Will there ever be a new large iMac (Pro)?

[Azrael9]

Hang on to your horses!! Wait a couple of weeks for some reviews from a couple of guys on this thread. I know @Azrael9 won't hold back if he finds thermal issues. He is a massive apple fan but he does give both sides to the story. Also waiting for Max Yuryev's review too.

Max Yuryev's review should be reasonably fair. He may be an 'Apple Fan' but he ususually calls it as he sees it.

Apple are a corporation. They don't owe me anything. And I don't owe them anything either. And I only buy Applekit (at premium) for the MacOS if it makes the grade or has made significant progress. Fortunately for their coffers, there's no shame in the 'last' Intel iMac.

For £3400. I'll be fair but brutal in my assessment of the 'Legacy' Intel iMac.

I've got an attic studio which gets hot during these balmy UK Summers. I'll soon know if there are anything thermal issues running benchmarks, apps or some old game from 2004.

Apple aren't giving me a review machine or any gifts. I won't be shy about saying it how it is. I'd rather listen to a a voice of 1 from these forums than the established reviewers in the press or YouTube that often don't call Apple out on certain things.

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

wow nice what one you order?

my 10 core 5700 GT has an updated delivery to thursday

Nice. Good news for you, Whiteman007.

Azrael.
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Order update: my BTO now estimated for Monday!

anthony13,

Lightning fast! That's moving on super quick.

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

AMD allegedly already working on NAVI 41 - VideoCardz.com

AMD could already be developing its fourth generation of RDNA architecture. AMD NAVI 41 (RDNA 4X?) A new rumor has surfaced from a respected leaker Komachi. According to his information, AMD could already be working on yet another NAVI product codenamed Navi 41. Komachi’s sources are usually...

videocardz.com

A Navi2 still listed. For the iMac 'Pro', eh? Maybe even the Mac Pro...

Azrael.

 

[DrRadon]

Did we have this one already. He dos all sorts of thermals and comparisons.

 

[Voyageur]

So no big changes in internal design with only one fan, so will have similar thermal issues to previous iMacs.

Wait a minute, what thermal problems did 2019 have? I'm currently trying to find reviews and feedback on the cooling problem in 2019 and I can't see them.

 

[DrRadon]

Wait a minute, what thermal problems did 2019 have? I'm currently trying to find reviews and feedback on the cooling problem in 2019 and I can't see them.

Forum dwellers. ^^

The main issue is that if you build a hack with proper cooling lower spec setups will outperform higher speced iMacs.
Like in that video i just posted you can see how points decrease when he runs three benchmarks in a row. Better cooling, less reason to reduce computing power.
But litteraly no one but forum dwellers know about this so... yeah, forum dwellers.

 

[The_Lord_of_Apple]

I've got an attic studio which gets hot during these balmy UK Summers. I'll soon know if there are anything thermal issues running benchmarks, apps or some old game from 2004.

I would be definitely interested in this!!!! So please do share this aspect. Australian summers are BRUTAL and my study has no AC at all.

 

[Azrael9]

I would be definitely interested in this!!!! So please do share this aspect. Australian summers are BRUTAL and my study has no AC at all.

I'm sure Australia is lovely and I do like the character of the Aussies. (But the one thing I don't stick too well. Is extreme heat. I wilt like lettuce. Sunny and breeze kind of person.)

We're experiencing record temperatures at the moment. (And I do wonder if running the iMac in a muggy/hot room contributed to its gpu frying and the fans blowing hot. I also wonder if the Mac under Windows/Bootcamp cools as well as it does under the Mac...)

In this environment, it will be brutal for the iMac.

I used to think temperatures of rooms and how efficient computers were was a load of old nonsense.

One fried gpu later. I've learned something.

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Did we have this one already. He dos all sorts of thermals and comparisons.

He does a battery of tests there. He's keen on fan noise and thermals, is Yuri. 3 passes of Cinebench.

No new cooling. The components...are faster but it looks Apple have been playing with efficiencies...

eg. The GPU is down clocked. And the CPU under volted?

Azrael.

 

[DrRadon]

We're experiencing record temperatures at the moment. (And I do wonder if running the iMac in a muggy/hot room contributed to its gpu frying and the fans blowing hot. I also wonder if the Mac under Bootcamp cools as well as it does under the Mac environment...)

I used to think temperatures of rooms and how efficient computers were was a load of old nonsense.

One fried gpu later. I've learned something.

Azrael.

I also live under a roof, a tar roof that gets lots of sun that is. There is a very very clear difference in when and how much cooling kicks in and about performance just as much. 21 degree and 34 degree in base temperature are a significant difference. Thats just how it is. When you maximum is just under 100 degrees thats a solid 13% difference in what you cooling has to handle.




Oh yeah, and about my last post. The thermal throttling is also an issue in MacPro or other run of the mill tower PCs. The most significant difference tests i saw was via water-cooling. So just because there is more performance in a machine dos not mean that it should magically be there if things stop being iMac or MacBook. I would not be capable of telling were the sweet spot of "this is how it should be" actually lies. I just know that only the nerdiest of the nerds complain among the five million people that buy iMac in many years.
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He does a battery of tests there. He's keen on fan noise and thermals, is Yuri. 3 passes of Cinebench.

No new cooling. The components...are faster but it looks Apple have been playing with efficiencies...

eg. The GPU is down clocked. And the CPU under volted?

Azrael.

Did he not say the CPU is using more wats?

 

[Azrael9]

Forum dwellers. ^^

The main issue is that if you build a hack with proper cooling lower spec setups will outperform higher speced iMacs.
Like in that video i just posted you can see how points decrease when he runs three benchmarks in a row. Better cooling, less reason to reduce computing power.
But litteraly no one but forum dwellers know about this so... yeah, forum dwellers.

You're spot on, Dr.

Snazzylabs has demonstrated how 'Hacks' with a lower gpu can outperform a higher one in the iMac Pro.

Thermals. Cooling. (Or not in the case of the iMac...) Which allow your components to perform at full flight. (Or not.)

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Did he not say the CPU is using more wats?

Yes, he did, Dr.

Considering that, it was keeping its thermal composure reasonably well from what I could see in the video.

The GPU is using better encoding provided by AMD's VCN 1.0 with some very impressive HD results compared to some (admittedly) much older gpus. Check out the benches in the review. The unigine bench is also smooth as butter on the 5500XT. (I'm guessing at HD, doubt it was at 5k. I'll watch again to check.) I'm of the view that as game play on PCs is still mainstream on HD that the iMac doing smooth butter on HD with bells and fx on...is a good place to be. And if you can get 'reasonable' 4k performance then this will be a fitting epitaph to the last Intel iMac.

Between the 8 core and the 5500XT, you're getting a price cut of £800 on the BTOs. The 8 core is performing better than the previous gen'. And it seems Apple has been playing with efficiencies.

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Wait a minute, what thermal problems did 2019 have? I'm currently trying to find reviews and feedback on the cooling problem in 2019 and I can't see them.

Yuri was one of the reviewers of the 2019 iMac. And he said that, using a similar battery of tests..., that the 2019 iMac was whisper quiet under load.

But user counts (which I'm more inclined to believe...) have stated 'hair dryer' noise. aka. Fans.

One tiny fan to cool the giant hot plate of the iMac doesn't make sense to me, anyhow.

How much does it cost to put two bladdy fans in there and a couple of vents like on the iMac Pro?

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Yuri's delivery date for the ten core and 5700XT is a day later than mine.

Guess he's in America. Think we got in 'abit' earlier here in the UK and this side of the sun.

Azrael.

 

[sco]

eg. The GPU is down clocked. And the CPU under volted?

There's been speculation that Intel has improved the way the i10 handles heat versus the i9 e.g.

Also suspect the Radeons in the '20 are more efficient with the GDDR6 memory which means more headroom for higher performance.

 

[Azrael9]

There is just a crazy amount of open space and it is even more apparent now with no SSD and SATA area.

Just one fan, then. The cooling is 'as you were, Sir.'

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Judging by the peak clock speed, wouldn’t the 5700 run the coolest compared to all the other options? I’m tempted to jump to the 5700 for this reason alone (and also for a bit of future-proofing).

They've downclocked these, it seems, to start with. So they shouldn't pump out as much heat.


VCN 1.0 improvements over older Polaris/Vega cards? So encoding should see a thermal/performance boost. Win. Win.


And I think AMD did better with the thermals on Navi 1 in general over the previous Vega which, to be polite, was hot and hungry.


Also. It stands to reason, (at least in my own head space...) that the 5700 would be performing well within its capability...vs a 5300 so it doesn't have to work as hard or to get as hot as the other options.

But it seems they've done ok on managing the thermals on this gen' of gpus in general.

Good for Video. Good for games. Particularly the latter was the last frontier of what the iMac needed to 'get good at.'

It's not like mainstream PC towers are resplendent with 4k performance.

With the barometer still in the high fps for HD to 2440p. As nothing less than a 2080 Ti is going to get you 4k performance near that? (From what I've seen on the 5700XT benches, you're looking at 30-50 fps at 4k depending on age of the game.)

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Judging by the peak clock speed, wouldn’t the 5700 run the coolest compared to all the other options? I’m tempted to jump to the 5700 for this reason alone (and also for a bit of future-proofing).

Yes, looking at the chart Fokmik provided...the lower gpus are higher clocked. Whilst the 5700s are lower clocked.

Interesting.

In general for a bit of future proofing, I'd get one of the 5700 options. (And I did. The 5700XT 16 vram.)

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Another great review

I seem to recall her reviewing some studio/wireless headphones...so you can play your guitar...and hear the sound depending on which direction you face etc. ie. As is you were playing in a particular virtual place eg a virtual concert hall. So if you want to plug in your elec guitar and not wake the neighbours...

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

I think you are wrong. Apple will be the king in few years. Intel is done!
AS will demolish anything on the market as no one will be able to compete with such a complete eco system.
If you build your hardware + software you always have advantage. Apple showed it with iOS devices - still no one can beat that after all these years. Same will be with AS.
Buy bye Intel, you sucked and you crippled innovation for us.
Sorry but not sorry

Hello Freida,

I think the big problem. Is intel themselves. They've done what AMD did. They got in their own way. They've made their own choices. And we live or die by them.

They were offered the chance to go phone via Steve Jobs in iPhone. But they blew it. So Apple did it themselves. And it gave Apple the billions in profit to one day develop a family of chips which will chainsaw any tentacle Intel has in Apple's £££ business.

That own goal cost Intel Billions and the advantage of a being a cpu leader in phones...which could have been funneled into their ace in the pack? Fabs. But their own incompetence and decision making erroded their chief advantage.

I think Intel have been blessed with the Wintel monopoly. It made them lazy. They got duffed up pretty well by PPC, Dec, AMD (now twice...) and ARM threatens to bury them like a tech' Tsunami. Not to mention 2 Trillion Apple getting into the ring with seismic software and hardware efficiencies backed by ten years of pad and phone engineering.

Apple have been watching Intel pish its lead up a wall for some time now. Intel sat on quad cores for years...until AMD's chiplets put the hot spoon on the 800 pound Gorilla's gonads.

Apple aren't blameless of the barren desert of desktop Macs in the last ten years or letting form factors get in the way of giving us a better deal or gpus...or designing around the problem.

But Intel are hot. Inefficient. The very same problems Steve Jobs dumped PPC for.

So I don't understand anyone throwing themselves on Intel's coffin. Because make no mistake, Apple will bury Intel this time.

When Intel lost the iPhone? It put one nail in the coffin.

Apple now control their software, compilers and cpu/gpus (they showed no remorse to former partner Imagination...) as well as their own store...gaming subs...consumer and pro stacks. They have tens of thousands of devs that flocked to the Apple platform with iPhone and iPad. 1 billion plus.

Some seem to be in denial about AS. They shouldn't be. The Mac has finally joined the Apple family of products.

I knew one day, the Mac would come 'home.'

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

So no big changes in internal design with only one fan, so will have similar thermal issues to previous iMacs. Also the SSD isn’t removable which isn’t great.

Yeah. No new thermal. Pretty lazy there.

I guess they've done with efficiencies on the Intel and AMD side of things.

Word being that Intel have tried to manage heat on this latest gen. And the RNDA1 'Pro' Apple gpus are downclocked...at least for the 5700s with new VCNs for the incoding so in many ways the cpus and gpus don't work as hard on key tasks.

I'm less worried about the SSD as I don't intend to get inside mine. Can add exterior SSDs or hubs.

But I think the 'fan' looks lonely in there. Couldn't they have squeezed in a similar cooling system to the iMac Pro in there?

Azrael.
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Moved up from the 19th to the 14th to now the 13th, honestly feel like it could get here before that. I was looking forward to the BTO model potentially being assembled in Cork, Ireland. I heard a while ago that the BTO models of some category were assembled there, I guess this isn't it.

That's almost a week faster. Neck whiplash!

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

Warning: This is gonna be a long rant.

Wow... so they actually removed the HDD and simply left a gigantic hole there. Would it have killed them to use the iMac Pro chassis for this last iteration? How much could it have cost them? To have that technology at hand and simply decide not to use it, and recycle the same old cooling design, is so... cynical. It's consumer hostile.

For me, this decision is the apogee of a very long list of weird, nonsensical choices and design decisions made by the mac divison at Apple since roughly 2013. And you can't blame Intel for all of them.

For instance, both me and my wife were huge fans of the original, super popular Air from its 2011 days. Back then, Apple had managed to build the perfect computer. Super light, reasonably fast, versatile, with a nice selection of ports, a great battery, great screen, it had everything for its time. It was so good that I used it as my main computer for more than 3 years, including gaming (WoW). All they had to do was update and improve it. And that's where it began: they started to neglect it. Kept the same bezels, same screen for so many years until it started to feel old. At one point (about 2015 I think) they also forgoed the yearly updates and just kept it around, with old CPUs and everything. The thing was so popular, people were still buying them, even with such old tech.

ALL they had to do is replace the screen with a nice, bezeless (probably 14inch), retina display and replace the old Thunderbolt 2 port with a 3. That's it. And it would have been the most popular computer even today, in 2020. Not Apple, though. Instead... they gave us the Macbook. Which we all know how it turned out. Too small, weird keyboard, bad port selection, slow... it wasn't a proper replacement, if any.

And then they when they finally remade the Air... it was also compromised as hell. Bad keyboard, slower CPUs, bad port selection, and on top of it all noisy like a jet. Even today, after all the "fixes", the Air is still not a worthy successor to the legendary old Air. It uses slower, Y series CPUs and it's far noisier, because apparently heatpipes should be reserved for "Pro" computers only

The 2013 Mac Pro was also a kind of a trainwreck. Nicely designed, but they left it without updates for oh so many years. Then the 2020 Mac Pro came, but at a price point few could afford.

I could go on and on, but I think I made my point. Every computer Apple makes these days seems to be some sort of weird compromise. With all the products they make, it's like they tease you but they want you to suffer.

Back to our subject, where does that leave us? You can get the new iMac, with bad cooling and new tech, or the iMac Pro, with nice cooling but 3 year old components - at the same price, of course. Which, in my country, is exactly 6356 US dollars, and that's because it's discounted a bit. Worth it for a Vega 56?

Pure, illegal in 49 states, screaming, head knocking on the headboard, hot stuff. You like it like dat? And I like me my posts like that.

I read your 1st sentence. And? I fell in love with your post. *bats eyelids.*

I agree. Funny, you must be mind linked to me. Because the phrase that went into my head?

'Consumer hostile.'

'...and you can't blame Intel for a lot of the Mac division decisions since 2013.'

"Ronald Regan, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchil. Your boy Tim Apple took one helluva beatin'." Wave84.

iStale.com

Azrael.

 

[richinaus]

I think you are wrong. Apple will be the king in few years. Intel is done!
AS will demolish anything on the market as no one will be able to compete with such a complete eco system.
If you build your hardware + software you always have advantage. Apple showed it with iOS devices - still no one can beat that after all these years. Same will be with AS.
Buy bye Intel, you sucked and you crippled innovation for us.
Sorry but not sorry

Exactly.
No wonder there has been little innovation in the intel Macs - its all been developed for Apple Silicone.
I wont be buying anymore intel Macs but good luck to those that do.

 

[Azrael9]

These are all fine, the parts and knowledge were already present, no surprises or anything new here, no bleeding edge tech for sure.
But, think about it, Tx is present for how many years? about 4? Since then we had the 2017 and 2019 iMacs with no Tx chip inside, only the iMac Pro got it which had a new design internally because of the components and the cooling system used.
Fusion drives may be a reason, but they could also just leave an entry model with it, just like now.
They delayed 4 years to fix the MBP keyboards, they forgot the Mac Pro for 6 years, the mac mini for many years too...

So, if the iMac is a dying product, because of the AS coming, why bother after all these years? Why offer a matt display option?
In general they paid too much attention than usual for this one, it is a bit strange...

It could also be a sign that the iMac Pro is dead for good.

Apple have been unworthy custodians of the Mac desktop since we lost Jobs.

I'll give them a prop or two on the iCan and the iuBerGrater. But any Mac tower fan can see how they're flawed. Whether in tech' or price demographic. It wreaks of hubris.

Azrael.
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Exactly.
No wonder there has been little innovation in the intel Macs - its all been developed for Apple Silicone.
I wont be buying anymore intel Macs but good luck to those that do.

iCynical.

They'll charge us now. And charge us later.

With a straight face.

Still, we got the nano glass...but no iCooling...

Azrael.

 

[Azrael9]

I know deep super Apple folks feel superior by everything they do and AS will be great but AS is not the death of Intel. Sorry. It wasn’t the death of Qualcomm or other ARM processors either. Mac is 6% of computing and less than 5% of Intel’s revenue. Perhaps you should look at where they make they money - most of it in areas Apple will never ever be.

They have challenges and have screwed up their roadmap but done? Get a grip.




careful now you’ll ruffle feathers in here with actual logic and analysis of Apple philosophy and not fanboi silliness. (But louder for the people in the back. )

Intel aren't going to 'die' any time soon. They'd have to go some to put themselves out of business.

But they're in for a fight currently with AMD in the consumer and server space...which, sure, they may see out. Despite running hot, the Intel cpus are still running reasonably competitive with the AMD cpus in my instances. I think I saw one bench where the incoming iMac 10 core is benching around that of a 16 last gen threadripper. But they've got to pull their finger out. And I'm sure the 'battle stations' red light is flashing at Intel HQ to sort things out. Just getting to 7nm soon would solve alot of their current problems.

With ARM. I think they're in for the fight of their lives.

As for Mac? They're all but dead. As in Dead in the Water.

And I guess that happened a few years ago when they started shipping buggy, hot incrementalism, promising...but not delivering.

For Macs, phones and pads and watches...Intel are now consigned to history.

I'm very interested to see what a beating Apple heart can do in a Mac.

Azrael.