Broadwell worth waiting for on the new retina iMac?

I'm definitely going to get the 27" Retina iMac (since my macbook pro of 8yrs died). I'm kinda hanging out for the broadwell chip but just wanted to know other people's thoughts. It will be more power efficient so over say 5 or 10 years (if i keep it for that long) will work out to save me some $$.

can be overclocked to a higher clock speed too i believe. On the apple website it states the overclock speed. So does this mean it comes overclocked? or i have to get it done somewhere else?

thanks for any comments.
mav.

mav5125 said:

I'm definitely going to get the 27" Retina iMac (since my macbook pro of 8yrs died). I'm kinda hanging out for the broadwell chip but just wanted to know other people's thoughts. It will be more power efficient so over say 5 or 10 years (if i keep it for that long) will work out to save me some $$.

can be overclocked to a higher clock speed too i believe. On the apple website it states the overclock speed. So does this mean it comes overclocked? or i have to get it done somewhere else?

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Overclocked? Who overclocks Macs? Apple certainly doesn't, at least not that I've ever heard. And you are aware that they JUST released the Retina iMac, which means a refresh is likely a year or more away, right?

mav5125 said:

I'm definitely going to get the 27" Retina iMac (since my macbook pro of 8yrs died).

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Doesn't this say it all? DEFINITELY means definitely right?

- Nick

mav5125 said:

On the apple website it states the overclock speed. So does this mean it comes overclocked? or i have to get it done somewhere else?

Click to expand...

I think you might be confusing this with Turbo Boost which is more about the processor scaling the speed up only when you're pushing the processor to its limits. This is dynamic as well so once you're done, the processor scales back to its regular clock speed. You have no control over this.

vansmith said:

I think you might be confusing this with Turbo Boost which is more about the processor scaling the speed up only when you're pushing the processor to its limits. This is dynamic as well so once you're done, the processor scales back to its regular clock speed. You have no control over this.

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oic... thanks that makes more sense.

Van is 100 percent correct. That's not an overclocking at all, it's done in the name of power efficiency (since, let's face it, few users push their systems very hard 95 percent of the time. Your computer spends far more time idle waiting for you to push a key or something than it ever does going flat-out*

*unless you're a hard-core gamer, I suppose.

mav5125 said:

I'm definitely going to get the 27" Retina iMac...can be overclocked to a higher clock speed too i believe. On the apple website it states the overclock speed. So does this mean it comes over clocked?...

Click to expand...

Intel's Turbo Boost is sometimes called "dynamic overclocking". It is a built-in feature that increases the clock rate over the base spec whoever the CPU is *not* thermally or electrically over-stressed.

As you push the CPU harder with a multi-threaded load, the the dynamic overclock will back off to maintain thermal margins.

So yes in this sense it is a type of factory overclock. However the term "overclock" typically refers to a static, fixed increase in clock rate over the spec. Although the built-in Turbo Boost accomplishes a similar result (to a degree), it is not a static overclock and we normally would not describe it as "factory overclocked".

A retina iMac is vastly faster than your old system so you will enjoy it no matter how it is configured.