Please review your 2017 iMac

[jayfromnova]

You got in early, ordered and now have received your iMac. Are you happy with your purchase? Any regrets? Wish you had upgraded the CPU, SSD or ___? What about fan noise? I'm particularly interested in whether your iMac is quiet or not and what CPU choice you made when you make that observation. If you were ordering again, what changes to your order would you make?

The rest of us procrastinators are waiting to hear from you brave early adopters!

Thanks in advance!
JayFromNoVa

 

[Falcon80]

Good thread. Let's wait for some contributions.

Just to share this review I watched over at Youtube.

The guy mentioned the fan noise is pretty bad.

 

[pcf2]

Received mine today. 27", i7 4.2, Radeon Pro 580 with 512 SSD.
First impressions: gorgeous display, blistering fast, SSD is clocking over 2GB/sec. My only gripe thus far is the constant fan noise - can be heard across the room on idle, and only gets louder under load. Whilst, my 2012 iMac is virtually silent unless being pushed. Not sure if I'll be returning it or not...

 

[KnoeSS]

Received mine today. 27", i7 4.2, Radeon Pro 580 with 512 SSD.
First impressions: gorgeous display, blistering fast, SSD is clocking over 2GB/sec. My only gripe thus far is the constant fan noise - can be heard across the room on idle, and only gets louder under load. Whilst, my 2012 iMac is virtually silent unless being pushed. Not sure if I'll be returning it or not...

Got the same one, only with i5 3,8 no fan noise at all.

 

[jltj]

I have the base 27" with 256 ssd. It's totally silent, even this afternoon while I was rendering video and putting my ear close to it to listen for any fan noise. The monitor is really the most beautiful computer screen I've ever seen.

 

[Quash]

Good thread. Let's wait for some contributions.

Just to share this review I watched over at Youtube.

The guy mentioned the fan noise is pretty bad.

There is also a follow up video on fan noise:

 

[saberfi]

I have the i5/575 machine myself.

In normal use / idle, the fan noise is barely audible, but it is there - the level of it is quite low however, so it doesn't bother me. I am yet to push the machine harder though, so we'll see.

The i7 can be a fairly hot chip, so I wouldn't be surprised if it contributes to fan noise noticeably.

 

[Falcon80]

It seems that i7 will be noisy. Kind of strange. I thought the fan will kick only when it overheat. Why does it heat up so soon?

 

[Ursadorable]

Glad I dropped by this thread. The fan noise would be a big negative for me the new iMac.

 

[xgman]

The top line 27's have had a good bit of fan noise under load for at least since the 15's came out. Mostly under heavy load or during TM backups or indexing, rendering, etc. If it was like that constantly I couldn't stand it, but it comes and goes. Let's face it, these high end processors and video chips always run hot under load and need to be cooled down somehow. The lower end chips and the macbook chips don't run anywhere near as hot. Just goes with the territory.

 

[Falcon80]

I have the base 27" with 256 ssd. It's totally silent, even this afternoon while I was rendering video and putting my ear close to it to listen for any fan noise. The monitor is really the most beautiful computer screen I've ever seen.

256 GB Ssd is sufficient for your use?

 

[Luxtrau]

My Config:
i7
16 GB RAM
1 TB SSD
Radeon Pro 580

Display is awesome, can't find any negative point. It's bright, super clear and sharp.
I was also blown away by ssd speed, for example when I open up RAW file it's almost there immediately. Apps are very fast, too.
I can confirm, that fan is nearly always running, but it's very quiet. So it doesn't bother me. Only once I forced it to run loud, when I did massive photo editing and watched a 4k video parallely, but after a few seconds it got quiet. I have to do more testing. Right now I'm surfing web, watching video stream and Pages is open. When I turn off my speakers, I really have to concentrate to hear fan noise. Now it's a very, very decent swoosh. But fan is indeed running, it is not disabled. CPU is at 39 Degrees Celsius.
I'd say fan noise is very bearable.

Once Photoshop crashed and told me it had problems with gpu, but I think these are just driver problems, so I don't worry about it. It never happened again.

Good idea to do a thread like this!

 

[jltj]

256 GB Ssd is sufficient for your use?

It's a step up for me since I've been using 128 SSDs for the past few yrs. I always have an external drive connected since even a 3TB Fusion drive would eventually be insufficient for me and I end up using an external anyway. Another reason is because I don't want a spinning drive in a computer I can't open up easily myself to replace. I leave my computer on 24/7 and spinning drives tend to deteriorate after a few yrs.

 

[Luxtrau]

It's a step up for me since I've been using 128 SSDs for the past few yrs. I always have an external drive connected since even a 3TB Fusion drive would eventually be insufficient for me and I end up using an external anyway. Another reason is because I don't want a spinning drive in a computer I can't open up easily myself to replace. I leave my computer on 24/7 and spinning drives tend to deteriorate after a few yrs.

True. I also think that hard drives are outdated, because they extremely slow down overall performance of any computer. Today I would never buy a hard drive again, the difference is too big.
Before I bought the iMac I researched a lot about the performance of earlier models and I came to the conclusion that almost all people who complain about slowdowns had a hard drive installed (or a FusionDrive).

 

[yukkwanf]

The i7 CPU gets hot easily and sometimes reached 100C when playing WoW

 

[Huddy]

I've had mine a few days with the following spec:

i7
8GB Ram
512GB SSD
Radeon 580

It's no doubt a nice machine, very quick and the display with it's brightness is really nice to work on, but my display shows signs of light bleed all around the borders which is yellowing whites. How are others finding their screen uniformity?

Having played a hour or so of WoW a few times in busy areas the fan has maxed out at 2700RPM which is loud, that's at 1440p and high settings, most of the time its barely audible over the speakers at medium setting. 100c cores and around 85c GPU are my max recorded whilst playing WoW.

 

[-Ryan-]

I bought the base model 27" with a 256GB SSD, added a further 32GB of RAM for a total of 40GB of RAM. Anyone who says that an iMac is silent clearly cannot hear properly, as every iMac I have ever used has some level of fan noise audible when sitting close by, unlike for example a MacBook Pro that you can only really hear if you literally stick your ear against it or under load.

The base model i5 has only a very minimal noise, with fans spinning at what I presume are their lowest RPM which is just about audible in a silent room from 50cm away. I haven't done anything yet that has really got the fans going. Importing, editing and exporting RAW photos in Lightroom didn't seem to cause much stress. I imagine gaming or video editing would send it louder.

The screen is absolutely beautiful. The colours are excellent, the brightness is (for me) a little too bright on maximum, but it is good to have that option, as most other computers I have used I would keep the screen always maxed out.

The biggest downsides for me are a. the disgraceful lack of standard SSD and b. the rip off RAM. The first is a major, major concern that I find totally inexcusable in 2017. At least there is a Fusion Drive as standard, but then the issue is that upgrading to an SSD is more expensive than it should be as Apple gets to keep the Fusion Drive. The second is a minor inconvenience for a 27" owner, given that upgrading it yourself is both inexpensive and straightforward.

The Magic Mouse remains an issue. The design of these urgently needs updated. For a professional machine, a mouse that causes fatigue will never be preferable over a perhaps slightly less pretty ergonomic mouse. Of course there is also the bizarre placement of the lightning port underneath - the less said about that the better.

Overall I'm very pleased with my machine. The iMac remains an excellent choice, with the best screen on the market. The i5 is plenty good enough for most users, but the Fusion Drive and 8GB RAM should have been left behind a few years ago.

 

[Quash]

100c cores and around 85c GPU are my max recorded whilst playing WoW.

Wow that CPU temp. would worry me long term. I've had these temperature issues with 2 iMacs in the past, which both eventually lead to broken GPU's. Does anyone have temps/fan speeds while gaming on the i5 Models with 570 or 575?

 

[fokmik]

so the combo i7+580 is again loud and hot like we had in the past i7+m295x

 

[Trebuin]

If you're running into issues & are concerned with the CPU temps, shut off turbo boost with something like turbo boost switcher pro. It will drop the volts & temps significantly.

 

[fokmik]

if you shut down things, why we not would go with the i5+580 ?
CPU \ Intel thermal utility \ Stressed (realistic) \ While gaming
i5-7600 (3.5) 73W \ 49W \ 42W
i5-7600K (3.8) 103W \ 64W \ 55W
i7-7700K (4.2) 137W \ 98W \ 77W

so the i5 7600k+580 is the highest combo you should go if you care about fan noise and temp

 

[Trebuin]

if you shut down things, why we not would go with the i5+580 ?
CPU \ Intel thermal utility \ Stressed (realistic) \ While gaming
i5-7600 (3.5) 73W \ 49W \ 42W
i5-7600K (3.8) 103W \ 64W \ 55W
i7-7700K (4.2) 137W \ 98W \ 77W

so the i5 7600k+580 is the highest combo you should go if you care about fan noise and temp

True. Keep in mind if you actually need the CPU like me, you may want the i7. I shut off hyper threading because I don't need it all the time & it keeps things quiet, but once I start rendering or encoding...I need every bit of the CPU.

 

[Falcon80]

True. Keep in mind if you actually need the CPU like me, you may want the i7. I shut off hyper threading because I don't need it all the time & it keeps things quiet, but once I start rendering or encoding...I need every bit of the CPU.

So it is possible to turn off hyper threading easily via settings?

 

[Taz Mangus]

so the combo i7+580 is again loud and hot like we had in the past i7+m295x

Did the i7/m395 combo get very hot?

 

[bcortens]

Received mine today. 27", i7 4.2, Radeon Pro 580 with 512 SSD.
First impressions: gorgeous display, blistering fast, SSD is clocking over 2GB/sec. My only gripe thus far is the constant fan noise - can be heard across the room on idle, and only gets louder under load. Whilst, my 2012 iMac is virtually silent unless being pushed. Not sure if I'll be returning it or not...

Check your activity monitor, this seems odd, mine is virtually silent at idle fan. When I first got it it required almost a day to go through and run the photo analysis demon to do its image recognition thing.
[doublepost=1497663306][/doublepost]

so the combo i7+580 is again loud and hot like we had in the past i7+m295x

I think it's the CPU.
I have the i7 + 580 and my GPU is almost always 10ºC cooler than the CPU. I'm not sure why but I did see 99ºC (on the CPU) the first day when it was hitting 150% CPU usage running photo image recognition. I've installed SMCFanControl and usually bump the speed up a bit when gaming but generally I find the fan curve fine as is for day to day use.

Generally, very happy, I'm coming from the 2013 iMacs so the retina upgrade is quite noticeable.
Gaming, I'm still finding myself dropping most games down to 1440p for smoothness since I prefer high frame rates to the very minor (in my opinion) visual bump that I'm seeing running at native 5K.
Code compilation is a tiny bit quicker than the 2013 but I already had the i7 so I'm not sure if its the SSD or the CPU which is aiding my compile times but I'm happy nonetheless.

[EDIT]
As a further note, I've only spun up the adobe CC apps once but they were very snappy and the zoom in and out of very large illustrator files felt smoother.