Apple iMac comparison

I am back with my promise... a review on Apple iMac..

The purpose of this posts is to compare currently available model of iMac and their specification, and try to make some personal comment on who should go for which model and for what usage, so to make it a more cost effective choice of yours in a way.. :)

I have make some effort to extract some useful information from the Apple website and make it into a easy-to-read tabular form.

Each color represent the quality/performance of the respective item. Green represent the best, while purple represents middle range and orange represent the worst relative to the rest within the comparison. There are some items which i mark as light green represents those with no difference across the different model, and portion highlighted in light yellow represent optional upgrades available for each model.

Overall, iMac has 4 basic models, ranging from a 20" to three 24" models all power by one of Intel's most powerful processor - Core 2 Duo. This is a 2 cores processor, which is manufactured using the latest 45 nanometer technology. This basically means that the processor may contain more transistor gate using less space, and more transistor mean more performance. And apart from that, fewer space needed for transistor means more spaces for accommodation of your L2 cache, and more L2 cache mean another performance up. So from here you can see the chaining effect. :) so this is not all just about size, is about everything!!!

However, iMac is still not using the fastest Front Site Bus available for its Core 2 Duo version. The fastest version available now is on 1333 MHz, but the basic iMac model is still using the 1066 MHz version. However, you got the option to choose between 2.66, 2.93 or 3.06 GHz for your Core 2 Duo processor.

On memory wise, the all model of iMac is able to support up to maximum of 8GB DDR3 SDRAM, which i believe is far more than enough as for home and personal usage. But the basic model comes with 20" iMac contains originally only a 2GB RAM, which i think is just enough to today's usage. But not to worry, as i said, you may always choose to give your machine a little upgrade on this. :)

To boost the graphic performance, iMac had chosen the use of NVidia GeForce Graphic. There are all together 3 different NVidia GeForce to choose from for your iMac, namely 9400M with shared 256MB memory, GT120 with individual 256MB and GT130 with individual 512 MB memory.

After all the technical specification, is time for some review on it's look-and-feel. I have been impressed by Apple's product design ever since i knew their brand many years back. Simple yet stylish is always the direction of their designer to create elegant looks product. Another thing i like so much about the iMac is their all-in-one packaging. It will save me a lot of time on cable management and keeping my table top managed and clean.

Other than that, iMac gives its user plenty of various ports for connecting to their devices. Every iMac comes with total of 6 USB ports (with 2 on keyboard) and 1 FireWire 800 port. Together with the earphone jack, networking port and etc, all nicely fitted at the back of your screen.

Overall, as a conclusion, as a personal and home user, i will opt for the model MB419ZP/A. With a little extra payment, what you get is more performance with a faster Core 2 Duo, and a larger memory space of 4GB RAM, and also to offload your RAM with the usage of a dedicated memory for your graphic. As for storage wise, 640GB is reasonable as of today's personal and home usage for storing of all your photo, musics as well as videos.

So my friend, what is your choice of iMac?? Leave your comment here to tell us!!!

**Source of images above are from www.apple.com