New iMacs: Teardown, First Benchmarks

Only couple days ago Apple released new iMacs with Sandy Bridge possessors and Thunderbolt technology. iFixit’s team, of course, immediately started tearing down a 21.5-inch model.  They  found that this model iMac opens in the same way as previous generations by pulling off the magnetically-held glass and removing the screws holding the LCD in place.

The LED display is manufactured by LG and it’s the same used in the previous-generation iMac. The optional SSD appears to reside beneath the optical drive. There’s three mounting points under the optical drive that have nothing attached to them, this option is only available on 2.7 GHz 21.5-inch iMacs. In usual Apple fashion, one heat sink is reserved for the CPU, while the other oversees the GPU. The machine was found to be powered by a quad-core 2.5 GHz Core i5-2800S CPU with 6 MB of Intel Smart Cache. The main chips on the GPU board include the AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU, as well as four Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2L 1 Gb GDDR SDRAM chips (totaling a cumulative 512 MB). The teardown also reveals the Thunderbolt connector is similar (but not the same) to the one found in the early-2011 MacBook Pros. iFixit also gives the machine a 7/10 Repairability Score, noting that average users can easily replace RAM, but accessing the CPU and GPU requires to take out the whole logic board, which is described as a “tricky process.”