Apple hasn’t changed everything for this model, keeping 8GB as the standard memory amount upgradeable if need be, and has gone with a very similar video card in the AMD Radeon R9 M290 with 2GB video RAM (the 290X was used in the first model), though this can be changed at the point of ordering, too.
There’s even the same storage amounts offered, though the drive technology has changed slightly.
You see while solid-state drives and Apple’s hybrid “Fusion” drive tech are both offered as options, the stock model here comes with a standard 1TB hard drive, a saving of around $200-300 compared with the equivalent 1TB Fusion drive. Some won’t worry about that, and others will, but while it might seem like Apple is shaving off some of the price tag, we suspect the shift from Fusion drive to standard drive is where the price drop is really coming from.
Using the computer, most people aren’t likely to notice a difference.
Unless you’re really into something that requires super speedy hard drive access, say video editing, photo work, or something that really requires a special hard drive setup, the 1TB 7200RPM drive is a great starting point, providing a price cut for those who don’t really see the difference and never will.
Granted, we’d take the better technology, with Fusion allowing faster access to files by sending the most frequently used files to 128GB of solid-state flash storage, providing faster access equivalent to relying on a solid-state drive, but keeping a larger amount of space provided for everything else, and meaning the other files are accessed from the slower hard drive.
As we said, most won’t notice a difference, but some will, and if you feel like you might, you’ll want to configure either the base model or go with the next one up which starts with a Fusion drive and boost both the graphics and main processor a little.
That said, performance during our tests with the 2015 edition of the 27 inch 5K Retina iMac were just as good as we remembered, with virtually no slowdowns during any apps.
Gaming was also perfectly acceptable here, and with a similar video card to the one we used last time — AMD’s Radeon R9 M290 with 2GB RAM — we found one title “Thomas Was Alone” ran at the 5120×2880 resolution without any issues, while our regular benchmarking title of “Portal 2” could only manage the 2560×1440, with the resolution double (the actual listed resolution of the 5K display) suffering from a texture glitch that basically stopped us from playing the game.
That could be an issue with the title, and it could be an issue with the video driver for the 5K display.
We don’t recall the same problem popping up when we played with the first generation of the 5K, but we also didn’t write much about the gaming performance so are willing to put this down to a bug in the title, rather than a bug in the hardware.
That being said, there are minor differences between the video hardware in this variant compared to the older one, and you can likely see this affect the price as well as titles. It might not seem like much, but an “X” could appear to make all the difference, with the M290 in the May 2015 27 inch 5K Apple iMac, and the M290X in the one before it.
Is it a little insane? Possibly, and we stand by our logic that few will likely notice the difference, but until all the games and graphics-heavy apps are patched up, you may find the odd niggle here and there.
Performance overall seemed to be quite good, however, something we’re not terribly surprised at given the use of fifth-gen Intel Core processors, which so rarely seem to throw up any red flags in any computer we’ve looked at.
We should point out that while Intel’s Broadwell chips can be fan-less — that’s the fifth-generation of Intel’s Core processor for those playing along at home that aren’t familiar with Intel’s codenames — the chips used inside the new iMac machines are still installed with a fan.
You can’t hear it very much, mind you, and we had to push the graphics pretty aggressively to get the fan to spin up in a way that was audible, but when it did, it still wasn’t overly loud, sounding more like someone who was frustrated with us and was huffing and puffing like a very quiet two year old who was steaming he hadn’t been given some sweets.
