Showing posts with label 27" imac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 27" imac. Show all posts

Friday, June 24, 2011

Testing the 27 "iMac" Thunderbolt - part V



Even in the video where the Mac Pro is traditionally at home, Westmere processors marking time: we find the fine balance between the raw frequency and the number of cores, which directly determines the performance for different applications. Handrake, for example, recognizes only core logic: this iMac is fighting against is with four cores to eight cores Westmere Mac Pro to € 3 400. But Handbrake does not take advantage of all the subtleties of Xeon processors, while the raw frequency is a key element of its operation: the iMac, with half of a good heart but more than the gigahertz Mac Pro, dominates with insolence. He can deal with anything against the twelve core Mac Pro to € 8 300: the frequency difference is less important than offset by the use of three times as many hearts.

The very marked differences in the Photoshop tests confirm the very different profiles of these machines. The DHT test uses a lot of old filters, so that the differences are erased in excess of five hearts (real and virtual) so the iMac is the hand with its higher frequency. The RAT test, it is much more realistic and simulates the touch of a photo with the latest filters: Although Photoshop performance peaked with massively multi-core configurations, the Mac Pro are Westmere at this time.

A beautiful iMac € 2 700 can be put in the closet of Mac Pro much more expensive? In most areas, yes, and widely: it shows, once again, the effectiveness of the Sandy Bridge Intel platform. The self in need of power will therefore turn to the iMac, which is not only the most powerful iMac ever made by Apple, but Mac is also one of the most powerful of the current range. The difference between these two lines is therefore not about raw power, but the concept: the iMac is an all-in-one, unlike the Mac Pro, which is still relevant for its scalability, ensuring a sustainability specific to dampen investment, therefore that represent the largest configurations. It also remains the machine of choice for certain niches, here for its computational capabilities, there to him the possibility of adding expansion cards. Still, the iMac is more than ever like the computer to do everything from Apple.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Testing the 27 "iMac" Thunderbolt



Sandy Bridge processors, connectivity Thunderbolt, SSD are the elements that we begin to know well, together or separately, on many Mac. Put everything in a single iMac, and you get a real bomb.

The configuration we are testing today is the top of the line iMac: Screen 27 "of course, 4 GB of RAM DDR3 1333 MHz, an Intel Core i7 Quad 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon graphics card HD 6970M with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, hard drive 1 TB and 256 GB SSD could obviously put more RAM, disk drive 2 TB or the graphics card to 2GB, but as it stands, this configuration costs a whopping € 2699 - € 300 more than the Mac Pro "basic".

This iMac is first ... yes, an iMac. The problems therefore remain the same: a screen can be a bit too bright, an SD card reader a little too close to the SuperDrive ... This new generation, however, offers many small innovations: the webcam is now able to shoot HD 720p (even if the quality is more than average) while the USB 2.0 ports (4) FireWire 800 are joined by Thunderbolt ports. Also, the drives are now connected via SATA III (theoretical maximum of 6 Gb / s, the SuperDrive is in SATA II), and the WiFi card is connected to three antennas, which allows to use the iMac 2011 WiFi 802.11n three channels at 450 Mb / s.

(Cont.)