I just bought the 27" quad 3.1Ghz i5 4GB iMac a few weeks ago and stuck in an extra 8GB ram. I considered waiting for the new ones, but decided it wasn't worth waiting given that the current range meet my needs. I don't do any gaming but use mine for coding and data analysis, which sometimes needs a lot of processing and/or RAM.

I'd still be interested to see the new ones - the only thing I might have wanted better is a larger screen. If the new range has a 30" I might consider trading up.

Last edited by Blahah (2012 May 07, 3:16 pm)

Blahah wrote:

I just bought the 27" quad 3.1Ghz i5 4GB iMac a few weeks ago and stuck in an extra 8GB ram. I considered waiting for the new ones, but decided it wasn't worth waiting given that the current range meet my needs. I don't do any gaming but use mine for coding and data analysis, which sometimes needs a lot of processing and/or RAM.

I'd still be interested to see the new ones - the only thing I might have wanted better is a larger screen. If the new range has a 30" I might consider trading up.

Sorry but if they are coming out in 1 month it was obviously worth waiting regardless of what you are going to use them for. Unless, of course, you are rich. Just saying.

I got myself the current 27" iMac with everything maxed-out. The thing is a beast, whether I'm playing games (Crysis and Deus Ex look especially nice on it) or compiling large codebases with Xcode. My wife does interior design (AutoCAD/Revit) with it, and has had a good experience with it, too.

Obviously whatever comes next will be great for gaming, too, but I'm sure the current one will last me for at least the three years that the AppleCare applies to it.

dtcamero wrote:

Windows however, whether parallels or boot camp, is a little underwhelming.

I'm guessing you are aware but due to the choice of words I would like to remark that there is HUGE difference between parallels and bootcamp.

When you boot under Windows with bootcamp, you have a PC. There is barely any difference whatsoever with a PC of equivalent hardware. There is no emulation whatsoever that can fail with any kind of software. It's running Windows natively. All software is hitting the CPU directly with no translation layer anywhere.

Most Mac ports of Windows games, as far as I know, are not true ports: they use an emulation engine like Wine. Don't quote me on this, but I think I read somewhere even Diablo 3's official Mac release uses Wine under the hood. So there is nearly always a performance cost for translating all the system and graphics API calls, even when the Mac games is thought to be a port.

The exception would be OpenGL games which logically are easier to port, like Valve's Source engine which appears to be truly optimized for Mac OS.

dtcamero wrote:

Now if you want a gaming rig you could spend a third of what I dropped and run new games at max specs for years... But if you want a mac, I don't know if they have the ability to virtualize high-end gaming rigs.

What graphics card do you have in that Mac Pro? Skyrim is running at 30 ish FPS here at native 2560x1440, it can go down to 25 in some towns, and usually 40 or more in caves/dungeons. I'm running it at highest settings with increased view distance. No anti alias though!

Depends what you mean by lag for "high end" gamers anything under 60 FPS is lag so ... (o_O)  I find Skyrim very playable and smooth enough at 30+ FPS. Granted, there is also a huge difference between 30 and 60 FPS, but usually until you experience the latter, you don't feel it that much.

And this brings me to this point...

As for running at max specs for years this is a myth.

In fact, when I was eyeing the iMac and I had made the mental shift to spending 1800 € + on a computer, I figured, hey, why not build myself a high end PC instead?

So I looked at what I could get for my money, I looked at the latest benchmarks for graphics card that had just come out and was thoroughly disappointed. Contrary to consoles, you NEVER get constant 60 FPS, and certainly not for years to come. No matter if you get the latest nVidia GPU that cost you 600 € for a graphics card alone. And since I was looking at a PC rig, those weren't even 27 inch benchmarks.

Go buy the latest ATI or NVidia card right now and find out how many games run with 4xAA at 2560x1440 at 60 FPS, with highest settings. Most games won't, or will drop to lower FPS every now and then. A good example is Call of Duty Modern Warfare. All is good and plain sailing at 60 FPS and then you have all this smoke covering the screen and now it's crawling down to 40 or 30 FPS. Yay.

There will always be badly optimized games like Crysis. These games are just what the "high end" gaming community needs, something to benchmark their rigs. It's completely and utterly irrelevant as far as graphics quality is concerned. For example, when Guild Wars came out, back then it looked splendid, and it was silky smooth. The texture mapping was spot on and the overal graphics quality was superb. I think it was one of the first games I saw that made such a good use of "bloom". This game wasn't wasting the GPU.

This is the main reason I quit my "power gamer" mentality and splashed for the iMac (putting aside development in Mac OS, just looking at the gaming aspect).

You'll never run new games at max specs for several years, on a PC, with the same rig. Not unless perhaps going dual or triple SLI, overclocking,watercooling... which isn't even gaming anymore it's just another subculture. People spend 5000+ $ on a PC gaming tower just looking at the specs, when there aren't even any games that make proper use of two CPU cores. Now drop a 27 inch native res in the mix, and you're not even looking at one year of top performance on a "high end" gaming rig which would be cost equivalent to an iMac.

What I have realised in retrospect, is that spending 1800 € + on a single all in one computer is simply a paradigm shift all of its own. It's like changing belief systems.

turvy wrote:

Sorry but if they are coming out in 1 month it was obviously worth waiting regardless of what you are going to use them for. Unless, of course, you are rich. Just saying.

And for the same reasons (paradigm shift), you could just as well say, that Blahah didn't make any mistake in buying early. It will most certainly meet his needs.

Instead of looking purely at specs, you look at the overall experience. Instead of trying to get that mythical 60 FPS or that mythical benchmark score which will change from day to day as new CPUs come out, you look at that gorgeous 27 inch IPS screen while you work, and a CPU that can more than handle anything that you throw at it.

What's interesting beginning with the last iMac revision is the Thunderbolt interface.

In theory we might be able to upgrade the iMac's graphics card with an external dock in the years to come.

It's not quite clear yet whether that wil be possible according this this article:

A Thunderbolt version of the ViDock would alleviate this problem considerably, but even Thunderbolt only operates over 4x PCI Express 2.0 — and it isn’t understood whether an external graphics card would get the full 4x — bidirectional 16Gbps (2GB/sec) — or just 2x.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/92 … w-you-away

Though even if that will be possible with the rest of the configuration overhaul and the resell value of Apple computers, I'm not sure it's worth upgrading the graphics card alone over reslling and getting a new model (thinking after 2-3 years of use here).

The biggest annoyance really is the upgrade but since I organized my folders for easier backup, it won't be that much of a hassle. Main hassle will be to reinstall php, mysql, ... and Windows.

turvy wrote:

I guess I am too self-centered sometimes. But boy, you guys are really demanding people.

Guilty as charged . I'm sorry to admit that I spend about 15 hours a day on my computer most days - so I do like to make sure the equipment I use (computer, headphones, chair, desk, etc) make those hours as comfortable as possible, minimise any possible medical risks of spending so long in one position etc., as well as minimising the amount of frustration caused by inadequate equipment. It does cost a significant portion of my disposable income, but hey, I find it inexplicable that others pay for sports tickets or to go out drinking .

ファブリス wrote:

Hehe, are you referring to Blahah's comment about a 30 inch screen? That made me chuckle as well

In my defence, I have to work with very detailed visual models of data like protein structures, and even a 27" screen feels restrictively small. Ideally I'd have a 3D projector and a 20ft screen!

There are rumors that the new iMacs will have non glare treatment on the glass panels.

I just found out that when the late 2009 iMac came out the mobility card was really a desktop 4850 underclocked. Meaning that safe overclocking with MSI Afterburner gave it the desktop speeds (core clock and memory). That's what I do now, with noticable FPS gains.

However since then the marketing people are cheating, and a 6970M was the equivalent of an underclocked 6850 (by ~15%). And the 5850M was based off an underclocked 5750.

It's a fair guess that the new high spec iMac will feature a 7970M. So it will be the equivalent of an underclocked 7870. Increasing the core clock from 850 to 1000 Mhz with MSI Afterburner I think should make it equivalent to the desktop 7870 (shader cores, texture units seems to be identical).

As for the "automatic graphics switching between the integrated GPU and discrete GPU" I'm not sure it's of any use on the iMac? I think it's mostly a power saving feature for laptops.

Yeah, I did that with my Macbook Pro for a while. SSD are so worth the money, IMO.

Elgato 120GB, I was mainly using it with my Elgato EyeTV 250 for ripping VHS to it directly. I installed a windows partition on it as the SSD that came with the initial MBP were quite small.