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performance of a 1.8ghz imac

melchior

melchior

macrumors 65816
Original poster
I decided it was time to make some big purchases so i order a canon 20d and an imac 20". Being in Australia, both are still several weeks off probably, before reaching my doorstep. Not worried about the camera, but i am having doubts of my imac...

However, I did manage to have a play with a 20" imac with 256mb of ram. the screen was not nearly as large as I imagined. In fact, there was no a noticable increase in screen real estate from my 17" crt. just my impression. significant being the operative and subjective word.

Too, performance was lackluster, to say the least. Not doing anything intensive. Simply browsing the finder, messing with itunes and iphoto. I am hoping i can blame this all on the ridiculously low amount of ram, but at the same time, i am just put off.

would there be a substantial difference in performance to say a dual 1.8ghz pm?

*stressing*


you'll be shocked, but my computer of comparison is an ibook 2001 overclocked to 600mhz, 100mhz bus 576mb of ram and a seagate 200gb firewire drive as the master boot drive...
 
it's the ram, and possibly the anemic video card.

get a nice pair of 512MB sticks from crucial,a nd once that is too little 2GB dimms should fall in price
 
I agree with the RAM comment, I use the old G5 and 512 ram and it was nothing like some of the reviews I had read.. it made me kind of sad. It wasn't until I got 2g of ram in the baby that is REALLY started to show why it's so amazing. Get more RAM and I am sure you will be happy.
 
Chaszmyr said:
A 20'' LCD is massively bigger than a 17'' CRT
Click to expand...

i appear to have experienced some brain fade and what i realised is that because i did not look at the system profiler, only the 'about this mac' and i saw the 1.8ghz and automatically connected with the 20" and in a flash of blinding embarassment I realise that there are *TWO* versions of the 17" imac. duh! 😛

as per memory... I wonder how much is enough? 1gb would be my minimum, but would 2gbmake a difference? i've never worked with 1gb before so i don't know if I be taking it deep into pageout land. with 576mb i pageout like it's going out of fashion... not doing anything special really, running regular apps, ilife(minus idvd and garage), photoshop, microsoft word *shudder*.
 
melchior said:
i appear to have experienced some brain fade and what i realised is that because i did not look at the system profiler, only the 'about this mac' and i saw the 1.8ghz and automatically connected with the 20" and in a flash of blinding embarassment I realise that there are *TWO* versions of the 17" imac. duh! 😛

as per memory... I wonder how much is enough? 1gb would be my minimum, but would 2gbmake a difference? i've never worked with 1gb before so i don't know if I be taking it deep into pageout land. with 576mb i pageout like it's going out of fashion... not doing anything special really, running regular apps, ilife(minus idvd and garage), photoshop, microsoft word *shudder*.
Click to expand...

Get as much as you can afford. I went with the 256mb option since apple charges so much. For the 1 dimm 1gb stick at apple 525, I don't think so. I order some ozc ram, 2gb for 470 at newegg.com. Its sold out now but I believe the next closet is 500.
 
2gb would make a difference over 1gb, but not really a cost effective difference. If performance is important enough to you that you would need that much RAM then a PowerMac may be a better choice than the iMac.

I'd advise 1gb of RAM for an iMac.
 
I have a dual 2GHz PM with 512mb of RAM... is it really all the rave to dish $200 on another gig of RAM? Currently, my game of choice is UT2004 (hopefully World of Warcraft soon)...
 
ram ram ram!! you can never have enough.

anything less than a gig these days is to little, unless your doing just word processing email and internet.
 
Blackheart said:
I have a dual 2GHz PM with 512mb of RAM... is it really all the rave to dish $200 on another gig of RAM? Currently, my game of choice is UT2004 (hopefully World of Warcraft soon)...
Click to expand...

I must say, I don't understand why people spend thousands of dollars on a very high end computer but then don't spend a couple hundred more for RAM. Dollar for dollar, nothing is going to boost overall system performance more than additional RAM. I'd wager that if you bought a dual 1.8 and spent the difference on RAM, that dual 1.8 (with, what, 2.5 gigs of RAM or so?) would easily outperform a dual 2.0 with 512 RAM on almost everything. Same for a base model dual 2.5 vs. a dual 2.0 with the difference spent on a few gigs of RAM.
 
Chaszmyr said:
A dual processor PowerMac should definitely have at least 1gb of RAM. (Mine has 2.5gb)
Click to expand...

damn right. If you have less, you'd probably be better off spending the money on another system with more RAM. You give a dual PM less than a gig, you're just hamstringing it anyway.
 
it is however hard to choose between 1gb and 2gb of ram... i don't work with video. nor do I work with massive images....

here's a question: do you think that the difference between 1gb of ram and 2gb would seriously affect resale value of an imac 20" in 6 months time? (creating contingency plans for the opportunity that the rev. B model is a zillion times better) 😉
 
melchior said:
it is however hard to choose between 1gb and 2gb of ram... i don't work with video. nor do I work with massive images....

here's a question: do you think that the difference between 1gb of ram and 2gb would seriously affect resale value of an imac 20" in 6 months time? (creating contingency plans for the opportunity that the rev. B model is a zillion times better) 😉
Click to expand...

With an iMac i'd only get 1gb of RAM. There will be a minor performance increase if you have more, but not huge, and it will end up costing you extra money. If you could afford 2gb of RAM, maybe you should have gotten a PowerMac instead 😉

(Yes i realize a PowerMac is much more expensive and isn't within the budget of many people.. I was just exaggerating)
 
Chaszmyr said:
With an iMac i'd only get 1gb of RAM. There will be a minor performance increase if you have more, but not huge, and it will end up costing you extra money. If you could afford 2gb of RAM, maybe you should have gotten a PowerMac instead 😉

(Yes i realize a PowerMac is much more expensive and isn't within the budget of many people.. I was just exaggerating)
Click to expand...

actually, i the dual 1.8 pm is priced quite closely to the 20" imac. but you still have to buy ram for it and you don't get the monitor and it weighs a freakin' ton! and you don't get a better video card. what do you get? an extra processor, faster bus speed and pci-x. (features like expandability and fw800 aside)
 
your perception of the screen is probably do to the large white area surronding it. I played with the 20" and it is a very nice sized screen. also a crt is not a widescreen format so your perceptiuon could be skewed. trust me you will love the computer and the screen is a nice hunk of territory... although i believe the 23" cinemas are the PERFECT size

edit: read the thread more closely and saw that you mentioned it being the 17". still i think it is deceptively big
 
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