MacRumors iMac G5 whining


The PowerPC chip isn't well known for going up in clock speed very often, and in six to eight months they're going to want to add features to the iMac to refresh it, and I'm sure a new video card would be one of the options.

MacRumors is one of my mainstay websites for finding out what might be coming from the world and obsession that is Apple Computer. With the recent announcement of the iMac G5 there was a posting confirming the details with the associated forum link. I jumped in for a few posts to say 'hooray, I'm ordering' and the like and then run off to work.

I get back to now what is 62 pages of bitching and moaning. The biggest point of contention can be broken up into two groups

1) The Video Card Sucks
2) It's not Headless

Headless?? When will people get it, that's not Apple's direction for the iMac. They've made it clear I don't know how many times that they have no intention of a headless iMac and that the all-in-one design is their building point.

I'm confused too on the video card issue. While there are definitely faster video cards out there on the market the GeForce 5200 FX Ultra isn't the worst thing in the world. The bigger/badder video cards offer a lot more heat output and they're already working in a rather tight enclosure. Plus it gives them something to upgrade for new models later down the road. The PowerPC chip isn't well known for going up in clock speed very often, and in six to eight months they're going to want to add features to the iMac to refresh it, and I'm sure a new video card would be one of the options.

I ordered Unreal Tournament for my new iMac G5 and will check it out once it gets here. I've not played a lot of games on my Powerbook because the trackpad isn't very conducive to gaming. But Warcraft III looks pretty nice on it, and even ran fairly well on Angi's iMac 800Mhz with it's GeForce 2MX chip on it. I think the chipset in the powerbook is a tiny bit better, not sure. It could be the slightly faster bus on the Powerbook that is helping because occasionally I noticed a stutter or two while playing on the iMac.

I must give props to Blizzard for the fact that their software is all dual versioned. When I had a PC I bought Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc. and each and every one of them has the Macintosh version on them. Warcraft III is the only OS X version but I can play all the games with little/no difference to the PC revision. Battle.net works as well. Very nice.

Posted: Sun - September 5, 2004 at 03:12 PM           |

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