Hi Bryan, I have the IMac27 Retina 5K with the Radeon R9 M395 graphics chip, 2 gigs of VRAM, the i7 4 ghz processor and 32 gigs of RAM. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it’s very efficient. I do a lot of PhotoShop work on 1 gig+ scans of 6x7 negs, and the machine never hesitates. i can do gaussian blurs and rotations in near real time. And a long burn-in session will result in only 10 seconds or so of down time. I opted for the 3 terabyte fusion drive, which comes with a 128 gig SSD. I find that it tracks my work flow very well and brings up current projects and current folders almost instantly. A 1.5 gig image file saves in a couple of seconds.
Paul > On Nov 25, 2015, at 5:27 PM, steve harley <p...@paper-ape.com> wrote: > > brief answer: my hunch is the graphics chip difference won't matter much > because the VRAM matters more — and both have 2GB; i would personally greatly > prefer an external SSD to a Fusion Drive; however choose carefully — most > Thunderbolt solutions will use a SATA drive, whereas PCIe is a lot faster > with the right SSD > > On 2015-11-25 11:38 , Bryan Jacoby wrote: >> I am thinking of buying a new 27" iMac, one of the standard >> configurations (so I can get a discount this weekend). I'm looking at >> the base and middle option. The differences are: >> >> AMD M380 vs. M390 graphics >> 1 TB 7200 RPM HD vs. 1 TB fusion drive >> $200 >> >> Photo editing (lightroom) is probably the heaviest lifting the machine >> will do. I know that Lr can use the GPU but I haven't been able to >> find much information about the difference between the M380 and M390. >> >> Now that the SSD component of the fusion drive is only 24 GB I'm not >> sure how much of an advantage that is over the straight HD. If I get >> the straight HD I will almost certainly use an external Thunderbolt >> SSD for most things, and use the internal drive for photo + music >> libraries. If I get the fusion drive, maybe that will be fast enough >> on its own, I'm not sure. If it's not and I still end up with the >> external SSD boot drive, I'm wondering if the fusion drive will >> actually be worse for photo and music libraries since it is presumably >> a 5400 RPM drive. >> >> (I guess, for the price of the middle M390 + 1 TB fusion drive model + >> external Thunderbolt SSD, I could get the top standard configuration >> with M395 + 2 TB fusion drive + slightly faster processor. The 2 TB >> fusion drive has 128 GB of flash. I'm just not sure how that would >> perform compared to an SSD boot drive). >> >> Thanks for any advice. >> > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
