Imacs and Apple stuff

[Gabe_Ruckus]

Figured this fell out of the scope of the existing PC thread. I do a lot of sound recording and image editing, so I took the plunge and got a HUGE Imac desktop, a real high-end version. Now for recording, I couldn't have made a better choice. My audio bus is literally plug and play, while my mixing software is still running, and that's great. Sound quality is awesome, I can change from internal to headphone jack to USB headphones to the jack on the USB bus, all while still working, and I haven't had any issues with drivers at all. Everything seems to be playing very nice with each other.

So far, I'm pretty satisfied with it. There is just one little caveat: I think this Imac might be more powerful than the ASUS laptop I use for gaming, and so I've got an itch to install windows 7 with Boot Camp and just see how it does. A couple things keeping me from doing that, though:

1: This thing feels HOT to the touch. Not just a little warm, but hot enough so you don't want to keep your hand on it. Mostly near the top and back, and the fans work, but they haven't kicked in as aggressively as they did during a hardware test. I have a little worry about overheating.

2: I know Boot Camp and dual booting comes with a performance hit. I tried EVE online on max settings at 1440p and was getting about 40-90FPS, depending where I looked. 1440p would reduce Arma1 to a slide show on my laptop, much less Arma2. So I think I might have some success there.

Anybody have any experience with gaming on the Imac? I don't want to jump in and dedicate 300gb of HD space for Arma, TOH, and Arma3 without being sure it'll be worth it in the end.

[Abs]

1: This thing feels HOT to the touch. Not just a little warm, but hot enough so you don't want to keep your hand on it. Mostly near the top and back, and the fans work, but they haven't kicked in as aggressively as they did during a hardware test. I have a little worry about overheating.

That's how my iPhone gets...and it burned the screen. I recommend you take it back and ask for a replacement, and buy the extended care warranty. The replacement they gave me for my iPhone had the same burnt screen issue, but they won't replace it anymore (even though I argued that they replaced a defective item with what later turned out to be another defective item).

Abs

[fraczek]

Well, if you have got the best model with AMD 6970M, this card should be similar (or somewhat underclocked) to regular desktop 6850 - good enough to run Arma II quite fluently I think. About the heat issues - install some dashboard widget like iStat Pro, it should tell you the temps of most sensors and fan speeds in your iMac, and try running Prime95 (yes its available for OS X too). Perhaps the fans are not kicking in 100% in your use.

OTOH, all newer iMacs probably use most of the aluminium enclosure as a big external heatsink, so this might be somewhat normal. I suggest you do monitor the internal components temps using the iStat Pro and see for yourself how hot they get under load.

Also, if you get to install BootCamp, if the fans are not kicking 100% under load by default, they could be controlable in Windows by any simple Win utility like SpeedFan, as I guess the iMac uses SMBus to control them.

off topic: there are really very nice FireWire external soundcards (which under OS X work out of the box without any drivers) with near-zero latency and no problems of saturated USB bus if you are into audio.

Good luck

[Tonci87]

How much did you pay for it?

[Gabe_Ruckus]

It was about 2000 USD, I'm in the military so I was able to get it without paying sales tax. The Post Exchange has a 15 day return policy, as well, so it was a risk-free investment.

I know how to build a comparable desktop for much less money, and I already have a great gaming laptop, but I decided to take the plunge and try it out for the multimedia aspect. So far, it's been less than painless, any USB bus plugs in and immediately gets recognized, I can swap headphones or speakers, or recording inputs on the fly, without restarting any software. I haven't had to download a single driver, and even Garage Band is pretty solid compared to comparable software (I use Studio One, personally, though). Also, the digital to analog delay I got recording on the PC is gone.

Expensive, but I save a lot of time and energy so I can be creative instead of fixing irritable combinations of hardware and software. Last time I updated Studio One on my PC, all my external plugins stopped working, and it took me 14 hours of troubleshooting to figure out it's because the updated version of Studio One was 64-bit, and all the 32-bit plugins weren't being recognized. The fix was installing two different versions of Studio One so I could track drums in one, render to WAV, and then record instruments in the other.

Now, when the bug to write hits, I can just plug in and go. The interface is a bit weird, and I'm using a PC mouse because it's what I'm used to, but so far it's been a good investment.