first upgrade: more ram
second upgrade: ssd
third upgrade: video card and monitor.
it's on track to give me 10 years of use now, if not more (i'll probably succumb to upgrade fever before then). knocking on wood. the ram and ssd were a given, but i was surprised at how much more 2d performance the video card delivered. i really just wanted 4k for the real estate, but the actual speed at which it renders everything jumped dramatically.
Alternatively, just buy whatever's on sale for small SSDs and do a fusion-drive on it.
So far I've been completly disappointed with my purchase. Compared to my 3TB HDD I've spent more money yet only see a 2x improvement in speed compared to my HDD for sequential loads. Sure it now boots much faster but that's hardly worth the money I've spent on it.
Alas, everyone still seems to recommend Samsung Evo if you want reliability (I do), and $330 for a 1TB EVO 850 is still a little more than I want to pay. (Especially when a 2TB spinning disk selling for $95 now.)
Perhaps I should go with a 500GB SSD and transfer the movies and whatever else is taking up space to the server. And then buy a new iMac once they put the next-gen GPUs in them.
an ssd is a completely different paradigm. it's night and day, even on an old sata bus.
this shoudn't even be a question. hdd computers are completely unuseable to me now. i sat down at one the other day and i thought it had crashed and almost rebooted it, but it was just chugging the disk.
I have considered switching out both the HDD and the DVD drive to get space to build a Fusion drive, but I kinda want to keep the DVD drive; it's the only one we have in the house.
Hm. Maybe I should build a Fusion drive and add an external optical drive...
A bit more complicated than I'd like :)
just did a 3.46 hex cpu upgrade. 32GB 1333 RAM sm951 AHCI pcie m2 boot drive (700MB/700MB) nvidia 1080 when it comes out.
bootcamp for games. 40" 4K Philips in os x for everything else.