So after many years of use I’d decided to retire my 20″ 2007 iMac which was starting to show it’s age even with an upgrade to 4GB of ram and from an internal hard disk to SSD and the Superdrive replaced with a 1TB 2.5″ spinning disk.
After seeing the release video for the new iMac on the 17th my interest was piqued enough to pull the trigger and order one.
I wanted the 4Ghz i7 and really once you’ve gone SSD there is no going back, so I didn’t want to risk the fusion drive. (Apple’s software wrapper for an internal 1TB spinning disk and a 128GB PCI-E SSD.)
Instead I plumed for the 512GB SSD, 8GB of RAM with more ordered from Amazon. The one concession I made was to not get the upgraded graphics card, the AMD M295X, instead getting the base AMD M290X.
As it turns out, I am eligible for an educational discount and as such I’ve initiated a return to Apple of the machine I have with an almost identical one ordered with the upgraded M295X.
This gives me the perfect opportunity to benchmark both and compare the results.
Here is the first collection of results for the following benchmarks, unigine valley, unigine heaven, 3dmark firestrike running in both OS X yosemite and Windows 8.1 Enterprise running in boot camp where applicable.
The benchmarks are all run in the highest possible preset available in the free version. This is to ensure that the result are comparable to other machines and not obscured by a myriad of custom settings. I will try and do some hi-res benchmarks at some point as I understand that with this machine especially, there would be interest in this.
The Windows 8.1 benchmarks are something I’ve not seen may other places.
Machine
Late 2014 – 27″ iMac i7 4790K 4Ghz, 16GB, 512GB SSD, AMD M290X
Unigine Valley – Extreme HD – OS X – 1096
Unigine Valley – Extreme HD – Win 8.1 – 1302
Unigine Heaven – Extreme – OS X – 659
Unigine Heaven – Extreme – Win 8.1 – 841
3dMark Win 8.1 – 5319
You can watch the actual benchmarks and my commentary on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB01opLsNn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EteZl9mYLOQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dIMurjxImU
You can also watch an incredibly unscientific video of my opening every app in the applications folder at once. (hint the iMac doesn’t break a sweat). Here