27" iMac i7 2.93Ghz, 120Gb SSD, 2Tb, 16Gb, 1Gb 5750....*NEW WOW VID 2!!!*

[sammyman]

I only thought about the upgrade when I saw the prices of the base Mac Pro's and thought hmmmm I can get close to this performance in a compact and silent package for less money and here it is

This is why I want an iMac as well. You were able to get both the 2TB HDD and the SSD drive in the same HDD slot? How is it that Apple only sells the SSD + HDD machines WITHOUT A CD BURNER? It seems like they would have thought of your solution.. Do you think there are problems with the way you have installed everything? Overheating etc?

I wonder why Apple can't pull this off?

 

[Skybar]

This is why I want an iMac as well. You were able to get both the 2TB HDD and the SSD drive in the same HDD slot? How is it that Apple only sells the SSD + HDD machines WITHOUT A CD BURNER? It seems like they would have thought of your solution.. Do you think there are problems with the way you have installed everything? Overheating etc?

I wonder why Apple can't pull this off?

Where did you get this from? Apple does not take away the optical drive. The SSD goes underneath the HDD - which is also the case when people add one themselves.

Overheating isn't a problem, the SSD doesn't use much power at all and thus won't become very warm.

There is lots of threads here about this, with pictures of how its placed and how its done!

 

[sammyman]

I talked to an OWC technician who told me there is no optical drive.... Now I am confused!

 

[Skybar]

I talked to an OWC technician who told me there is no optical drive.... Now I am confused!

That is quite strange. In Applestore, if you check the option to have both a HDD and SSD, the optical drive is still in list to the right. And the fact that there is three (3) sata ports on the logic board (where the -09 iMac only has two). He must have been talking about the -09, since adding a SSD there you have to replace the optical or the HDD.

You can view pictures in this thread how it looks like (most likely looks about the same when ordering that setup from Apple - doing that is very very expensive though):
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1027834/

 

[BlakeRearthUSA]

Well I finished my upgrade today with the 16Gb arriving. This thing is

If anyone wants to ask me anything, benchmark anything, video anything then please let me know and I will try my best. I struggled to get any information at this spec so I thought it might be useful.

It cost:

iMac i7 2010 with student discount (daughter at uni) = £1591
16Gb 1333MHz Ram = £270
Patriot Inferno 120Gb SSD = £176
Seagate LP 5900rpm 2Tb HDD = £76
Cabling for upgrade = £10

SOLD 4Gb that came with machine = -£60

Total = £2063

A lot of money but I have cause to use Parallels with Windows 7 (4Gb RAM dedicated to it), Photoshop CS5, Aperture 3, Office 2011 + usual extras such as email, internet and IM. With all that running its smooth and fast. I can also have warcraft running as well with those programs.

Here is xBench result:

Full detail and 2560x1440 res, 4xAA, 16x Ansiotropic and sunshafts on High.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OSNEvz4lU4

isn't that system a bit overkill for WoW? ^^ serious question though, I know on mine when I get into intensive areas while playing game it seems to lag a out, maybe my resolution is too high, does yours seem to do that a lot too?

 

[bossxii]

So following a few threads related to SSD's and convinced the stock HDD in my i7 2.8/12gig 09' iMac needs to go. I run Xbench with the all the tests and avg out to 218, while unchecking the disk test it runs 378. No huge surprise it's faster but clearly the HDD is a mammoth bottleneck.

I have a FW800 1TB as a storage drive as I was using a older MB with a 160HDD before. I'm thinking pretty seriously about just finding a fast 128 or 256gig SSD and taking the HDD out of my iMac all together.

So the question becomes with the heat sensor on a 09 iMac, am I going to run into having to short it out to make it work? I need to go back and look thru the various posts but that along with if I would need a 3.5 to 2.5 caddy for the SSD?

Any tips here would be appreciated.

 

[SpitUK]

isn't that system a bit overkill for WoW? ^^ serious question though, I know on mine when I get into intensive areas while playing game it seems to lag a out, maybe my resolution is too high, does yours seem to do that a lot too?

This system is not just for WOW, just wanted to show people how well is runs. No lag on this system.

 

[SR2]

16GB of RAM? What a waste a ram and money. My $800 PC scores 10,500 on geekbench.

 

[Uhu]

This system is not just for WOW, just wanted to show people how well is runs. No lag on this system.

No doubt your setup is impressive but to be honest. Running a 6 year old game on a 2000 bucks machine is nothing to be proud about. Even with high res and settings.

 

[Skybar]

No doubt your setup is impressive but to be honest. Running a 6 year old game on a 2000 bucks machine is nothing to be proud about. Even with high res and settings.

It might not be impressive to you, but to others it might - including me. You might think running the latest games on a $500 machine is totally awesome - but I might not. We are impressed by different things, and are proud of different things. Let those who are proud of something be just that, even though you might think its silly.

 

[SpitUK]

No doubt your setup is impressive but to be honest. Running a 6 year old game on a 2000 bucks machine is nothing to be proud about. Even with high res and settings.

WOW maybe 6 years old but it is patched regularly with updated graphics. You would not be able to run the current build of WOW on a 6 year old mac. I will reiterate, I have not spent 2000 to play WOW, this iMac runs my businesses.

Thanks Skybar

 

[hippo206]

No doubt your setup is impressive but to be honest. Running a 6 year old game on a 2000 bucks machine is nothing to be proud about. Even with high res and settings.

I would like to see a 6 year old machine run current day WoW (cata) on full settings... Not going to happen.

Now WoW might not be the MOST graphic intensive game, but its no FFXI crapware graphic either. With the cata updates, people with machine that ran wow at over 100 fps are having to lower the detail settings.

 

[BlakeRearthUSA]

This system is not just for WOW, just wanted to show people how well is runs. No lag on this system.

Ah ok I gotcha, I've just seen some people who honestly spend well over a grand, some over 2 for custom gaming rigs just to play WoW but I never understand it. not hating, I just never consider it as graphic intensive as stuff like Crysis 2 or Farcry. your machine is still bad@ss though

 

[cobrasneverdie]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Where did you get the ram from?

 

[FMJPhoto.com]

This system is not just for WOW, just wanted to show people how well is runs. No lag on this system.

Bah...and you got me to re-up my subscription, that I'd canceled back in Feb. of 2010...just to see how my machine would hold up.

Honestly, I never knew WoW could look so good. Maybe it's the time spent away from it, maybe it's the new machine, but I remember the rain being "sheets" of texture as you're riding through it but now it's seamless, I remember no shadows or the game would be "choppy"...now it's beautiful with shadows and smooth too, and very flat colors...almost cartoony...now they're vibrant and the major cities look amazing, especially Dalaran which I used to avoid like the plague because it would lag me out. (Holy run-on-sentence Batman!)

Either way, your video got me to try WoW again, and being so close to Cata release, I think I'll play for a few more months. Thanks for posting the vid

 

[SpitUK]

You will be addicted again soon

Here is a new WOW video after I have installed 10.6.5. This enables the ultra settings. This is the best detail you can currently get on WOW on the mac. 2xAA is active as well.

Very very impressive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_WFKwbQWQc

 

[SpitUK]

Picked up Black Ops yesterday and have been trying to get it to work in Parallels. It installs fine, when I run it the game loads and gets to the title screen but it will not let me press a key to continue. Sound works etc.

All I get is the spinning windows 7 disk over the top of the mouse pointer. The mouse moves but I cannot progress any further. Very frustrating.

Any ideas?

 

[Skybar]

Picked up Black Ops yesterday and have been trying to get it to work in Parallels. It installs fine, when I run it the game loads and gets to the title screen but it will not let me press a key to continue. Sound works etc.

All I get is the spinning windows 7 disk over the top of the mouse pointer. The mouse moves but I cannot progress any further. Very frustrating.

Any ideas?

Hm I have no idea.. Could it be that Parallels is incapable of using enough juice for it? It would probably work in Bootcamp, or maybe with Crossover Games? I don't play any games that isn't native to OS X, so I don't really know. Sorry!

 

[George Knighton]

Could it be that Parallels is incapable of using enough juice for it?

I don't think you're able to assign enough video RAM to the virtual machine, for one thing.

Since the original poster has an SSD, I think I'd be tempted to only run it in Bootcamp, unless it's an intellectual exercise to get it going in the virtual machine.

 

[SpitUK]

I don't think you're able to assign enough video RAM to the virtual machine, for one thing.

Since the original poster has an SSD, I think I'd be tempted to only run it in Bootcamp, unless it's an intellectual exercise to get it going in the virtual machine.

You got it

Getting to the title screen it is really responsive. It is something to do with the mouse I reckon. Modern warfare 2 is certified to run under parallels but I wanted to get a newer game and thought that because it uses a similar engine it would work. Might swap it for Modern Warfare 2 and try that.

 

[Cox Orange]

Very impressive. I know you were partly doing the upgrade to look what can be achieved on an maxed out iMac, but I am wondering though whether the 16GB RAM are ever used, or ever used more than 8GB.

How much does WoW use? I know you are doing other things than WoW, too but it would be interesting.

 

[bossxii]

Very impressive. I know you were partly doing the upgrade to look what can be achieved on an maxed out iMac, but I am wondering though whether the 16GB RAM are ever used, or ever used more than 8GB.

How much does WoW use? I know you are doing other things than WoW, too but it would be interesting.

I have 12gigs in my iMac and regularly check the Activity Monitor since installing it last week. Many times it's using 9 to 10 gigs of ram. Having the ability to multitask and not have the iMac use HDD for a swap file makes everything much faster. There is a reason people say "you can never have too much ram". Not to mention with it being rather inexpensive these days it is still a great way to speed up non SSD based machines.

When I run something like HL2 via Steam in OSX it will eat up 8 to 9gigs easy.

 

[Jolt]

I have 12gigs in my iMac and regularly check the Activity Monitor since installing it last week. Many times it's using 9 to 10 gigs of ram. Having the ability to multitask and not have the iMac use HDD for a swap file makes everything much faster. There is a reason people say "you can never have too much ram". Not to mention with it being rather inexpensive these days it is still a great way to speed up non SSD based machines.

When I run something like HL2 via Steam in OSX it will eat up 8 to 9gigs easy.

I think you must be running a lot of other applications to be using that amount of RAM.

WoW and HL2 are both 6 year old games and use nowhere near 8 gigs of RAM.

 

[SpitUK]

I have 16Gb as I have Windows 7 always open in Parallels 6 with a 4Gb allocation. I also have a ton of stuff open on osx such as aperture 3 and photoshop.

 

[gabicava83]

How do you find Windows 7 with 4GB?

Is it running nice and smooth?

G.

I have 16Gb as I have Windows 7 always open in Parallels 6 with a 4Gb allocation. I also have a ton of stuff open on osx such as aperture 3 and photoshop.