I'm gonna be upfront with you guys.
When I saw that Apple had updated the iMac,
I didn't really think about it twice.
I mean, it's just a refresh
and they didn't make a bunch of noise about it.
But then I saw that it came with
up to a core i9 eight core processor.
At that point, I had all kinds of questions like,
how the heck are they gonna cool one of these
in a standard iMac?
Does this make the iMac Pro basically pointless?
And how quickly can we get one?
Well, let's answer that last one first.
It takes about a week.
As for the rest of it, stay tuned
because we are about to find out.
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Within its iconic trapezoidal box
and sandwiched between three pieces of protective styrofoam,
we find the beast with its glossy 27 inch 5K retina display
front and center.
I've got to praise Apple
for their multiple layers of protection
to ensure that your iMac reaches your desk
without any scratches or scuffs.
But I do think that there's room to improve
on the amount of non-recyclable material
that they use for packing.
The same can also be said for the IO.
It's mostly great, actually.
We've got two Thunderbolt 3 ports
and more than enough type A,
and you can charge up to four USBs for the average desktop,
especially when you consider that Wi-Fi is integrated
and the magic keyboard and magic mouse
need to be charged so infrequently
that they can share a cable.
But dang it, Apple.
If we're gonna shower you with praise
for including 10 gig Ethernet on the iMac Pro
and the Mac mini,
then you've got to expect the opposite
when you don't do it.
It's not even an option here,
which is a real shame because you're stuck either,
whether you're charging up to five level network speeds
or shelling out several hundred dollars
for a Thunderbolt to 10 gig Ethernet adapter.
As for the rest of the design,
Apple has taken the if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach,
remaining fundamentally unchanged since 2009.
In fairness, it somehow still looks pretty sexy,
but the bezels and especially the chin bar
are just massive for a modern machine.
And we feel like even timeless designs,
need to be refreshed once in a while.
That said, the 2019 iMac does have one welcome remnant
of that bygone era, user expansion.
Apple's still rocking it
with four easily accessible DDR4 SO-DIMM slots,
which means unlike Anthony,
when he purchased this machine for review,
you can skip the Apple tax and install your own memory
to not only save yourself a little cash,
but to push your system RAM capacity
to a staggering 128 gigs.
That's double what Apple has available on their store
for about the same price.
So Apple, I don't want to beg.
It's not dignified, but I will.
Whatever the next iMac looks like,
please don't take this away from us.
Between this iMac and the Mac mini,
you've shown us that there are still some people there
who care.
It's not too late to change.
Enough about the future though.
Let's take a look at the machine we have today.
So we kitted ours with the top end Core i9-9900K,
and we're going to take a look at what it's capable of.
So we're going to take a look at the top end Core i9-9900K-F,
and that F means that it omits the Intel HD graphics
that typically come along for the ride in consumer chips
in favor of slightly improved thermals.
Unfortunately, while our unit also has dedicated graphics,
we opted for the Radeon Pro RX 580X,
figuring that if we needed a lot more horsepower,
we could get more with our Radeon 7
in an external enclosure.
No onboard GPU means that Intel's quick setup
and sync video encoding is out of the question here.
It's a good thing that Apple is big on OpenCL.
So onto our performance analysis then.
We're going to focus mainly on the iMac's CPU performance
with emphasis on how well Apple managed to cool
our beastly eight-core hyper-threaded CPU
if they managed it at all.
And actually, it keeps our Core i9 going
over even long workloads with core temperatures hovering
around the low to mid-90 degree mark.
Now to be clear, that's higher than what I'd be comfortable with,
and that's especially true once there's some dust in the cooler
a couple of years later,
but it's actually better than I expected.
And if, like us, you have concerns about the long-term health
of any machine that's running hot enough to cook instant noodles,
you can use a piece of free software called Max Fan Control
to bump up your fan speed.
So then at full, our temperatures looked a lot better
and a lot more sane without our machine becoming unreasonably loud.
But not all of the news here is good,
or even necessarily bad.
Some of it's just kind of weird.
While our CPU frequency is constant,
which would indicate that we're not throttling,
let's just overlay the base clock on this graph and...
Ooh.
We're a little off there, aren't we?
Let's zoom right in on the first minute of the temperature
and CPU speed graphs
and...
That's weird, too.
It's not even thermal throttling.
So...
It kind of smells like a power limit issue.
Sure enough, then, if we look at the package power
using Intel's power gadget,
we're actually running at around 80 watts sustained
instead of the 95 that they rate this chip for.
Now, it's unclear whether this is a deliberate measure
to protect constrained VRMs
or if it's because of a firmware bug,
but what we do know is how it impacts performance.
So, in some of our tests,
we got similar performance to our comparison 9900K,
but heavier loads like Cinebench
revealed the 6% difference
that we would expect from lower clock speeds.
So, it looks like Apple managed to tame the beast,
but they only did it by removing some of its venom,
which is...
sort of cheating.
We did find outliers the other way, though.
This is really interesting.
So, in this Blender render,
we managed higher performance
than our reference comparison CPU.
This one took us a little while,
but here's what happened.
Remember that controversy over motherboard manufacturers
basically factory overclocking Intel CPUs
by removing some of Intel's recommended constraints?
Well, around that time,
we switched to running all of our benchmarks
at Intel recommended turbo boost settings,
which is something that we can't manually control on the iMac.
So, then it looks like what Apple has done
is played around with the turbo clock speed dials a little bit,
provided that the chip does not exceed their power limit,
which actually resulted in a continuous boost clock speed
of 3.8 GHz in this test.
As a sanity check,
we ran our comparison 9900K with its limiter disabled
and a beefy cooler,
and it performed better still.
So, now you know.
Which leads us, then,
to the price.
It's actually pretty reasonable
compared to building your own comparable desktop setup
with the same features.
This is something we've talked about before,
and it's happening again.
If you want that hardware,
Macs are generally actually not that expensive.
So, the question then becomes,
should you buy one?
At 2700 US dollars for the Core i9 version,
you're looking at someone who needs
the high per-thread performance of the Core i9-9900K,
as well as excellent, if not the best multi-threaded performance,
8 cores really is a nice sweet spot,
and an excellent 5K display.
So, we're looking at photographers,
video editors,
and other visual media professionals.
Looks like they kind of nailed it.
In fact, ironically,
in some ways, they nailed it a little too hard,
because it's actually a better machine
for a lot of those users
than the iMac Pro,
and that computer is nearly twice the price.
So, then, if you're one of those people
who needs that magic blend of performance
and dorm-friendly form factor,
you really can't go wrong.
Unless...
paying for computers that don't perform
quite as the specs indicate
and come with a mouse that you can't use while you charge it
just...
straight up rubs you the wrong way.
You know what rubs me the right way, though?
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