A few finding on 21.5" vs 27" I did today

[beerglass007]

Hi all,

I purchased a 27" imac i5 2.8ghz this week but still kept my 21.5" until i'm happy with the 27" and decided its right for me. I got the 27" and started to get headaches so didn't put the 21" onto ebay until really happy with the 27"

Anyway, I have the 21 and 27 on the same desk and decided to run some tests.
When loading apps the 21" is faster. The 21" is a 3.06GHZ core 2 with 4GB ram and a ATI 4670 video card. The 27" is a 2.8ghz quad i5 with 4GB ram and ATI 5750. Most apps loaded a few seconds quicker on the 21" Mail, firefox, calander, settings etc etc

Then I loaded SC2 and again the 21" loaded quicker. The 27" runs around 33FPS at native res and high settings. The 21" runs 45fps native res and medium. But I couldnt tell the difference in detail between the two machines, only the load times were quicker on the 21". As soon as I set the 21" to high settings it killed the fps.

I've also noticed the 21" has a 1TB SATA HDD make Hitachi and the 27" has a 1TB SATA HD make WD.
The 27" HD noise can be heard quite alot of the time but you can never hear the 21"
Is this the model ? or because the 27" is larger and carrys the sound more ?

 

[wordoflife]

Launching apps depend on the hard drive speed. They might have different drives.

And although the 27" iMac has more powerful specs, remember it needs to power than massive display as well which might just make it around the same as the 21.5

 

[beerglass007]

Yeah but that should impact the loading times

Just seen the thread on here for noise HDD

Mine is bad

 

[ProstheticHead]

If I were you, I would return that 27" that you purchased and go buy this: http://www.powermax.com/parts/show/c-nim-mc507ll__a

That's the previous gen i7. It's CPU beats the new i5 in Geekbench scores by nearly 1500 points. The only downside is the lower amount of VRAM. Regardless, the GPU runs at a higher clockspeed than that in the new i5, so the difference in FPS is only a few frames. The only time you'll see a huge difference is in games like WoW where massive landscapes need to be rendered.

I'm somewhat pissed that PowerMax began offering these at $300 less than what I paid for mine. WITH NO SALES TAX.

Too late to take mine back now.