[Arthur Wilinski]

This is my first ever reply on Creative Cow. I’m a back and forth video professional…. I’ve done a couple of features and shoot talking head stuff from time to time. For the past 6 years I’ve used iMacs, Always the best of the best that was available at purchase time. I have (had) two mid 2011 27″ i7 3.4ghz iMacs with 256 SSD drives and 1tb 7200 RPM spinners. They have been great.

They both went kaput with video card problems within 2 weeks of each other. Keeping the story short, they were warranty deals and Mac agreed to replace them with the new Retina models. They assured me the new models would be faster than my older machines.

They gave me the i5 with fusion drive and 290 graphics card. Compared to my mid-2011, the thing is a boat anchor. About 15-20% slower in all things video. On the old machine, running an item in Compressor to prores HQ took 6min 30 sec. The new machine took 7min 45sec. Bringing it back to H264 took 16 min flat on the older machine, 19min 30 secs on the newer. Substantial difference. The Geekbench score was also lower in nearly every category (V2 32 and 64 bit) and overall 1500-2k lower than the identically set up 2011. I can say this because I actually have the IDENTICAL (same programs, desktop, everything) 2011 sitting right next to it to test. The only difference could be Yosemite, which is by default on the new machine.

I would imagine that the 4.0 i7 really rips, but the i5 is a slug.

Back to the mac store today. I will post more if I hear it is a simple fix. Any thoughts?