The *Core i9* 21.5" 4K iMac Apple NEVER sold, is it better than the M1 iMac?

the new imac is here and it's great people love this thing it is thin it's beautiful this one's purple it's great but i've heard a lot of people saying that it's a little bit expensive you have to pay extra for you know the full fat m1 chip and there's been some complaining from people who just kind of wished that it was a little bit more pro and i'm not talking about the type of people that every time a mac comes out say oh that should have a rtx 3090 in it and be 600. not that group of people but there were a number of people myself included who had hoped that this upgrade would also feature more powerful apple silicon chips even if optional even if on the the higher end the m1 chip has been used quite a lot and it's a really great device but when you're spending two thousand dollars for a well-specced one of these it does make you wonder can you do any better and today that's what we're gonna find out [Music] so you may be wondering what exactly is going on well if you couldn't tell the wedge-shaped box kind of gives it away this is an imac specifically the old imac everyone else out there reviewing the new imac i got the old one specifically this is the 2020 refresh kind of it's the 2019 model but this is the one that has ssd as standard instead of the fusion drive thankfully so this is also a base model this was the thirteen hundred dollar model it has a quad core i3 eight gigs of ram gigabytes of storage as well as the radeon pro 555x now i know what you're thinking luke why are you out here buying this old much worse imac when the new shiny ones are already here well there's two reasons number one i paid 750 dollars for this thing which is significantly less than a base model m1 imac and the other big reason has more to do with what's missing than what's present see the current imac is a beautiful device no one is disputing that actually no a lot of people are disputing that the new imacs are shall we say distinctive but they have absolutely no upgradeability whatsoever you get what you get and you don't get upset and by get upset i mean fix anything because it's stuck with whatever you order it with the same is not true of the old generation imac this may be a lowly base model with just eight gigabytes of ram and a poultry core i3 but that's not how it's going to stay because i've bought this 32 gigabytes of ram and most importantly this a core i9 9900 that's right this quad core i3 imac is gonna have its cores doubled from four to eight with the help of this core i9 now i know what you're probably thinking is wait hang on is that is that even possible this is a core i3 8100 and this is a core i9 9900 but what's important there is that i didn't say k this is not a 9900k see the way that these imacs work is their cpus are mainly limited by the power supply so in this case it's a 65 watt socket now this particular imac and this specific logic board could handle up to the core i7 8700 which you could order from apple directly but because it's the same chipset and the same logic board and the same power supply you can actually put a core i9 9900 in this machine so the goal of this video is twofold number one if you already have a base model imac could you upgrade it for significantly less than replacing it and number two if you're thinking about buying an imac would it make more sense to buy an old one and supercharge it with a core i9 or should you just go right ahead and buy the new m1 model well to complicate things a little bit i paid 750 for this imac i paid 350 for this core i9 and i paid about 150 bucks for 32 gigabytes of ram which means that this imac if everything goes according to plan should end up costing one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars fifty dollars less than the base model m1 imac so is it gonna be more powerful for less money is it going to be less powerful for less money or is it going to be about the same for about the same let's find out so in theory at least this upgrade should be relatively simple we don't need that many parts there's the core i9 and the 32 gigabytes of ram that we're going to be installing and then we just need some ifixit display adhesive strips because of course the display is glued on and we're going to have to cut it off and we'll need these to put it all back together again so for today's video we're going to be following the ifixit repair guides which are very comprehensive and show you how to take apart this imac replace the ram replace the cpu basically all you have to do is figure out how to take out the logic board and that's what ifixit's guide can help you with so the links to parts and tools and guides are in the description below so without any further ado let's hop into it and we'll start by cutting off the display this can take a little bit of time it's really strong adhesive and it'll take a couple of minutes to get it off cleanly so for best results i used a combination of the picks that come in the ifixit protect tool kit as well as the imac opening wheel that comes with the display adhesive strips once inside it's a very familiar look if you've seen the inside of one previous gen imac you've seen them all the thing that's really amusing on this particular model because this was the 2020 update that just removed the hard drive is there are still brackets for a hard drive that no longer exists anymore you can see where the hard drive would go but isn't and so apple just keeps putting the brackets in anyway we're going to go ahead and start by taking off this little strap at the chin of the imac the chin strap if you will this is just held in with a couple of phillips head screws but once it's removed it reveals the scary part about working on any of these imacs and that is the exposed power supply say what you will about the new imac with its external power brick but it means that you don't have to deal with this when you open it up and then comes a very careful dance of removing the connectors and taking out the power supply without touching the exposed traces on the front which have a risk of electric shock this process is nerve-racking and lengthy it took me a long time to get the connector that connects the power supply to the actual socket on the back out fortunately now with the big bad scary power supply out of the way things get a lot more relaxed we'll spend a couple of minutes disconnecting all of the various connectors and unscrewing the logic board from the housing [Music] [Music] [Music] now do be warned it does take a fair amount of wiggling to get this logic board out of the enclosure because the ports and the chin are very tight tolerance and it takes a little bit of time but once we have the board out you can basically have access to all of the components apart from the gpu that make this imac tick unlike the 27-inch imac this older one still has a user-upgradable ssd so just like the older retina macbook pros you can upgrade this as much as you want they also left the sata port so even though the hard drive is now gone you can buy a connector and use the existing hard drive bracket to add an additional internal hard drive if you wanted to do that but today we're focusing on the ram and the cpu so we'll remove this fun perforated housing that holds the two sodium slots this machine can accept and we'll replace it with 32 gigabytes of ram up from eight and i'll tell you one thing it costs a heck of a lot less than paying apple for it now the next step is going to be removing the heatsink which covers both the cpu and gpu so on the back of the board there's this bracket that holds the cpu in place and it's a bit of a tough cookie to crack it's it's very tensioned and you really got to get some elbow grease to get this thing out but flipping the board over there's a couple of t8 screws that hold the heat sink and then have the bracket for the gpu these are a lot easier to unscrew and with that the whole assembly just pops right off but do keep in mind the cpu is actually stored in the heatsink it'll be held in by the thermal paste so you'll want to scrape that off as well as cleaning off the gpu [Music] and we are now at the midpoint of our repair everything is as disassembled as it needs to be and it's time for the fun stuff it's core i9 time people let's get this thing in the board put on the thermal paste and we can start reassembling this imac [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] it's all fun and games but now we're getting to the point where uh i gotta put back that that scary power supply look look i know you don't wanna do it but you gotta do it so just just get it done get it over with all right there you go all right let's get this thing in here and get this whole thing wrapped up [Music] now here's where you got to be careful folks if you put the screen back on before you test everything and you forget to plug something in you have to cut it back off and buy new adhesive strips so make sure that you test everything before applying the adhesive but with all of that said and done our machine has now been upgraded so we'll give everything a bit of a wipe to get rid of some of the smudges and we're good to go [Music] so here you have it the most powerful 21 and a half inch 4k imac that there will ever be it is physically impossible to get a more powerful one at least in terms of the cpu yeah you could get the vega 20 and then put a core i9 in that and that would be truly the most powerful machine but this is as far as it goes you cannot put a better cpu than what this machine has it's it's so good that apple didn't even give it to us i had to do it myself and it was kind of annoying i guarantee there were a number of you who didn't think this was actually going to work leave a comment down below if at the start of this video you were like no way there's no way that's going to boot up but here it is how about that okay so let's talk about the process of actually upgrading this thing because i'll tell you one thing it's a lot easier to just buy an imac from apple than to do what i did today especially with that kind of scary power supply situation yeah working on these is not necessarily the most difficult thing but it's not for everyone and if you're squeamish about upgrading the ram in your computer then you probably shouldn't attempt something like this but if you're watching this video then chances are you're trying to maximize your dollar and potentially this could be the best way to do that i think we should go through a couple of benchmark numbers to see how this supercharged imac compares to a stock m1 machine so starting off with geekbench 5 weirdly the i9 imac scores lower than the m1 it scores 7 400 compared to 7 700 on average for the full fat m1 chip that's a little bit weird and then if we move over to geekbench compute it doesn't get a whole lot better because the radeon pro 555x is frankly garbage and it scores 15789 compared to 19958 from the base model m1 imac this thing is certainly not a graphics powerhouse now that radeon pro 555x might sound familiar it's the exact same gpu that you would find in the 2018 and 2019 base model 15-inch macbook pros and boy can you tell that it's a couple of years old the radeon pro 500 series which is basically the 400 series is from like 2016 2015 so yeah it's not a good graphics platform and the m1 absolutely is gonna smoke this thing when it comes to anything graphics bound but if we go back and look at some cpu stuff this thing really starts cooking and i'm not just talking about the temperatures cinnamon r23 reveals a pretty significant gain for the core i9 9214 compared to 3600 with the core i3 which puts this not only ahead of its previous version but ahead of every m1 device that you could buy no matter how much you spend on it this blatant increase in horsepower is evident also in blender in the bmw render it takes 3 minutes and 30 seconds nearly half the time that the m1 is able to accomplish the task and the classroom render is under 10 minutes when the m1 base model imac is nearly 20. now granted in blender there is an added benefit to this being an intel machine meaning it doesn't have to run rosetta but the performance gains are nothing to scoff at and this is a seriously powerful machine now however i think it's worth noting that it kind of makes sense that this is more powerful this is a 65 watt desktop processor and we're pitting it against basically an ipad the m1 chip is in everything from an eight hundred dollar ipad to two thousand dollars plus if you really spec out the imac but the point is it's not a desktop class chip so yes it does very well considering that it draws like under 40 watts of power in the mac mini but this is just it's just gonna beat it now i know what you're thinking there is a side effect to running a 65 watt eight core i9 in this chassis and that is the thermals because quite frankly this was not designed for that basically the way that mac os handles this computer is it just kind of keeps the cpu around its base clock speeds and it just kind of keeps it at a 65 to 70 watt power draw pretty simple so when you start running a cinebench test you can very quickly see that it tries to draw up to 120 watts of power and it starts boosting up the cpu and then macos is like nah let's maybe dial it back a little bit here fella and then it sort of settles in at around 65 to 70 watts and it also stays around its base clock now it doesn't ever drop below that it's a 3.1 gigahertz based processor and it usually sits around 3.4 to 3.6 and honestly the results are pretty good you're not going to get the exact same performance that you would get if you put this in a pc obviously but given that this imac has a 180 watt power supply for the whole system i think it handles it pretty well so what we have here is a pretty interesting situation in terms of the cpu it is objectively more powerful than any m1 machine and not necessarily by a small amount especially if your workflow hasn't been optimized for apple silicon yet however the graphics are definitely worse than the new imac the screen is smaller the design is a lot more dated and it is a bit of a hassle to actually get this thing upgraded so i guess it comes back to the question at the beginning of the video is this worth it well to be honest given that this costs about the same as a base model m1 imac if you wanted to do this yourself i don't really think it's worth the effort to do this instead however if you do have one of these imacs and you're like oh man i wish i had a little bit more oomph but i don't want to go for the m1 because it's not quite enough if you have the energy for 350 bucks you can put the core i9 in you can put the 32 gigs of ram for 150 bucks which is way less than you would even pay for 16 gigabytes from apple and you can actually upgrade this storage as well you could put a two terabyte owc ssd in here i've got that linked below one that would work with this machine by the way you could also put in a normal mechanical hard drive if you got that special sata cable that apple uses this has room to be expanded which the m1 doesn't so if you have an imac like this or even a 27 inch as well because those all have upgradable cpus and you think the m1 imac isn't quite what i need yet i think honestly if you can handle it if you can you know literally handle that power supply and take the annoyance of doing this upgrade it's a pretty cost effective way to supercharge your imac so i'm very curious to hear what you guys think about this project as far as i'm aware not a lot of people have done this before i was able to find one forum post where someone had put this core i9 in this imac but there's a lot of confusion about whether this would be possible and it seems like i'm only one of a handful of people that have attempted something like this but if you're watching this yes absolutely you can put a core i9 in a 4k imac and it makes a big difference but i'm curious to know is it a big enough difference let me know that in the comments below and as usual don't forget to like comment and subscribe and i'll see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 263,076

Rating: 4.9144135 out of 5

Keywords: imac, new imac, old imac, new vs old imac, 2019 4k imac, m1 vs core i9, core i9 imac, 21.5 inch imac upgrade, iMac core i9 upgrade, 4k iMac core i9, can you put core i9 in 21.5 inch iMac, ifixit, right to repair, iMac upgrades, maxed out imac, upgrading iMac 2019, 2019 iMac upgrades, iMac vs apple silicon

Id: N2QSE-zBP9E

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/manny2206]

I believe most of the audience that would use an iMac isn't the same audience thats going to install new cpu/ram on their own.. so idk if the inference is correct

[u/ultratiem]

Claims some people are complaining you have to pay extra for the M1 SoC... what people?

The previous Intel-based model was 21" and the base configuration i5 retailed for the same price as the 2nd level M1 iMac 24" (actually $50CAD more).

The M1 is the cheapest processor Apple has ever sold. All Macs that have the new Apple Silicon are entry level priced and if not comparable to previous Intel-based offerings, a little bit cheaper. All you have to do is look at the Mac mini, which still sells an Intel-based variant. The price for the M1 (with the upgraded 512GB SSD) is $150 CAD less than the comparable i5-6core. All of which the M1 runs circles around.

And yet despite all this, the M1's are running circles around Intel chips. It's not even a competition.

What even is this...

[u/nicetriangle]

Wow I guess I hadn't seen the previous gen iMac setup and running in a couple months or more and man does it look dated already with the new ones out. Those bezels are honkin big. The new iMacs really do look much nicer.

[u/uiresponder]

Do you think macOS 13/14 will run on intel macs? As far as Apple is concerned intel is dead tech.So if you already have and intel Mac and do a non trivial upgrade good for you. I would not buy a new intel iMac.