MacFormat UK – June 2019

27in iMac APPLE CHOICE

Paul says...

Regular readers will

know that I’m eagerly

awaiting hard facts about

the upcoming modular

Mac Pro. An iMac with an

eight-core i9 is tempting,

but the Mac Pro may

sway me, depending

on what Apple actually

means by ‘modular’.

It also depends on

whether the Mac Pro’s

price is closer to that

of the iMac Pro, too.

macformat.com @macformat JUNE 2018 | MACFORMAT | 79

even higher spec: a Core i9 processor. This

option is available only on the middle and top

27in iMacs at checkout. Brace yourself, as it

bumps up the cost by £450 on the former and

£360 on the latter. So, the least you’ll pay for

the capability that these eight cores – and 16

processing threads – can deliver is £2,399.

One of the reasons we test using the free

video transcoding app HandBrake is that it

tends to make full – or close to full – use of

however many processing cores are available

to it. Our traditional test for this is to encode

a roughly half-hour video to H.264 format.

The 16 processing threads available on our

27in iMac tear through this test with ease.

So, last year we began to test processor

capability by also encoding a 57-minute video

to the HEVC (or H.265) format. This is more

demanding for a device to handle. The 27in

iMac’s Core i9 took 43 minutes and 4 seconds

to finish the task. It’s worth noting that it’s

the only new Mac that we’ve tested in recent

months that has been able to complete the job

in less time than the video’s duration.

In contrast, the quad-core i7 in our 2018

13in MacBook Pro took 1 hour and 32 minutes,

while the six-core i5 in the 21.5in iMac fell

roughly in the middle on 70 minutes and

7 seconds. Those figures help to illustrate just

how differently the various processor options

in the Mac range deal with heavy-duty tasks,

and why you might want to throw an extra

wad of cash towards the eight-core i9.

The capability of the eight-core i9 is

also shown in its single- and multicore

Geekbench scores, which are a 9% and 35%

improvement over the best available in the

Mac mini – a six-core i7.

Interestingly, the 21.5in iMac’s processor

(see page 82) is the same specification as the

one in the entry-level 27in iMac. Both have a

six-core i5 processor that’s clocked at 3.0GHz

and able to speed up to 4.1GHz thanks to

Intel’s Turbo Boost tech. Beyond screen size,

these two iMacs are equipped with different

graphics processors. The larger one has a

13-inch MacBook Pro

& 5K display £2,624

SPECIFICATIONS

2.3GHz quad-core

Intel Core i5 processor

Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz

16GB memory

256GB SSD storage

Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655

iiyama ProLite XB2779QQS

27-inch iMac

(alternative

configuration)

£2,019

SPECIFICATIONS

5120x2880-pixel IPS display

3.0GHz six-core

Intel Core i5 processor

Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz

16GB memory

256GB SSD storage

Radeon Pro 570X 4GB

ALTERNATIVE CHOICES >

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