Best iMac 27 for the buck?

I need a fairly quick question answering...... Im looking to buy my 18 year old lad an imac for xmas, I cant afford a new one and hes happy with a second hand one, my budgetis absolute max 600 but thats stretching it a bit, ideally 500.. now I know im not gonna get a new retina screen for this but my question is, will an i7 with a 512mb VGA card be able to handle the stuff he needs? Basically hes using logic, photoshop and other softwares for music... Hes doing graphic design at collefge and is in his 2nd year so its getting heavy now and hed like to be able to do some work at home. Hes also very keen on making his own music with guitar and keyboards mostly. I have been offered this mac here for 500 and I think i can get it down to about 450-475.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2223263000...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT

Could someone tell me if that would be OK and is there some scope to upgrade in the future like video card ? I know the Ram can be upped but im just not that well up on MAC.

Many thanks lads.
Paul

Anyone? its a collect tonight kinda offer haha sorry to mither but i could do with knowing its OK.
Cheers

I doubt the GPU is up-gradable but I may be wrong, it's not like a PC where all GPUs have Windows drivers. You would need to search for the hardware requirements of each software but they are easy to find online.

As for the price, I would look at this and adjust the search to suit you for an idea on the going rates.

Thanks mate, I've got it, had to wait and had a limited time available, have 430 for it though if that's any good. He reckons you can upgrade the GPU on it

In my experience newer mac products are more limited with upgrades available. And they get more complicated then more newer they are. At this age there should be some options. That said I reckon u didn't get a bad deal. :)


DJ OD

I had to upgrade the SSD of a retina MacBook the other day, Apple decided to switch m.2 drives with proprietary drives, there is only one third party which manufactures such drives and a 1TB model which only has 2 lanes instead of the 4 in the original cost over £700. It's outrageous but I was told to go ahead.

Yeah I've had a good play with it and it seems good value for the money, I can swap it the did drive for an ssd and have that as boot drive so that will speed things up, I've also got a spare crucial 500gb ssd so let's hope I can utilise that. I'm happy.

Right lads, this thing is slow at doing what i need it to do, however i think its totally full of crap still from previous user, basically its lagging from basic things like today i clicked on safari browser to open and it took like 6 mins to open!!! Also just general use seems really really slow, I don't understand as its basically the same spec as my own PC i7 8gb Ram but not as good video so I at least expected it to do basic stuff at the same sort of speed, is it possible he's running an operating system thats causing it to be slow? its running El Capitan and if so how do i go about getting it back to factory settings, i have had a quick google about resetting to factory by restarting and pressing cmd R but i got nowhere and it takes so long to boot its a bit of a pain haha, I could really do with sorting its I need to wrap it up tomorrow really.
cheers again fellas

In your position i'd be replacing the HDD with an SSD and installing macOS from scratch. Bit tight on timescale though.. You can download the installers from most normal places, I usually use an OSX VM to make a bootable USB from the dmg.

im not that well up on mac either evilsatan haha you're right timescale is bad, however i did a bit of reading and there are thousands of people with issues on older macs and el capitan so i just upgraded via app store to sierra and its still not what i expect but about 50 percent better, I'm told it could be file permission problems and to sort that i need a full registered version of clean my mac so I'm off to try that and see how that goes down.
thanks for the time to read pal.

I know its a travel but if you want to bring it to leeds ill reinstall Yosemite then u can upgrade to latest osx, bring a new ssd and its a 10 min job to replace the drive as long as its not the new bonded screen then its a hour or two.

Disk utility should be able to repair permissions or clean my Mac can be found for free some places... I know the newer versions of macOS removed some features from disk utility but I thought the first aid section was still there.