Any thoughts on the tune-up on my iMac?

@acaciainferis - Rendering has two parts to it: The App and what the system is able to process with that app and your work.

So to start off your system has a Quad core CPU so it only offers four concurrent threads. So if your rendering app is multi-threaded it will be limited with the i5 CPU your system has Vs what a i7 could offer you here with Hyper-Threading which doubles the amount of threads to eight concurrent threads.

Memory & Storage space are other areas you might find improvement.

Having fast storage for the apps scratch space as well as where you you are working from can improve things. Which is the direction I think you were going down here.

While you could easily swap out the 2.5" HD your system has to a SSD you won't be able to use the M.2 SSD here as Apple uses a custom part that is not compatible. In addition getting to the blade SSD slot will require you to completely remove the logic board. The custom SSD is also not cheap in the larger sizes one would like to use here.

The other factor is the speed of the connection the custom SSD is over 4 times faster than the SATA III (6.0 Gbps) HD drive connection. So it does pay having the custom PCIe SSD. But you can gain this performance externally! Which is what I would do and its cheaper! Here I would use an external RAID enclosure populated with SSD's connected via a Thunderbolt 2 connection.

So instead of opening your system it might make sense just going with the external drive setup like this one: OWC - ThunderBay 4 mini.

The last issue is RAM: Your system likely came with only 8 GB of RAM. Rendering often needs more RAM than this so if it's not enough it will leverage the drive for virtual RAM (paging). Again this is a bear of a system to open as you would need to pop the logic board out to replace the RAM.

So the bottomline here is you may want to think through what would be a good investment if you are planing on doing a lot of rendering with either animations or live action videos.

I would recommend you sell your system and get a i7 based model and one with as large as you can get PCIe flash drive and small HD. In addition get the external RAID or look at upgrading the HD with a SSD (Apple doesn't offer a dual SSD config).

Here's the IFIXIT guides you should review to get an idea on the amount of work:

• iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2638 Hard Drive Replacement
• iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2638 SSD Replacement
• iMac Intel 21.5" EMC 2638 RAM Replacement

The last point here is its quite easy to damage the display if you don't follow the IFIXIT guides to the letter and not use the correct tools. So think hard if you want to risk damaging your system if you've never opened one of the newer 'Thin Series' iMacs.

Here's a side by side breakdown of the three systems: Comparisons-of-the-three-systems.pdf

While I love the larger 27" display (my desktop is a 27") I'm not sure you gain enough here given the costs.

Review the Geekbench multi-core 64 numbers as you can see you'll loose performance with the older '10 system Vs going with the board swap.

Don't forget the '10 model also only has SATA II (3.0 Gb's) ports so you wouldn't gain the speed you need here (Drive I/O SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) & PCIe x2 blade SSD interface).

Here's some numbers that might help:

• Samsung Spinpoint 2 TB HD SATA III (6.0 Gb/s)
  • Write - 250 MB/s (2.0 Gb/s)
  • Read - 300 MB/s (2.4 Gb/s)

• Samsung 450 EVO 2 TB SSD SATA III (6.0 Gb/s)
  • Write - 452.3 MB/s (3.62 Gb/s)
  • Read - 512.7 MB/s (4.1 Gb/s)

• Apple PCIe x2 blade SSD: (This is what your system has)
  • Write - 643.5 MB/s (5.14 Gb/s)
  • Read - 714.0 MB/s (5.71 Gb/s)

• Apple PCIe x4 blade SSD:
  • Write - 1416.5 MB/s (11.33 Gb/s)
  • Read - 1536.0 MB/s (12.28 Gb/s)

The 27" iMac drive interface is half as fast as your current systems SATA port (only 3.0 Gb/s). Depending on the drive used you can't exceed what the I/O can support.