, etc. In fact, I would even guess that there is further differentiation at Apple in that there are most likely specific design teams for the MacBook, one for the iMac, another for the Mac Pro, etc.

The Mac product line seems to be a cash cow for Apple. Why would Apple ever as a company decide to simply neglect this revenue stream? Are they simply starstruck with their own ingenuity over the iPad and iPhone? Do they really believe that the desktop computer is going the way of the dodo? Even if this were true, doesn't it make more sense for them to ride this cash cow all the way into the sunset rather than abandoning it before it's time? Especially with ever increasing sales?

My guess is that once you start seeing USB 3.0 devices at BestBuy and WalMart you'll also see it in Macs. In fact, I'm pretty confident that you'll see it in Macs well before you can go into BestBuy and have anything other than one or two out of stock USB 3.0 drives. It's nice to have all the latest bells and whistles, but there is a point at which it simply doesn't make sense to throw in the bleeding edge just to say it's there.

And what, exactly, are you going to connect to eSATA? Is it faster than FW800? Sure. But other than a fast RAID, which is still fairly uncommon for consumers to own, what peripheral are you going to connect that will take advantage of eSATA's speed? You might get a slight benefit if you have a very fast single external drive, but not enough to justify adding that new port.

That is funny, I could not find it on Apple's website or Intel's website. Turbo Boost is offered only for i5 and i7

i thought the only difference between the i5 and i7 chips was faster ram and hyper threading. Why would that even matter if the imac doesn't come with the faster ram the i7 supports. that means you're limited to hyper threading which isn't even important for desktop machines not fully optimized for multicore operations. Grand Central and multicore programming are far from universally adopted features. It's not like this thing is the ps3 where they design for multicore from the start... so I don't understand why anyone would want the upgrade. Also, no usb3? wtf apple? I don't need esata. that's for server nerds. Firewire is at least still relevant for video editing. usb3 should be a mandate. Also partly agree on the bluray. Big wtf on this release. Seems VERY lack luster. super huge WTF on the not allowing you to have 2 hard drives unless one is SSD and one is HDD