Need some serious spec help....

[morecowbell]

Please advise me on what to do here...

I currently have a mid 2017 iMac 27 Inch with the following specs:


Mid 2017
i5 3.4ghz
16 GB Ram
Radeon pro 570 4gb
1tb Fusion

I have one external display 27 inch I believe running at 3840x2160 Via thunderbolt.

I generally have 8 or so tabs running on safari, 2 on chrome (including streaming stock market data) Outlook, messenger, word, excel and ToDoIst all running. It might just be in my head but occasionally it feels Sluggish. It’s certainly not bad.

My wife and I are building a new home office since we can’t work side by side anymore. She also wants to move from a PC to a Mac. So we will need one new Mac. She does mainly email and excel. She wants two screens.

I would like to run one additional 4K display (so I have three screens).

Option 1: Use my current machine for myself, and attach one more display. Then get my wife a new one (maybe a Mac mini) with 2 displays.

Option 2: Give her my current machine and get myself a new iMac and 2 additional monitors.

Option 3: Give her my current machine and get myself a mini and attach 3 monitors.

I want enough power to Run the 3 displays and all of my apps without it feeling sluggish but want to avoid overkill.

How should I spec a new mini or new iMac?

I configured this today on the Apple store site. Is it overkill?

Standard glass
3.6GHz 10-core 10th-generation Intel Core i9 processor, Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz
32GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory
Radeon Pro 5700 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory
2TB SSD storage
10 Gigabit Etherne

 

[Whiteman007]

i would drop too 1 TB and get the 5700 GT (more power for the 3 monitors) and use an eternal if u really need the extra space. also dont buy Ram from apple get it form OWN or Crucial

 

[kohlson]

Some random comments/observations:
- I believe the "sluggishness" is your Fusion drive. MacOS is constantly reading/writing to the disk. SSD in an external TB enclosure may breathe some life into this system.
- Use Activity Monitor to examine disk activity, RAM usage to characterize your workload.
- Download something like istat to see GPU memory usage.
- I don't think the Mini's iGPU can effectively handle 3x 4K displays <- but I don't know that.
- I'm not so sure that a 570 with 4GB can run 3x 4K monitors. I have a 580 with 8GB and occasionally run 3 monitors (4K, and 2x HD) and it requires some fiddling to get all of them to run at 60 Hz. Not saying it can't be done. But 3x 4K on a 4GB GPU is pushing it.
- Nothing either of you are doing pushes CPU.
- As stated above, you may be able to take advantage of 16GB GPU with 3x 4K monitors.

IMHO, not sure why you *need* 10-core, or 10Gb Ether.

 

[morecowbell]

I’m learning a lot here. So I guess if professor has nothing to do with the extra displays and if the apps I use won’t tax it (even if they are all
Open) I should just drop back to the I7?

 

[kohlson]

If money is not a constraint, then keep 10-core. But if it is, I would use the extra cost of 10-core for something else - better GPU, more memory (especially 3rd-party) or more SSD. Lots of cores are good for things like VMs, Video/Photo processing, DB, giant number crunching - that sort of thing. But use activity monitor to see how much CPU you're using now. I suspect not that much.

 

[padams35]

I'd suggest getting the second 4K monitor first and trying that with your current Pro 570. It should work. If/when a 3-displays setup work you will know you can safely drop all the way back to a 6-core i5 with the 5300.

Also Strike option-3. A Mini's UHD 630 struggles a little with 2x 4K and isn't going to handle a 3rd flawlessly.

My bet on sluggishness: a) your internet connection, b) the fusion drive, or c) RAM pressure (check activity monitor).