27-inch iMac buying advice: processor, video card optiions

+another for the i7; it's a beast. If your interest is not gaming, and getting the most longevity for the money, this one is going to stay "fast enough" longer than the i3 or i5.

For (some) assistance on the graphics card aspect of things, this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2569-6.html says the 4850 is not far off from the 5750 in terms of power, though obviously the additional 512MB of DDR5 will make some difference, at a higher price. As for the option to get the new iMac so as to purchase the 256 GB SSD drive, I would recommend against it. Today, I just bought an external 250GB (non-flash based) HDD for under $80 CDN, so you can see the huge price premium you'd be paying, and frankly, for ALL of your planned uses - hard drive speed is NOT going to be your bottleneck. Much better to spend that money on a 3rd party RAM purchase, with the advantage of waiting a bit to see how much you might actually need after using the new computer for a while.

Seconding the i5 refurb suggestion. FYI, the price just dropped significantly. I got my i5 refurb about a month ago. So far, solid, no issues, you'd never know it wasn't new.

Yes, it might be useful to have the SSD option. However, three major caveats. First, the price disparity between regular HDD and SSD is huge, and I suspect it will be quite a while before you can buy a large SSD for a reasonable price - today you can get 1TB HDDs for like $60 - meanwhile a 1TB SDD (like the Colossus) is more like $3000. Second, the split drives solution - having both the HDD and the SDD - is a bridge toward eventually going all the way to SSD drives a few years from now. Personally, I'd just prefer to wait until I can just have one affordable drive instead of the split solution. Third, at least for now, OS X is really not equipped to take full advantage of SSDs - "the most advanced operating system on the planet" apparently does not support TRIM; now some will argue that with new drives the importance of TRIM has declined, but that's not quite true - it still matters. So from my point of view, I'll ride the i7 for a few years, and by the time I'm ready for a new computer, hopefully OS X comes with TRIM, and SSDs are a fully baked technology and are reasonably priced standard default storage.

Any opinion on adding a 256 GB solid state drive (flash memory, no moving parts) to the configuration, in addition to a 1TB traditional drive? The idea is to keep applications on the solid state drive, increasing speed, and freeing up the traditional drive for documents. However, this configuration (both SSD and traditional in one comouter) does not come as an option with the i7 refurbished iMac, and is a $750 option for the new iMac.

As tommasz says, there is no way to know what specifically was wrong with a computer that led to it being refurbished, but the way I look at it is this: Any new computer goes through some basic testing to try to ensure it is not DOA (all components have a non-zero risk of being crappy), but a refurb goes through more extensive testing to ensure that it has been returned to as equivalent to a completely new state as possible, thus for less money, you're getting a machine that has been more thoroughly tested. My refurb still had the new computer smell (/joke). In fact, the only way anyone would know that it's a refurb rather than brand new is that it comes in a plain white box instead of a pretty iMac picture box.

Refurbs can be anything from major component replacement to simple "dust off". My iMac looks absolutely new, there were no scratches, no dirt, nothing that would make you think it wasn't brand new. YMMV, but I wouldn't hesitate provided they have what you want.

Thanks for everyone's responses so far. It looks like going the refurbished route may be a consideration. So what does Apple do when it refurbishes a computer?

And if you aren't interested in gaming, I don't know of anything particular that needs much more than whatever base level GPU every Mac comes with. I suppose you could find yourself doing something that is OpenCL capable that Grand Central Dispatch will farm out to the GPU, but for the most part video acceleration in desktop applications is more than sufficiently handled by every discrete video card. Flash still sucks eggs in OSX. Maybe next year?