iMac on the desktopSource: Mike Matthews/iMore

What you need to know

  • Apple announced a refreshed iMac a couple of days ago.
  • The new machines have already started to be benchmarked.
  • Both the CPU and GPU upgrades performed well.

Apple announced some refreshed iMacs earlier this week and Japanese site Mac Otakara has already gotten its hands on one. So it did what anyone would do – benchmarked it.

According to their testing, the base model 2020 iMac – with its Intel Core i5 3.1GHz CPU – is around 1.2 times as fast as the outgoing model. Or 20% faster, if you prefer.

I compared the benchmark results of the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) using Geekbench (64bit), comparing it with the 5K 2019 model.

Compared to iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)/Intel Core i5 3.0GHz, the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)/Intel Core i5 3.1GHz was about 1.2 times faster.

Although it is the bottom Intel Core i5 3.1GHz model, it turns out that it has higher performance than the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2019)/Intel Core i5 3.7GHz model which was the third model from the bottom

In terms of graphics performance, the report shows the new Radeon Pro 5300 is around 36% faster than the Radeon Pro 570X from last year. That's in terms of Metal performance with the number growing to 43% faster when OpenCL is used.

This is all great news for anyone who needs to buy a new iMac right now. But everyone else should probably hang fire until Apple gives is the iMac redesign we're waiting for. Hopefully, alongside some blazing fast Apple silicon, too.

If you are picking up a new iMac, be sure to check out the full Mac Otakara piece before deciding on what spec to go with.