Chosen Solution
With this model: 21.5-inch iMac with Retina 4K display 3.2GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.6GHz8GB 2666MHz DDR4 memoryRadeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory1TB Fusion Drive storage Can you upgrade the CPU (theoretically)? Also, is more convenient to buy an eGPU and get the built in Radeon Pro 560X instead of Vega 20?
It’s still early to know all of the internal details as iFixit hasn’t released a Teardown on these systems yet. Us independents won’t know for at least a year from now when we start getting them in for repairs & upgrades. If Apple follows the same direction as the previous version the i3 will likely have a soldered CPU where as the i5 & i7 models will have a socketed CPU. Even still you are already buying the top model so at this point I don’t see any point on worrying about upgrades as the systems firmware will likely prohibit anything other than the supplied CPU’s this series support (iMac19,2). While not easy your systems RAM can be upgraded upto 32 GB. Your storage is locked in as both the SATA & PCIe ports are in use with a Fusion Drive set (HDD & SSD). The blade SSD in a Fusion config is only 32 GB which is quite small if you decide to use it at a boot drive. You’ll want to increase it to 512 GB or more so it can support the OS, your Apps and have the rest of the drive free for caching, paging and scratch space.
Seeing as this iMac is no longer new and I’m reopening this question. I don’t have much upgrade experience (dates to far back to count), so I would like to know what I can to to improve this Mac’s performance as I find it slower than my mid-2014 MacBook Air at times with multiple apps and Safari open.
I’ve upgraded this model to an i9-9900K intel CPU + 64GB of RAM + NVMe SSD of 1TB + 1TB of storage SSD. CPU: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B089J73… SSD proprietary connector cable: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08YF1J… RAM: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07PTRZ… SSD for operating system: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07QDPD… SSD for storage: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B079XC5… CPU: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B089J73…
