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which mac for gaming?
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Louisiana, US
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I'm having trouble deciding which mac is best suited to me. I'm torn between a power mac, and a 24" imac with the 7600gt.
Will the 24" imac with 7600gt give me outstanding performance in WoW, or am I better off ordering a power mac and upgrading the video card myself? I word the second option as such because I'm not happy with apple's offerings from the factory.
WoW is really the only game I care about. I dont have enough time to spend playing more than one game. I will be upgrading from an amd 3200+ with 1gb ram and a 7600gt running linux and cedega. Which of these would give me the better gaming machine?
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Smallish town in Ohio
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The 24" iMac's video card is upgradeable. Look it up on google.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Apr 2005
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Do you want the better gaming experience or the better gaming experience *for your dollar*.
PowerMac is overkill for WoW, to put it mildly.
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: Ottawa, Canada
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Originally Posted by macintologist 
The 24" iMac's video card is upgradeable. Look it up on google.
And you'll find the chances of iMac video card upgrade are very slim.
Originally Posted by pwolfe1
I'm having trouble deciding which mac is best suited to me. I'm torn between a power mac, and a 24" imac with the 7600gt.
As much as I am an Apple fan, I have to tell you to stay away when it comes to gaming. They only machine that'll game reasonably is the Mac Pro (w/x1900XT) but that costs too much. And it's a workstation and not a real gaming machine (a Conroe Core2Duo Mac with DDR2 RAM would be but that doesn't exist) although it would do fine. I only got mine because I use it professionally as well.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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Originally Posted by thebunny
As much as I am an Apple fan, I have to tell you to stay away when it comes to gaming. They only machine that'll game reasonably is the Mac Pro (w/x1900XT) but that costs too much. And it's a workstation and not a real gaming machine (a Conroe Core2Duo Mac with DDR2 RAM would be but that doesn't exist) although it would do fine. I only got mine because I use it professionally as well.
I tend to disagree...
Featured Desktops
A Core 2 Duo Dell if you configure it with the same speed, costs as much in my book, and only has one processor. From the latest articles I've seen on games, such as UT2007 being multithreaded and OpenGL being multi-threaded ( Macworld: News: WoW update adds multi-threaded OpenGL on Intel Macs ), I think the future of games is multi-core processors and multi-processor machines. But then I seem to be one of the rare few that think there is hope for Mac Gaming.
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Mac Pro Dual 3.0 Dual-Core
MacBook Pro
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Mac Enthusiast
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Globetrotting
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I have the 24" with the 7600. I dusted off my WoW disks and reopened my account for a month to see how it performed.
Everything max except view distance = 30fps at 1920x1200.
Dropping down to 1600 x 1000 and some of the eye candy it's over 100 fps.
My "old" G4 1Ghz Powerbook at 1440 x 900 gets 14 fps with conservative settings.
Barefeats has a great benchmark compare.
iMac Core 2 Duo - High Rez gaming
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Last edited by Crusoe; Dec 6, 2006 at 04:49 PM.
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If a group of mimes are miming a forest and one falls down, does he make a sound?
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Dec 2006
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: Louisiana, US
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Originally Posted by Crusoe
I have the 24" with the 7600. I dusted off my WoW disks and reopened my account for a month to see how it performed.
Everything max except view distance = 30fps at 1920x1200.
Dropping down to 1600 x 1000 and some of the eye candy it's over 100 fps.
My "old" G4 1Ghz Powerbook at 1440 x 900 gets 14 fps with conservative settings.
Barefeats has a great benchmark compare.
iMac Core 2 Duo - High Rez gaming
Thanks for the replies everyone. Let this topic sit for too long. All insight was appreciated. These hard specs were what I needed to see to bite the bullet and do the upgrade!
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: SF Bay Area, CA
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Wow that link is a good representation of what I have experienced. The performance gap between our iMac w/ X1600 (128MB) vs my workstation was night and day. If you want the most bang for the buck for gaming alone I would have to recommend a PC. While I am highly satisfied with the gaming capabilities of my workstation it is not its primary function. The GPU upgrade was fairly nominal against the cost of the rest of the machine and was more of a bonus since my work is primarily focused on sound.
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Dual 2.66Ghz Xeon Woodrcrests // 8800GT 512MB // 30" Apple Cinema Display // 8GB RAM // Samsung Galaxy Nexus LTE // 64GB iPad LTE Verizon // Home Theater
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Junior Member
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Arden District, Sacramento, CA
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Originally Posted by bluekatt
none get a console
yeah, thats not what he was asking.
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