New iMacs get benchmarked as fast as expected

As people start benchmarking the new iMacs on Geekbench, the new new Sandy Bridge systems are showing pretty strong results coming in near the Mac Pros released last year and significantly above the speedy Sandy Bridge MacBook Pros released earlier this year.  To give an idea where it falls, here is a bit of Geekbench’s normalized results for Mac systems:

Macworld also benchmarked a new 3.1 GHz Core i5 27-inch iMac and found it to be the fastest  iMac ever tested with the Speedmark 6.5 suite of tests…

    Our overall system performance test suite, Speedmark 6.5, shows the new system to be 16 percent faster than the previous high-end standard configuration iMac, a 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 quad-core model with a 1TB 7,200-rpm hard drive, and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1GB of dedicated RAM. (Apple considered the older 27-inch 2.8GHz Core i5 iMac a BTO option, but the online Apple Store didn’t treat it like one, so we decided to treat it like a standard configuration model.)

If the middle of the road iMac with standard parts does this well, it will be interesting to see how the high end built-to-order iMacs perform.