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More good news, Amazon Canada is showing:

Apple iMac MC510LL/A 27-Inch Desktop
Only 4 left in stock--order soon.

Apple iMac MC508LL/A 21.5-Inch Desktop
Only 5 left in stock--order soon.
 
That's a crazy good recap, Hell. Great work. As far as I'm concerned, /thread :D
 
Hellhammer, what are your thoughts of Apple using either NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M or AMD Radeon HD 6970M?

NVidia 485M has a TDP of 100W so that is unlikely. ATI 4850M is the hottest GPU that has ever been used in iMac and it has TDP of ~55W. It's also not much faster than AMD 6970M which has much lower TDP. Plus it looks like Apple is opting for AMD GPUs now.

Apple has never used the highest-end GPU in iMac so that is why I would expect AMD 6950M. However, 6970M is just overclocked 6950M so you can easily give the 6950M some OC under Windows and make it a 6970M ;)
 
How about the iMac having 2TB or 1.5TB as standard on the mid to high end with 3TB being BTO'd?
 
How about the iMac having 2TB or 1.5TB as standard on the mid to high end with 3TB being BTO'd?

Now that some MBPs have 750GB as standard, I would expect 1.5TB or 2TB in higher-end models. 3TB option should also be included if 1.5TB or 2TB is used in stock config.

See my edit in the post above.
 
.... ATI 4850M is the hottest GPU that has ever been used in iMac and it has TDP of ~55W. It's also not much faster than AMD 6970M which has much lower TDP.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong.....is the 4850M a faster GPU than the current generation 6970M? I assumed the the 6950 and the 6970 would outclass the much older 4850 by a long way. I definitely get a tad confused with AMD/ATI's naming/numbering conventions plus combine that with Apple muddying the waters with their naming conventions it's hard to keep up.
 
Maybe I'm reading this wrong.....is the 4850M a faster GPU than the current generation 6970M? I assumed the the 6950 and the 6970 would outclass the much older 4850 by a long way. I definitely get a tad confused with AMD/ATI's naming/numbering conventions plus combine that with Apple muddying the waters with their naming conventions it's hard to keep up.

I meant NVidia 485M is not much faster than the 6970M. Maybe I should have put the sentences in better order :eek:
 
It can be said that an older part is still faster than a newer part if you do not consider performance per watt. Efficiencies comes into play.

Either way the 2011 iMac will be a screamer and partially outperform even the 2010 Mac Pro.

I can't wait for the day they start offering the Core i7 option for the 2011 iMac. :)
 
I meant NVidia 485M is not much faster than the 6970M. Maybe I should have put the sentences in better order :eek:

Ahhhh, that makes sense. How much of a percentage performance boost do you think having the 6950M GPU will be over the 4850M (obviously a ball park figure).
 
Ahhhh, that makes sense. How much of a percentage performance boost do you think having the 6950M GPU will be over the 4850M (obviously a ball park figure).

There aren't any benchmarks for 6950M but there are plenty for 6970M. Since 6950M has just 100MHz (15%) lower clock speed, it's fairly easy to compare them. NotebookCheck's benchmarks show that 6970M is up to more than twice as fast as 4850M, even in gaming benchmarks. I would say performance gains vary between 70% and 110%. Subtract the 15% from that and we get 60% and 94%, so average of 77%.

6950M will sure be a huge upgrade from 4850M.

6970M appears to be around 40-45% (30-60% in various benchmarks) faster than 5850M. Again, subtract 15% and we get ~36%. Note: You must compare 5850M with GDDR5 since there are versions with DDR3 and GDDR3. Those are much slower.
 
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IIRC the BTO option of previous Macs took a bit longer to come out than the non-BTO Macs.

When 21.5" and 27" iMacs were originally released in October 2009, high-end 27" iMac with i5-750 or i7-860 (i.e. not just i7) didn't ship immediately like other C2D based models. In the previous update in July, that wasn't the case though, all models shipped immediately (well, BTOs always have that 3 day shipping time).

It is likely that all 2011 iMacs will ship within 24 hours.
 
The iMac I have currently (27 inch, 2.93 i7) feels blazing fast. I can't wait to see how well these perform! :D

Same here. About the only thing that I wish I would have sprung for was the SSD/HDD combo (I went with a refurb with the 1TB HDD only).

But the i7 2.93 is blazing fast for me and while I'm anxious to see how the new ones perform, I probably won't be getting a new iMac for 3 years or so (or so I'm currently telling myself). :D

For everyone who has been waiting (impatiently ;) ), I hope it is everything you're wishing for!
 
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I know this might sound stupid, but on the US Apple site, when you search it in the url and the page comes up it redirects you to the startpage, and when I have previously been on the US site it didn't normally do that, could this mean something?
 
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