At its latest event, Apple revealed a slew of new changes that the company made to its line of iMac desktop computers.
The new iMac, dubbed iMac with Retina Display, wears a screen that offers an extremely high resolution of 5,120 x 2,880, which is equivalent to 5K. That’s seven times more pixels than what you’d get with 1080p screens, which are ubiquitous.
On top of that, the iMac with Retina Display offers significantly more pixels than 4K screens do as well. A 4K resolution amounts to 3,840 x 2,160. Apple claims that the new iMac with Retina display also consumes significantly less energy than previous screens.
To help power this super-demanding display tech, Apple has also upgraded the GPU and CPU on the iMac with Retina Display as well. The new iMac with Retina Display can now be had with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, which is upgradeable to a Core i7 CPU running at 4GHz.
The default iMac with Retina Display configuration offers a Core i5 CPU that’s 100MHz faster than what the highest-end 27-inch iMac has. While you can bump the latter chip’s up to a Core i7 running at 3.5GHz, that’s where it tops out at. The iMac with Retina Display now has the most powerful CPU in the entire line.
It’s also swapping out the Nvidia 700M-series GPUs, which are in the current slate of iMacs, for newer AMD Radeon R9 M290X and M295X GPUs. That’s surprising, considering that Nvidia recently outed new 970M and 980M GPUs. The latter is an incredibly powerful performer, according to our tests, and offers power that’s not far off from the desktop-based GTX 980. The latter is currently the most powerful single-GPU graphics card you can get today.
Apple is offering upgrades in other areas as well. For instance, the 1TB hard drive that’s available by default with the non-Retina iMacs has been upgraded to a 1TB Fusion Drive, which should offer significantly better performance compared to a standard mechanical drive.
The new iMac with Retina Display can be had for $2,500, and is shipping starting today.
It’s worth noting that Dell will soon be releasing its own 5K display for $2,499. However, that screen, dubbed the Dell UltraSharp 27 Ultra HD 5K Monitor, will cost $2,500, and doesn’t include a computer inside it. It also won’t be released until sometime during the upcoming holiday season.
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