- Joined
- Nov 27, 2004
- Messages
- 445
- Reaction score
- 23
- Points
- 18
- Location
- Yorkshire, UK
- Your Mac's Specs
- 20" iMac | iPhone 4
Hey guys & girls,
I'm seriously considering buying an iMac to kick start my 3rd & final year of University. The iMac I'm after is the following:
20-inch widescreen LCD
1680x1050 resolution
2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor1
4MB shared L2 cache
1GB memory (2x512MB SO-DIMM)
250GB Serial ATA hard drive2
8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL, DVD±RW, CD-RW)
ATI Radeon X1600 graphics with 128MB GDDR3 memory
Built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote
& Apple wireless keyboard & Mighty Mouse
This would cost me £913.84 with my student discount (not bad I thought).
I'm even seriously considering selling my old iBook G4 to help cover the costs as I have thought long and hard and although I love my iBook to bits, it's just not powerful enough for me anymore .
Anyhoo, a few questions.
1. Boot Camp - Is this software still free to download? Also if I was to install Windows XP on my iMac how do you actually go about doing it? Is it a simple enough operation?
2. Graphics - I noticed that the only real change between the 20" and the 24" iMac is the graphics card. Is the ATI Radeon X1600 a decent card? I have only ever really used NVIDIA and so don't have much experience with game playing on an ATI card.
3. Front Row - It would be so nice to be able to lie back on my bed and watch my media using a remote rather than having to look through files and folders with a mouse. I have some video files that have been encoded using different codec’s (i.e. XviD .avi files, DivX .avi files and so on). Now to play these on my Windows system I need to install a codec pack. Will these media files be able to play through Front Row?
Speakers - Are the speakers of a good quality on the iMac? This is not a problem either way as I already have a Creative iTrigue 2.1 sound system that I could hook up. (I'm a bit of a sound snob)
4. Video Editing, Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe Suite - These are the tools of my trade so to speak, I just want opinions on weather this model iMac will be adequate to perform processor/memory intensive tasks efficiently. I have never owned a core 2 Duo computer before and so have never experienced the difference it makes over a single core processor. (for comparison purpose the main machine I work with at the moment is an AMD Athlon 64 Windows based machine with 1GB memory and an NVIDIA 6600GT 128MB Graphics Card).
Also, will this Mac last me a good few years? I'm not too fussed about buying it then a new one coming out a few months down the line as that’s always the deal with computers. But if there are some new Mac's due to be released any time soon then I will wait and see what's new with them. What do you guys think?
Thanks in advance for opinions, info, help & advice.
Regards,
Chris. :mac:
I'm seriously considering buying an iMac to kick start my 3rd & final year of University. The iMac I'm after is the following:
20-inch widescreen LCD
1680x1050 resolution
2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor1
4MB shared L2 cache
1GB memory (2x512MB SO-DIMM)
250GB Serial ATA hard drive2
8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL, DVD±RW, CD-RW)
ATI Radeon X1600 graphics with 128MB GDDR3 memory
Built-in AirPort Extreme and Bluetooth 2.0
Apple Remote
& Apple wireless keyboard & Mighty Mouse
This would cost me £913.84 with my student discount (not bad I thought).
I'm even seriously considering selling my old iBook G4 to help cover the costs as I have thought long and hard and although I love my iBook to bits, it's just not powerful enough for me anymore .
Anyhoo, a few questions.
1. Boot Camp - Is this software still free to download? Also if I was to install Windows XP on my iMac how do you actually go about doing it? Is it a simple enough operation?
2. Graphics - I noticed that the only real change between the 20" and the 24" iMac is the graphics card. Is the ATI Radeon X1600 a decent card? I have only ever really used NVIDIA and so don't have much experience with game playing on an ATI card.
3. Front Row - It would be so nice to be able to lie back on my bed and watch my media using a remote rather than having to look through files and folders with a mouse. I have some video files that have been encoded using different codec’s (i.e. XviD .avi files, DivX .avi files and so on). Now to play these on my Windows system I need to install a codec pack. Will these media files be able to play through Front Row?
Speakers - Are the speakers of a good quality on the iMac? This is not a problem either way as I already have a Creative iTrigue 2.1 sound system that I could hook up. (I'm a bit of a sound snob)
4. Video Editing, Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe Suite - These are the tools of my trade so to speak, I just want opinions on weather this model iMac will be adequate to perform processor/memory intensive tasks efficiently. I have never owned a core 2 Duo computer before and so have never experienced the difference it makes over a single core processor. (for comparison purpose the main machine I work with at the moment is an AMD Athlon 64 Windows based machine with 1GB memory and an NVIDIA 6600GT 128MB Graphics Card).
Also, will this Mac last me a good few years? I'm not too fussed about buying it then a new one coming out a few months down the line as that’s always the deal with computers. But if there are some new Mac's due to be released any time soon then I will wait and see what's new with them. What do you guys think?
Thanks in advance for opinions, info, help & advice.
Regards,
Chris. :mac: