Reviewed: Apple Late 2012 3.4 GHz iMac

2013-01-09 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: GPU, iMac, memory, Photoshop, SSD, video tech

Thanks to Other World Computing for making the iMac available for testing, as well as the 32GB of 1600 MHz memory.

The late 2012 iMac stomps the fastest Mac Pro system for common Photoshop tasks, so long as it has adequate memory.

But for really big jobs the iMac lags the Mac Pro badly because the maximum memory the iMac can accept is 32GB. As well, there are other considerations for general use besides RAW CPU speed.

See the multiple pages of my review of the late 2012 iMac 3.4 Ghz. More to come.

Click each graph to read more on that test.

Photoshop CS6 performance on diglloydSpeed1 benchmark
Late 2012 iMac 3.4 with GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB *

Photoshop CS6 performance on diglloydMedium benchmark
Late 2012 iMac 3.4 with GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB *
Fusion variants using only 37GB on system drive = pure SSD operation

An iMac with only a hard drive would do much worse than shown here. As shown here for Fusion numbers, an empty Fusion drive performs very well, but once more than 120GB of capacity is used, its performance plummets, because the Fusion technology maintains only 4GB of free SSD working space.

Photoshop CS6 performance on diglloydHuge benchmark
Late 2012 iMac 3.4 with GHz NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB *
Fusion variants using only 37GB on system drive = pure SSD operation