Wye wrote:
The slow internal storage can be mitigated with some external thunderbolt storage.  It's expensive but it's fast.

I could also open those babies up and slap a "cheaper" 256GB SSD in them. But only if they really need it. They're coming from 4 year old, bulky, constantly crashing and slow Windows machines with AMD cpus in them because they were cost effective at the time. I think only one of them has a graphics card.

I don't think they'll need 16GB as their retouching isn't the same type of retouching we do here. They clone and heal on a dupe layer, and then do light adjustment effects, crop, save, and move onto the next lol. Yeah it future proofs them, but... 0_o

Chroma Hue wrote:

I could also open those babies up and slap a "cheaper" 256GB SSD in them. But only if they really need it. They're coming from 4 year old, bulky, constantly crashing and slow Windows machines with AMD cpus in them because they were cost effective at the time. I think only one of them has a graphics card.

Yep.. you can either get a cable and put a PCIe SSD in (which will be super fast) or get a SATA SSD to replace the SATA HD that's in there now.  It won't be as fast as the PCIe but it will be tons faster than the HD.

I don't think they'll need 16GB as their retouching isn't the same type of retouching we do here. They clone and heal on a dupe layer, and then do light adjustment effects, crop, save, and move onto the next lol. Yeah it future proofs them, but... 0_o

Yeah.. the future proofing was all I was thinking about. The non upgradeable RAM in these machines is just silly. 8GB is more than enough for most people.. but having 16GB vs 8GB may make the difference between this machine lasting 5 or 6 years vs maybe 3 or 4.

I upgraded my 5 year old iMac with an SSD and 16GB of RAM and it's humming along very nicely.  I really want one of the newer ones (with Thunderbolt and Bluetooth 4) but I just can't justify the purchase with this machine running as well as it is.

Wye wrote:
I upgraded my 5 year old iMac with an SSD and 16GB of RAM and it's humming along very nicely.  I really want one of the newer ones (with Thunderbolt and Bluetooth 4) but I just can't justify the purchase with this machine running as well as it is.

I recently purchased a maxed out 5K iMac, so I'm waiting for that to come in (well 8GB, upgraded RAM via OWC). Also got 3 very good Seagate externals in 3TB, 4TB, and 5TB. Consolidated my older 4x1TB drives into a small movie server. And the rest of my random drives into a small JBOD P2P upload/download server.

Chroma Hue wrote:

I recently purchased a maxed out 5K iMac, so I'm waiting for that to come in (well 8GB, upgraded RAM via OWC). Also got 3 very good Seagate externals in 3TB, 4TB, and 5TB. Consolidated my older 4x1TB drives into a small movie server. And the rest of my random drives into a small JBOD P2P upload/download server.

Yeah.. I've been coveting those since they first came out last year.  But this machine is humming along nicely.  Barring some major hardware failure I can see myself sticking with this machine (2010 27" Quad Core iMac) for probably another 2 years.  The last time I upgraded was because my parents' machine was on its last legs and they wanted a better one.  So I gave them mine (a 2008 24" iMac, I think.. don't remember) and bought this one.  That machine is still humming along nicely for them as well.  Will probably upgrade it to El Capitan this weekend if I have time.

Wye wrote:
Will probably upgrade it to El Capitan this weekend if I have time.

Hold off for a bit on that. Ever since upgrading to El Capitan, I've been having some performance issues with Photoshop. not sure what's happening, but navigating/zooming in or out/turing layers on or off seem to be very laggy. I've tested this with images at 16MP @ 300ppi, and 50MP @ 300PPI and I get the same result

I normally get sent RAWs between 21MP-50MP so I keep my history states at 16, cache levels at 8, and tile size at 1028k. I USUALLY have GPU settings Advanced, but even on Basic I'm still having issues. Very weird.

Chroma Hue wrote:

Hold off for a bit on that. Ever since upgrading to El Capitan, I've been having some performance issues with Photoshop. not sure what's happening, but navigating/zooming in or out/turing layers on or off seem to be very laggy. I've tested this with images at 16MP @ 300ppi, and 50MP @ 300PPI and I get the same result

I normally get sent RAWs between 21MP-50MP so I keep my history states at 16, cache levels at 8, and tile size at 1028k. I USUALLY have GPU settings Advanced, but even on Basic I'm still having issues. Very weird.

Interesting.  I've upgraded my personal machines (laptop too) around when the release came.  I was talking about my mom's computer.  Though in fairness I don't really use my photoshop very much these days so even if there are problems it would take me ages to notice.  I'll have to stress test it a bit, after what you've said, since we'll be upgrading our machines at work (which are using Photoshop heavily) in the next few months.  Thanks for the heads up.