iMac 21.5 or 27
 

Hi.

Looking to buy an iMac for my son.
Went to the shop and viewed the 21.5 and 27. At first I thought the 27 was going to be the one. However now home I realise how big the 27 is. It looked great in the shop but for home use is it just too big?

Anyone here run a 27 having owned a 21.5 ? What are your thoughts.

The computer will be used for school work and photoshop CS6.

I have 2 monitors, 30 inch and 27 inch attached to my PC, isn't an issue at home and for photoshop it will be very good.

To be honest the 27 is big, but not stupidly so and given the resolution and quality is absolutely stunning. I was in the same boat, but given I do a lot of Photoshop work I went with the 27. If he is going to use Photoshop a lot go for the 27 otherwise the 21 will be absolutely fine.

There is no need for a big monitor unless you do plenty of design work or like a lot of PC users want to brag about the size of it for some strange reason! Oh look! :lol1:

Also the iMac 27 is such a good looking machine it doesn't feel like having a 27" monitor on the desk whereas 99% of PC monitors are gash in the looks department. Aesthetics are not a major factor in some people's decision making, but can be for others.

27 will be better for photoshop

27 is the one, best screen

I have two 27" on my desk at work. Before getting the 27" I did have a 21.5", and there is a bit of a difference, but not too much. When I got an iMac for home I went for the 27". When I first put it on the desk it looked huge, but after a week I got used to it.

I would go with the 27".

Defo go for the 27 inch if funds permit.

Highly recommend upgrading the hard drive to an SSD or hybrid.

on the 27 inch the memory can also be upgraded easily at a later date which you can't do on the 21 inch.

The SSD on the Mac runs off PCI not sata. My dads can write at 700 Meg/Second

My work machine is the 27 inch with standard hard drive and I wished it had been upped to an SSD.

Memory from here:

http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/list...013%29&Cat=RAM

Dad upped his to 16gig and it runs awesome.

SSD is definitely worthwhile but PCIe SSD's are now the same speed as SATA3, ie 6Gb/s which is around 750MB/s so PCIe is only really an advantage if you have an older SATA interface.

I think SATA 3 saturates at around 500meg/sec. My mac Mini does and me main PC.

Before the Macs went PCI I think they were running the non Pro Samsung 840 which was getting 400 read and 250 write IIRC

I used to have the 24" iMac which for me was the sweet spot. Then replaced it with a 21" as I felt the 27" was just too big. I found the 21" with the resolution was perfect however this is personal choice. Just remember for expansion the 27" is better as it has the memory slots to add later. The 21" needs to be configured with what you need now and later on as you cannot add memory a year down the line

Aside from that also remember the lack of DVD drive if you need it. Most people don't

Lucky chap :thumb:

The latest Samsung 840 Evo is hitting @560MB/s and that is mSATA!

I think a lot of that is down to SATA 3 implementation on some mobo's and CPU Usage. I have seen many benchmarks using real world applications that cannot distinguish between SATA and PCIe on loading and bootup because the higher transfer rate is offset by worse Random Access times.

A decent SSD is such a huge upgrade over mechanical the numbers really just boil down to willy waving. I have seen some PCIe drives hitting over 1000 MB/s however, those are more than twice the price of 2 similar capacity m500's (2x240gb for £80 each vs 256Gb for £200) which will easily match that transfer speed in RAID and have almost double the capacity for the same cost.

Yep totally. I got 2 Evo's for £99 each from pixmania, bargin!

:thumb:

The Fusion drive (hybrid drive of normal HDD and an SDD) DOES make a difference.

One of the team needed a replacement so we decided to try one out. Seemed pretty good. built our Xcode project for our app 55% faster than the existing machines we had (2011 27" with whatever the top end chip was, plus maxed out RAM). This was great as we were able to use this speed increase as a business case for others on the team to get new machines, which we did.

A couple of corrections for you I'm afraid:

1) SATA-3 has a maximum bandwidth of 600Mbyte/second, not 750
2) PCIe SSDs have been comfortably above 1Gbyte/s (and far beyond) for years.