Dual monitor

[Drask]

Hello there,

Man I've asking several questions now, hope you guys dont mind, all feedback has been amazing so far!

So my iMac 27 is on its way now (hopefully next week) , I have an external 24" monitor I'd like to dual, do the iMac gets slower when i do this? Does it affect performance? and if it does what does it depend off? RAM? GPU? thanks again!

 

[Chupa Chupa]

It will only affect performance in that the two monitors will share the GPU's RAM. So, for example, if you have the stock 1GB card on the top model, each monitor will use 512MBs vs if you only used the single monitor it would get all 1GB.

Realistically, unless you are doing some really GPU intensive work or game playing you will not notice this at all.

 

[Macman45]

I have the 27" with the 2GB VRAM option....I use it now and then with my 42" Toshiba Regza smart TV....Never lags at all. You won't notice a thing.

 

[diverdief]

I have a 27" iMac with a 24" Cinema Display attached. Love it! Gives me lots of screen real estate for video editing.

 

[Chorny]

I've been running dual monitors with my i5 iMac and before with my Intel (desktop spanned across vertically arranged monitors) and there's absolutely no performance hit to be noticed.

Some things you might find though:
-You'll wish your second monitor was the same size as the first
-The iMacs have IPS displays. If the second monitor is non-IPS you may be disturbed by the difference in image quality.

 

[mmomega]

I haven't noticed a performance hit and I run dual monitors on a 2011, 2010 and 2009 iMac.