Should I buy a new Imac

I just visited apple.com, and I literally started to drool.

They were advertising their new 20 inch flatpanel Imacs... my eyes were like... glued open

I was wondering... will it be adequate to run SL for Mac? It uses the Gforce FX 5200 card... dunno about that (Im an ATI user).

So uh.. should I think about buying it?

==Chris

5200 cards are pieces of crap better suited for www.disney.com than SL. Nvidia realized people were getting wise to the MX cards not being worth gaming, so took the best GeForce 4 card number (4200) and renamed the FX MX card to FX 5200. It is severely gimped and not great performance, I especially would not trust it with as nice a screen as the 20" Apple displays are.

Sorry if I offended anyone who has one.

And erm, I still harbor an old grudge for the original imacs, and I think the current ones are ugly too (though I havn't seen a 20" version so I dunno how they look).

They look about the same to me....just a wider screen, and a thicker pole thingy to hold em up.

I'm not sure why Apple screens tend to grow wider faster than they grow taller. Something artsie I guess.

If I were not going to get a Powerbook I'd say to get one of the new tower cases and buy the monitor separately. That way you have more control over video card and monitor components later on. It's going to be a long long time (if ever) before you have to retire a G4 or G5 based box, on the other hand LCD prices just keep coming down and hence larger screens become more sensible as an upgrade.

Personally, I don't trust Apple. Way back when I had an Apple 2GS. It was one of the better PCs on the market. Apple just dropped the line one day in favpr of the Apple Macs. They didn't phase it out, or gradually merge it with the Mac line. They just dropped it, abandoning several million customers. If they did it once they can do it again. They lost me as a customer permantly the day they did that.

I'm going to go for one of the Dual 1.8G5s, myself.. one of these days. To be honest, you have to make sure the iMac is exactly what you want.. what with no upgrading and all. I love mine, but the limited screen rez is what is going to drive me to update. Of course, with the 20" monitor that is less of a problem than my 15".

I have the iMac 17" 1ghz with 768mb ram and a GeForce 4 with 64mb. You cannot change the graphics cards on iMacs, as far as I know, so, it's whatever they give you. That being said, I have a feeling it will perform differently than on PC. They tell you when looking to buy a mac to triple the processor speed to compare with PC, so, I have a feeling it's something similar with the GFX card.

I'm sure it will be fine, and you'll love it.

Lindens: HURRY UP WITH SL FOR MAC!!!

That could be plausible when comparing certain things, James. Comparing Mhz across cpu architectures is nutty, which is why they say to do that, and why AMD has it's X000+ ratings. However the graphics cards in both are the same chips. An FX5200 in one will perform pretty much the same as an FX5200 in another.

whoot! IIGS!! The movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" kinda explained what happened to the Apple II's. Really good movie if you are MAC or a PC fan.

I purchased my first Mac this past April, a 12" Powerbook. I love it. And since I'm a history/trivia/useless knowledge freak, I looked up http://www.apple-history.com and was thumbing through the older models specs.

I agree the IIGS was a beautiful machine, and though I haven't seen Pirates of Silicon Valley in a while, I figure there must be a reason.

I was chatting with a Linden in-world about the Mac client, and he says that they won't be able to support anything less than the beta specs, which means my Powerbook doesn't cut it (only G4-867).

Kinda irks me that the min on a Windows box is a P3-800, yet it's 1GHz on the Mac. I'd have to say that's the first time I've seen something that had higher min specs on the Mac than the PC.

This isn't the first time I've seen this. Way back in 94 we produced an educational multimedia CD that ran on both Windows and Mac. I wrote the C++ software that it was based on. Under Windows 3.1, it ran fine with 4MB with virtual memory turned *on*. Unfortunately Mac OS at that time had a serious bug that prevented sound from working correctly when streaming off the CD when virtual memory was on. Result -- the Mac version required VM to be off, which pushed the memory requirement to 8MB.

I'm not a Mac user, but I own an FX 5200. It bites. Seriously. Although, unlike ATI cards, it's compatible with SL, the FX 5200 is extremely slow.

The FX 5200 rocks
It cost me half of my previous graphics card (3D prophet 4500 - Kyro2 chip) and its 5 times faster. I get great performance in SL and everything else. You people must be like those benchmark sites who run everything at 1600x1200 with AA and Aniso. My monitor doesnt even go beyond 1024x768

This is not an opinion or recommendation, just a question. Does Apple even offer a gaming optimized computer?

I have yet to actually see any Apple model marketed toward gaming. They seem to market their machines toward pretty much everything else but gaming. That is understandable, considering a lack of Mac ports of popular games. They also seem to use lesser Nvidia cards. I don't know if this is a cost or compatibility thing, so I won't assume a GeForce FX5200 works the same in a Mac as in a PC.

To answer Christopher's original question, he should consider what else he could do with this iMac before he considers buying one.

The higher-end Macintosh machines use ATI cards. Although Mac OS X has more native integration of OpenGL, so maybe they can avoid ATI bugginess?

But yes, as Teeny said, think of what you'll do with the Mac before you buy it. SL for OSX was a dream when I bought my Powerbook, but that's about the only thing I don't do on my Powerbook. And I reboot it once a week, if that

The PC plays fileserver and gaming machine, although my only game is SL. Heh.

Chris, will this be your first Mac?

Bah, I don't like mac. Bad memories from the OS6 days. Man, that really sucked ass.

Yeah, I think the first GUI I tried was Windows 2.something... it was a real POS. I haven't had much respect for Windows ever since.

Multiply clock speed by 3 to figure the performance?

I have a 3GHz P4 with an 800MHz front-side bus. I would be genuinely surprised if my rig didn't run circles around a 1GHz Mac.

Is that some cheap dig at PC reliablility? I will hav eyou know, sir, that the last time I had to restart my windows box was about a month ago, after I shut it down to install some new hardware. Shame! Keep your PC bashing with the times.

Chris, don't do it! Stay on the side of all that is good and true. I was tempetd by the apple website, and that damn 17 inch powerbook, but luckily I have an inherent distrust for anything that is pretty, and escaped the jaws of that trap.

bbc

Actually, in all honestly, I barely reboot my XP desktop now. But that's probably more because I only use it for SL. The occasional reboot more comes from my cousin futzing something up on the guest account, or sheer lag, or the odd installation of a Windows-only program that requires a reboot.

So, I digress about the "only have to reboot once a week" comment.

I will say tho, that my G4-867 running OS 10.2.8 and the Safari web browser responds a lot better to having 20+ browser windows open than my P4-2.26 running XP Home and IE 6.0. The desktop started to choke at 20 windows, and the laptop routinely has 50-100 windows open simultaneously.

This experience I will not digress about. (And no, I didn't have SL running to help choke the desktop)

As for multiplying by 3, that is quite high. A 1.5-2x multiplier is more appropriate for a single-CPU machine. Dual-CPU machines are a different animal.

Only? How would it handle with 300 copies of NEdit running at once? (Yes, I've done this. Don't ask why.)

Well Bino, your first problem would be that you were running IE on your PC.

BBC I love you

Yes, I was running IE. What I should have mentioned was IE is XP's default browser, and Safari is OSX's default browser.

Needless to say I don't use IE much at all anymore.

There is nothing wrong with a modern linux distribution.

SuSE 9.0 comes with ALOT of stuff that the average home or small office user might need, and is not so bad to configure.

Buy the boxed set, and you get great manuals, too.

My current configuration lies somewhere between the cost of a bargain basement PC (~$300) and a Mac ($1500+)

Athlon XP 2600+, Geforce FX 5900 Ultra, nforce 2 Ultra 400, 512 megs ram.

Hard drive, speakers, monitor, yadda yadda.

Prices have dropped since i bought my equipment, you can probably score an athlon Xp 3000+, no problem.

Get a good case, good power supply, and decent cd burner/dvd burner, and your set.

Cheaper than a Mac, no proprietary lockin, and as long as you only purchase Linux friendly hardware, an industrial strength easy to setup OS.

The main problems I have with Linux on the desktop, is setting up crazy hardware. But as long as you don't always search for the absolute cheapest thing you can find, you don't have any problems.

My HP PSC 2210 all in one scanner/printer/fax works great, even the image card reader.

I'm REALLY happy with my computer now, no stability problems, except when I dual boot into XP to play Secondlife.

Infact, given that I've ditched the only other game that was giving me trouble in linux (eve-online), as soon as SecondLife goes linux (or we get it working in WineX) I'll be done with Microsoft for good.

Useful resources for Linux users----

Codeweavers Wine projects---
www.codeweavers.com
Codeweavers office is brilliant. Internet Explore, MS office, and other sorts of windows apps work GREAT. (Of course you could just use Open office like me, but some people need MS office for work purposes, or have spent the ~$300 for a license and are too stubborn to give it up )
Codeweavers Crossover plugins is sweet too--- no more 'unable' to play windows media formats, etc. . . .

WineX, of course, is great. I love it. Most DX 8 games work, no problem.

The retail version is VASTLY improved over the CVS version, mainly because of all the Installshield tweaks/hacks.

The cool thing about this is that SuSE now sells something called 'the wine rack', which comes with the above three wines preconfigured for SuSE 9.0, for a total cost of $40, IIRC.

$70+$40= $110, not an unreasonable cost for your OS+ Gobs and Gobs of software.

Get linux hardware, get linux software.

Sure, there is a slight premium. Sure, you probably will have to build it yourself.

But you'll still have a great selection of both hardware/software than with Apple, and you'll still save money.

Plus you learn ALOT about all sorts of interesting computing topics.

Note: I did consider going Apple, but I just can't afford it, and none of the Windows Games/Apps that I want will work at a reasonable speed. I can retool my home and my office to go linux. I can get most of my applications working too.

I just can afford the much larger investment to go Apple.......

A large part of that is I can't get OEM motherboards/processors at a reasonable price (I did investigate that route). I spent about two weeks drooling over the possibility of buying stuff on eBay and building myself a G3 or G4, but I couldn't get the hardware price much below $800-$900 for a configuration with specifications that would be useful to me.

Anyways, not to discourage the Apple Zealots(TM), but this Linux Zealot(TM) is here to help any of you, or answer any questions, about the possiblity of adopting a penguin in your home

Feel free to visit me at our home in Freelon, I spend a lot of time there

One important piece of software that WineX doesn't run (at least in the free version) is SecondLife.