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BARE FEATS LAB - real world Mac speed tests

The 'late 2015' iMac:
Five GPU Shootout

Posted October 29th, 2015 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

The 'late 2015' 27" iMac 5K in several flavors when it comes to graphics processors. Readers ask, do I need the R9 M395X with 4G of VRAM? Or will the R9 M395 with 2G be sufficient? And what about the M390 and M380? Everyone's needs are different but here is the result of our efforts to test all options.

GRAPH LEGEND
iMac5K M395X = 'late 2015' iMac Retina 5K 4.0GHz Quad-Core i7; Radeon R9 M395X GPU (4G GDDR5); 16G RAM; 1TB flash storage
iMac5K M395 = 'late 2015' iMac Retina 5K 3.3GHz Quad-Core i5; Radeon R9 M395 GPU (2G GDDR5); 8G RAM; 2TB Fusion Drive
iMac5K M390 = 'late 2015' iMac Retina 5K 3.2GHz Quad-Core i5; Radeon R9 M390 GPU (2G GDDR5); 8G RAM; 1TB Fusion Drive
iMac5K M380 = 'late 2015' iMac Retina 5K 3.2GHz Quad-Core i5; Radeon R9 M380 GPU (2G GDDR5); 8G RAM; 1TB HDD
iMac4K i6200 = 'late 2015' iMac Retina 4K 3.1GHz Quad-Core i5; Intel Iris Pro 6200 GPU; 8G RAM; 1TB HDD

(RED graph bar means FASTEST)

(RED graph bar means FASTEST)

AFTERTHOUGHTS
We did our best to feature apps and benchmarks that stress the 'late 2015' iMac's various GPUs either exclusively or primarily. We didn't have the luxury of having the same CPU or storage on each. (Big mahalo to PowerMax for providing test units.)

LuxMark revealed some of the differences in the GPU specs. There is very little correlation between clock speed and performance. The M380's 1021MHz clock speed didn't help it keep up with the 909MHz M395X. However, the 32 compute units of the M395X did help it beat up on the M380's 12 compute units.

WHAT'S NEXT? CPU shootout between four flavors of 'late 2015' iMac and some 5120x2880 GPU results.

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WHERE TO BUY FACTORY REFURBISHED MACS
Apple Store USA has refurbished Macs with 12 month warranty that can be extended to 36 months with AppleCare. Pay attention to the GPU it comes with.

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copyright 2015 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
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