Has anyone used the GTX 660M for games yet? How does it feel? I'm def. not a serious gamer, but would love to take on WOW, Dragon Age, Portal 2, etc with nice settings. What'll it be like? The notebookcheck.com benchmarks look promising!
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GTX 660M Gaming?
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Cod 4 seems to run with no bother, thinking about a Magic Mouse now to play it though 
Going to try mw2 next, will let you know how it goes.
Going to try mw2 next, will let you know how it goes.
Unfortunately my 'version' of mw2 did not work..will try another app, real racing 2 not too bad, will find another app to try.
On the gizmondo review of the 21"
As for actual brute force computing prowess, in our standardized render test, the new iMac averaged 43 seconds. That came out well ahead of the Retina MacBook Pro 13-inch (54 seconds) and an older Mac Pro (2 minutes), but it was behind a Retina MBP 15-inch (34 seconds) that had double the RAM and a beefier graphics card. Real world-wise, that nudges the bang-for-buck value toward the RMBP 15, especially since its default graphics card is a little better.
For gaming, our near-base configuration was fine. It's 1080p (non-Retina) screen ran Diablo 3 at 1080p on medium settings at close to 60fps. But for any heavy lifting, you're going to want to upgrade to the beefier cards on the 27-inch iMacs. If you ramp up the settings on D3 or Witcher 2, you're not going to squeeze great performance out of the baseline GT cards. Our framerate dipped under 30 on both games, in a hurry.
Just for reference purposes, of course.
On the gizmondo review of the 21"
As for actual brute force computing prowess, in our standardized render test, the new iMac averaged 43 seconds. That came out well ahead of the Retina MacBook Pro 13-inch (54 seconds) and an older Mac Pro (2 minutes), but it was behind a Retina MBP 15-inch (34 seconds) that had double the RAM and a beefier graphics card. Real world-wise, that nudges the bang-for-buck value toward the RMBP 15, especially since its default graphics card is a little better.
For gaming, our near-base configuration was fine. It's 1080p (non-Retina) screen ran Diablo 3 at 1080p on medium settings at close to 60fps. But for any heavy lifting, you're going to want to upgrade to the beefier cards on the 27-inch iMacs. If you ramp up the settings on D3 or Witcher 2, you're not going to squeeze great performance out of the baseline GT cards. Our framerate dipped under 30 on both games, in a hurry.
Just for reference purposes, of course.
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Well I bought mine for music recording and a bit of photography editing. That said I still want to see how far the GPU will go though out of interest.
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It is actually $350 if you are getting the regular 27" as you have to pay $200 to upgrade to the top $27, then $150 to upgrade to 680mx.
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Ok, haven't been able to get black ops to work neither, not down to the imac, but it wasn't a legit copy.
But got Need for speed running but it struggled due to it running off of windows 8 on parallels 8 trial. I will keep trying....may try and get wow freeplay to see how that fairs.
But got Need for speed running but it struggled due to it running off of windows 8 on parallels 8 trial. I will keep trying....may try and get wow freeplay to see how that fairs.
Couples of days now with the base 27" with fusion drive 1TB and the GTX 660M and i'm really happy.
I'm not a big gamer... but i enjoy to play.
I play Tropico 3 with native resolution, all setting in high and is awesome. i never can play like this before with my 15" macbook pro 2 core dui of 2007. it's simply awesome... i play like 4 hours and in any time i ear the fan running more fast. the Imac was ambiant temperature. Love it.
I install Xplane 9 too, just open and play a little 10 minutes. Look promissing, but xplane is really more difficult in all little things to make in graphic side that now i can't really said if good or not, but flying couple of minutes in what i think medium-high setting look nice !!!.
Enjoy... the 27" is AWESOME !!!
I'm not a big gamer... but i enjoy to play.
I play Tropico 3 with native resolution, all setting in high and is awesome. i never can play like this before with my 15" macbook pro 2 core dui of 2007. it's simply awesome... i play like 4 hours and in any time i ear the fan running more fast. the Imac was ambiant temperature. Love it.
I install Xplane 9 too, just open and play a little 10 minutes. Look promissing, but xplane is really more difficult in all little things to make in graphic side that now i can't really said if good or not, but flying couple of minutes in what i think medium-high setting look nice !!!.
Enjoy... the 27" is AWESOME !!!
Ok an update, got quake 4 working with it with full settings no probs, then put on bootcamp and got nfs most wanted and it looked sweet running at the top res.
going to try and get elder scrolls to work on it and will keep you informed.
going to try and get elder scrolls to work on it and will keep you informed.
got the same base iMac 27 here as well (there is no official apple store in a country i'm from, so i had to buy the best that was available to the local authorised reseller) . obviously, i wasn't going for a gaming machine, but for a properly functional mac desktop and occasional gaming fun (like Starcraft 2, Civ5, even maybe portal and some older shooters), this machine goes pretty well so far
So far I've had cod modern warfare running on it, but need to get a copy of black ops to check out how that runs.
I'm not after a total gaming experience, just after seeing how far i can push the graphics card, I don't think the gtx660m is as bad as some of the people on this site are stating.
Cheers for that, and I realise the card does have limitations, but will still continue to put down what I can and cannot get to work.
hmm.. i am perfectly happy with my 27-inch base right now, but eventually i will want more performance, space and presumably graphical power. in fact, i wouldn't pick up the low-end (even the word is degrading) iMac, there just wasn't anything else in my country, so now i think about eventually making it more powerful through thunderbolt and RAM increase.
what do you think, in case of RAM upgrade (to, let's say, 24 or 32 gb ideal) - how much will the performance benefit, from graphics point of view?
what do you think, in case of RAM upgrade (to, let's say, 24 or 32 gb ideal) - how much will the performance benefit, from graphics point of view?
Think you can never have too much ram, but graphically? none really....you've still bought an awesome machine, just enjoy it. I certainly am, if you wanted an out and out games machine(I didn't), then you should have held off until you could buy the i7 with the 680 card, I'm a very casual gamer so it doesn't matter as much to me, but I am curious.
i was way too impressed with this generation of iMacs (coming from windows background, i'm practically an apple virgin, though i owned ipods and an iphone for years) , so i suddenly have this urge for perfectionism. for what i do (multimedia design - mostly sound) this is perfect, it's just a shame that this pretty sleek desktop cannot run starcraft 2 on native resolution all maxed.
and oh yes, i am jealous of i7 , 680 MX owners... )))
and oh yes, i am jealous of i7 , 680 MX owners... )))
Yeah, the only option for proper gaming on Mac is the highend 27" with or without the GPU upgrade. The 660M is only 10-15% better than the 650M (same chip, higher speed) but on the 27" it has to push more pixels.
I went for the maxed out 27" with the full 32GB ram and the 2GB card. I have run Black Ops, MW3, FIFA 11, Battlefield 3 all at full resolution and they absolutely fly! So far so good!