Lab Tested: New 27-inch iMac speed results
Finally, after many phone calls to many Apple Stores—as well as a few heartbreakingly fruitless trips to far-flung retail stores—the hard-to-get 27-inch iMacs are in our lab and tested. The results, however, were not what we expected.
The new 27-inch iMacs are available in two standard configurations. Both have 8GB of RAM and feature Intel’s quad core Ivy Bridge processors. The $1999 model sports a 3.2GHz Core i5, while the $1799 model uses a 2.9GHz Core i5.
Both iMacs include 7200-rpm, 1TB SATA-3 hard drives, but the drives in these two iMacs we received are not identical—and neither were their performance scores. Our $1999 iMac has a Western Digital WD10EALX Caviar Blue drive with 32MB of cache. Our $1799 iMac has a Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 hard drive with 64MB of cache—twice the cache of the WD, and the advantage of the larger cache is evident in our test results.
2012 27-inch iMacs: Speedmark scores
Speedmark 8
27-inch iMac/3.2GHz Core i5 (Late 2012)
224
27-inch iMac/2.9GHz Core i5 (Late 2012)
238
27-inch iMac/3.4GHz Core i7 1TB Fusion Drive, 16GB RAM BTO (Late 2012)
313
27-inch iMac/3.1GHz Core i5 (Mid 2011)
189
27-inch iMac/2.7GHz Core (Mid 2011)
187
15-inch Retina MacBook Pro/2.6GHz Core i7 (Mid 2012)
275
21-inch iMac/2.4GHz Core 2 Duo (2007)
82
All results are scores. Higher scores are better. Best result in bold. Reference models in italics. Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, Albert Filice, and Kean Bartelman.
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