Is the base model good enough?

[EugW]

Fusion drive is so 2012.
And of course SSD is cooler and silent.

 

[Zirel]

It is one of those times where the base model isn't too underwhelmingly castrated. With the slight loss in performance you gain back some heat efficiency and obviously also some cost savings. While a budget I would go for the base and upgrade the SSD as much as you can.

I’m so happy with my machine.

I got the base 5K with the 256GB SSD, then I already had a 256GB SSD for bootcamp, and got a 16GB DDR4 stick from crucial making 24GB, but the base 8GB are already more than plenty, specially considering it has enough memory on the GPU to handle all the graphics...

 

[Firebrand]

Fusion drive is so 2012.
And of course SSD is cooler and silent.

Apple didn't even bother to market it as Fusion 2 or so. But whatever.

 

[morphodone]

I have the 2017 base 27" iMac with 512 SSD and I upgraded the RAM myself with some crucial memory for a total of 24 GB. Seems to be fine for all my needs.
I use Lightroom with an external HDD and other basic tasks like surfing, balance, checkbook, etc. Plan on using an external SSD for extra speed with Lightroom down the line.

 

[mogg11]

Base 27" + 512 SSD just ordered!
Reading through all the review posts here, I don't want to trouble myself into those heat + noise issues after spending huge amount of money in i7+580 for the performance gain that I may even not notice during day to day work.
Base 27" definitely has the best cost effectiveness, the effectiveness goes down a little bit after attaching a 512 SSD to it as it really costs a lot, but with the speed I can actually feel later on, it's absolutely worth it.

 

[EugW]

Base 27" + 512 SSD just ordered!
Reading through all the review posts here, I don't want to trouble myself into those heat + noise issues after spending huge amount of money in i7+580 for the performance gain that I may even not notice during day to day work.
Base 27" definitely has the best cost effectiveness, the effectiveness goes down a little bit after attaching a 512 SSD to it as it really costs a lot, but with the speed I can actually feel later on, it's absolutely worth it.

For most day to day work the i5 65 Watt models will be great. If you do any video encoding or transcoding though, the i7 will be much faster.

One thing I noticed that just dragging and dropping video out of Photos is a big tax on the system. In Photos (in 10.12 Sierra), if you do this with a 4K h.264 video, it will transcode the video to h.264 again (even though the video is already h.264 and untouched). This takes a while, even on the 4.2 GHz Core i7 7700K iMac.

A way of getting around this is just to export the original video and it will be instantaneous of course, albeit with a larger file size. That's all fine and dandy, but I wonder what will happen in High Sierra when all those iPhone 4K videos are HEVC based. For distribution to some people they will need to be transcoded to h.264. However, it seems that currently the transcoding is software based. Will Photos in High Sierra change it to hardware encoding, or is the quality not good enough?

 

[Chupa Chupa]

I've been doing OK with a 2012 base model 21.5" -- Intel graphics! It was suppose to be a "tide me over" machine but 4 years later.... The only thing I use the machine for is photo editing (20-24MP RAW files in Lightroom and PS CS6), FCPX and Motion. It's been surprising how usable the machine has been on a hobbyist level.

That said I will be buying a stock entry level 27" iMac as soon as the discounting starts. I can afford a mid-range iMac but prefer to spend the money on more RAM and an external SSD. The 970 isn't amazing but it'll do just fine unless you are a true pro and every last second counts or you are editing 4K video or play games.