New 27″ Intel Quad-Core i7 iMac

Today my new 27″ iMac arrived after more then a month wait. I ordered this machine on November 27, 2009 and it only arrived on Thursday. Today was the official unboxing and I’m happy to share the experience with you.

This is going to be replacing my existing iMac. Since I have a lot of iTunes media (TV Shows and Movies take up a lot of space), my needs for storage were fairly large. I am also going to be installing Windows 7 on this machine via Boot Camp so that I can play a few games (like Star Trek Online early next month). So taking everything into consideration I ordered the following specs:

• 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
• 8GB 1066mhz DDR3 RAM 4X2GB
• 2TB Serial ATA Drive
• ATI Radeon HD 4860 512MB
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad

27" iMac in the box

So far I am absolutely loving this machine and I can’t believe how much power they were able to fit into an iMac form factor. The draw back to this is heat. This machine runs HOT! The processor itself only idols at around 50c, but if you put your hand on the back of this machine, you could actually burn it if you left it there.

27" iMac Booting Up

I used Boot Camp to partition the hard drive for the Windows install. I allocated 500GB for Windows, and left 1.5TB for OSX. There was a display issue when installing Windows 7, as the default driver for the ATI card is not compatible and leaves the screen blank. There is a fix for this that I will be posting tomorrow.

27" iMac Installing Windows 7

Overall I’m very happy with my new machine. I think this is a powerhouse of a computer, and the price is really good value considering everything that comes with it.

I was considering last summer moving to a Mac Pro for storage and power reasons, but now this iMac takes care of everything I needed to do, at about half of the cost. Granted there is still a need for the Mac Pros, especially if you want more than two monitors, but for most consumers and prosumers needs, this new iMac fits the bill.