| Joined: | Wed Apr 4th, 2012 |
| Location: | St Louis, Missouri USA |
| Posts: | 106 |
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The major difference is that the new ones are thinner, don't have a Superdrive, and have some different I/O ports (no more FireWire).
I'd consider getting an older one depending on your I/O needs. Here are the specs:
Was and Still is: Configurable to 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
Was: Configurable to 2TB HD or 256GB SS second drive; Now: Configurable to 3TB HD or 768GB SS second drive
Was: Max RAM 16GB; Now: 32 GB
Was and Still is: Two Thunderbolt ports on 27-inch iMac
Was: Mini DisplayPort (none mentioned on new iMac)
Was: One FireWire 800 port (none mentioned on new iMac)
Was: Four USB 2.0 ports; Now: four USB 3.0 ports
Was: SDXC card slot (none mentioned on new iMac)
Was: Slot-loading 8x SuperDrive; (none mentioned on new iMac)
Was and Still is: Gigabit Ethernet
Edit: Max RAM on the old iMac (Mid-2011) can supposedly be bumped to 32 GB. The value of doing so is questionable.
I have 12 GB in my 27" 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 and it's plenty fast (standard 4GB + $40 8GB module from Crucial). I threw some Photoshop Liquify filters at a 100 MB D800 file and it took it only a few seconds. Then I up-rezzed the file to make it stupidly large and did some more Liquifying and it only took a few more seconds. Finally, I did an Oil Painting effect on the stupidly large file and that took 40 seconds, not really all that long considering it was creating jillions of fake brush strokes.
Last edited on Mon Nov 5th, 2012 13:46 by Dave Groen
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