Carlo_M
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Oct 31, 1997
- Messages
- 13,392
Barefeats has a pretty decent initial impression of the iMac changes.
This is based only on their knowledge of the parts, they have ordered a new iMac and will benchmark it as soon as it arrives to see how the real world tests measure out.
They say the new GPU is the biggest improvement in the iMac, calling it "a serious GPU". They were very critical of the previous graphic solutions in iMacs up to this point, which were mostly comparable with their mobile [laptop] equivalents. The new GPUs are apparently closer to their true desktop counterparts.
They also mention the dual internal HD drives, and hope that they are user accessible. This would make the iMac way more compelling for me if the drives were user accessible. And the top end CPU available specs out to the same speed as the current 2.93GHz Mac Pro offering (though the Pro uses the Xeon line, and will soon be upgraded to once again outpace the iMac).
One thing they don't mention is the RAM speed increase from 1066 to 1333, which if accompanied by an increase in FSB speed (it's not clear if it does or not based on the specs at Apple) could result in 5-10% speed improvement in benchmarks (real world results may vary but it certainly won't hurt performance).
Overall it isn't considered a revolutionary upgrade, but if the GPU tests out as Barefeats thinks it will, that will result in real-world noticeable performance increases for graphics-intensive programs. Not just video games, but a lot of Apple's software is starting to offload processes to the GPU (like Aperture and Final Cut) so people who work with A/V and large RAW files should notice an improvement from that increase alone.
This is based only on their knowledge of the parts, they have ordered a new iMac and will benchmark it as soon as it arrives to see how the real world tests measure out.
They say the new GPU is the biggest improvement in the iMac, calling it "a serious GPU". They were very critical of the previous graphic solutions in iMacs up to this point, which were mostly comparable with their mobile [laptop] equivalents. The new GPUs are apparently closer to their true desktop counterparts.
They also mention the dual internal HD drives, and hope that they are user accessible. This would make the iMac way more compelling for me if the drives were user accessible. And the top end CPU available specs out to the same speed as the current 2.93GHz Mac Pro offering (though the Pro uses the Xeon line, and will soon be upgraded to once again outpace the iMac).
One thing they don't mention is the RAM speed increase from 1066 to 1333, which if accompanied by an increase in FSB speed (it's not clear if it does or not based on the specs at Apple) could result in 5-10% speed improvement in benchmarks (real world results may vary but it certainly won't hurt performance).
Overall it isn't considered a revolutionary upgrade, but if the GPU tests out as Barefeats thinks it will, that will result in real-world noticeable performance increases for graphics-intensive programs. Not just video games, but a lot of Apple's software is starting to offload processes to the GPU (like Aperture and Final Cut) so people who work with A/V and large RAW files should notice an improvement from that increase alone.
