Speed Results for IMAC

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Kayla Phantom

The fans of Apple have been  in for a treat on Tuesday when the company released an updated iMac line featuring quad-core Sandy Bridge Intel  processors and Thunderbolt ports. Macworld Lab has all four standard configuration models and have tested them. Now the speed results are in.

The $1999 iMac, the first to arrive was also the first to be tested. At the heart of this iMac is a 3.1GHz Core i5 quad-core processor. This iMac also has a 1TB 7200-rpm hard drive, and AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics with 1GB of video memory.
Speedmark 6.5, the test suite used on the new iMacs has shown that it is 16 percent faster than the previous high-end standard configuration iMac which was a 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 quad-core model with a 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drive, and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1GB of dedicated RAM.

During the iTune test the iMac proved to be 22 percent faster the 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 iMac. The new iMac was also 18 percent faster in the Handbrake test, 20 percent faster in the Cinebench graphics test, 21 percent faster in the Cinebench CPU test, and 16 percent faster in the MathematicaMark tests.

As with the older iMac version all the new ones support Turbo Boost, which can give more processing power to individual cores when needed. And also like the older 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 iMac, all of the new standard-configuration iMacs do not have Hyper Threading, a technology that presents the OS with two virtual cores for each physical core.

Compared to the six-core 3.33GHz Xeon Westmere Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM, the Mac Pro was about 15 percent faster than the new iMac. The iMac was a tad faster in the graphics tests and iTunes encode tests, but considerably slower in most tasks, especially MathematicaMark and Cinebench CPU tests.

The other versions are still being tested, but keep an eye out for the results. Surely they will not disappoint.