 I'm gonna be upfront with you guys. When I saw that Apple had updated the iMac, I didn't really think about it twice. I mean, it's just a refresh, and they didn't make a bunch of noise about it. But then, I saw that it came with up to a core i9 8-core processor. At that point, I had all kinds of questions like, how the heck are they gonna cool one of these in a standard iMac? Does this make the iMac Pro basically pointless, and how quickly can we get one? Well, let's answer that last one first. It takes about a week. As for the rest of it, stay tuned, because we are about to find out. The Hot Docks uses the Ergodox design, which keeps you comfortable typing away for long periods of time, and features QMK firmware and hot swappable key switches. Check it out at the link below. Within its iconic trapezoidal box and sandwiched between three pieces of protective styrofoam, we find the beast with its glossy 27-inch 5k retina display front and center. I've got to praise Apple for their multiple layers of protection to ensure that your iMac reaches your desk without any scratches or scuffs, but I do think that there's room to improve on the amount of non-recyclable material that they use for packing. The same can also be said for the I.O. It's mostly great, actually. We've got two Thunderbolt 3 ports, and more than enough Type-A super speed USBs for the average desktop, especially when you consider that Wi-Fi is integrated and the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse need to be charged so infrequently that they can share a cable. But dang it, Apple! If we're gonna shower you with praise for including 10 gig Ethernet on the iMac Pro and the Mac Mini, then you've got to expect the opposite when you don't do it. It's not even an option here, which is a real shame, because you're stuck either accepting 2005 level network speeds or shelling out several hundred dollars for a Thunderbolt to 10 gig Ethernet adapter. As for the rest of the design, Apple has taken the if it ain't broke, don't fix it approach, remaining fundamentally unchanged since 2009. In fairness, it somehow still looks pretty sexy, but the bezels and especially the chin bar are just massive for a modern machine, and we feel like even timeless designs do need to be refreshed once in a while. That said, the 2019 iMac does have one welcome remnant of that bygone era. User expansion! Apple's still rocking it with four easily accessible DDR4 SODIMM slots, which means unlike Anthony when he purchased this machine for review, you can skip the Apple tax and install your own memory to not only save yourself a little cash, but to push your system RAM capacity to a staggering 128 gigs. That's double what Apple has available on their store for about the same price. So Apple, I don't want to beg. It's not dignified, but I will. Whatever the next iMac looks like. Please don't take this away from us. Between this iMac and the Mac Mini, you've shown us that there are still some people there who care. It's not too late to change. Enough about the future though, let's take a look at the machine we have today. So we kidded ours with the top-end Core i9 9900K F, and that F means that it omits the Intel HD graphics that typically come along for the ride in consumer chips in favor of slightly improved thermals. Unfortunately, while our unit also has dedicated graphics, we opted for the Radeon Pro RX 580X, figuring that if we needed a lot more horsepower, we could get more with our Radeon 7 in an external enclosure. No onboard GPU means that Intel's quick sync video encoding is out of the question here. It's a good thing that Apple is big on OpenCL. So onto our performance analysis then. We're going to focus mainly on the iMac's CPU performance, with emphasis on how well Apple managed to cool our beastly 8-core hyper-threaded CPU, if they managed it at all. And... Actually, it keeps our Core i9 going over even long workloads, with core temperatures hovering around the low to mid 90 degree mark. Now to be clear, that's higher than what I'd be comfortable with, and that's especially true once there's some dust in the cooler a couple of years later, but it's actually better than I expected. And if, like us, you have concerns about the long-term health of any machine that's running hot enough to cook instant noodles, you can use a piece of free software called Max Fan Control to bump up your fan speed. So then at full, our temperatures looked a lot more sane, without our machine becoming unreasonably loud. But not all of the news here is good, or even necessarily bad. Some of it's just kind of weird. While our CPU frequency is constant, which would indicate that we're not throttling, let's just overlay the base clock on this graph and... We're a little off there, aren't we? Let's zoom right in on the first minute of the temperature and CPU speed graphs and... That's weird too. It's not even thermal throttling. So, it kind of smells like a power limit issue. Sure enough, then, if we look at the package power using Intel's Power Gadget, we're actually running at around 80 watts sustained instead of the 95 that they rate this chip for. Now, it's unclear whether this is a deliberate measure to protect constrained VRMs, or if it's because of a firmware bug, but what we do know is how it impacts performance. So, in some of our tests, we got similar performance to our comparison 9900K, but heavier loads like Cinebench revealed the 6% difference that we would expect from lower clock speeds. So, it looks like Apple managed to tame the beast, but they only did it by removing some of its venom, which is... sort of cheating. We did find out liars the other way though. This is really interesting. So, in this Blender render, we managed higher performance than our reference comparison CPU. This one took us a little while, but here's what happened. Remember that controversy over motherboard manufacturers basically factory overclocking Intel CPUs by removing some of Intel's recommended constraints? Well, around that time, we switched to running all of our benchmarks at Intel-recommended turbo boost settings, which is something that we can't manually control on the iMac. So, then it looks like what Apple has done is played around with the turbo clock speed dials a little bit, provided that the chip does not exceed their power limit, which actually resulted in a continuous boost clock speed of 3.8 GHz in this test. As a sanity check, we ran our comparison 9900K with its limiter disabled and the same performance disabled and a beefy cooler, and it performed better still. So, now you know. Which leads us then to the price. It's actually pretty reasonable compared to building your own comparable desktop setup with the same features. This is something we've talked about before, and it's happening again. If you want that hardware, Macs are generally actually not that expensive. So, the question then becomes, should you buy one? At $2,700 US dollars for the Core i9 version, you're looking at someone who needs the hyper-thread performance of the Core i9 9900K, as well as excellent, if not the best multi-threaded performance, 8 cores really is a nice sweet spot, and an excellent 5K display. So, we're looking at photographers, video editors, and other visual media professionals. Looks like they kind of nailed it. In fact, ironically, in some ways, they nailed it a little too hard, because it's actually a better machine for a lot of those users than the iMac Pro, and that computer is nearly twice the price. So then, if you're one of those people who needs that magic blend of performance and dorm-friendly form factor, you really can't go wrong. Unless... Unless paying for computers that don't perform quite as the specs indicate and come with a mouse that you can't use while you charge it... Just straight up rubs you the wrong way. You know what rubs me the right way, though? Our sponsor for today's video. Ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction. They've even got real people working at their customer service center and not robots. You pay only for what you use, with the average Ting bill coming to just $23 a month per device. If you're stuck in a contract and switch to Ting, they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee, up to $75. They've got lower mobile data rates than ever, just $10 per gig beyond the second gig, and every single Ting customer can reap the benefits of changes like that one. 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