What is WRONG with you people?
Hasn't ANYONE thought of simply benchmarking a new iMac with the "GT130" and then benchmarking an old iMac with the "8800 GS"???????
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE PROVIDE A LINK TO A SITE THAT PROVIDES THIS SIMPLE AND SENSIBLE BENCHMARK. It's the only one that matters. Thank you.
Why yes, Dark Goob, I will help you out.
Compare these:
Xbench of 8800 GS imac vs.
Xbench of 130 GT imac. From these marks it seems that actually the 130 GT GPU is *faster* even in this test where the older iMac's CPU marked better. Although
in this test of another 8800 GS iMac, the old iMac actually
beats the new iMac in almost everything except the disk test. But at worst, the graphics performance of the 130 GT seems to be on par with the old system, though its CPU seems to mark worse... why would that be?
Yet another test of the 130 GT shows memory allocation to be better on the new one's RAM, but the memory is slower in other respects, and GPU and CPU performance are pretty much exactly the same.
The only thing that really seems improved on the new iMacs on these tests consistently seems to be the disk performance and memory allocation (even with slightly slower RAM, which is weird). I would imagine that the RAM being faster makes the hard drive read and write times faster? And certainly, hard drive read-and-write times could make applications such as Second Life or any game that loads textures from the HD perform better.
Yet again
here is another 8800 GS iMac that performs
seemingly better, by a small margin when compared with the newer 130 GT...
Further, I would issue a word of caution to those wishing to rush head-first into a new GPU Mac. I purchased the MacBook Pro with 8600M GT the day it came out (June 6, 2007). It was not until the release of Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 (Feb. 11, 2008, a day that I will remember forever) that Apple patched the
horrific memory leaks that caused total system freezes requiring hard reboots , but even after that, we suffered through horrifically slow frame-rates until the release of 10.5.6 (!!!) in December, when Apple's fast-working video driver engineers F****ING FINALLY updated the video card drivers for this machine to resemble
WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE WHEN THE F****ING MACHINES SHIPPED IN JUNE 2007!!. Yes, that is a year and a half of my life that I will
never have back.
But frankly I would suggest going with the older iMac with the 8800, since Apple has had since April 2008 to work on drivers for this machine. Theoretically, based on my experiences, that means that by this point in time the drivers should at least be
stable, if not fast. You may have to wait until September or October of this year (2009) before a Mac OS version release comes out that features a driver that really pumps the 8800 to its max performance... if my experiences were any indication.
But if you buy the new iMac now, you may have to wait until mid-2010 before the damn things work right. And since based on all the tests available to me they seem to be IDENTICAL, get the older 3.02ghz iMac 8800 if you can since you'll save money and see no performance differences.
Now on the other hand, if you reallllly want to get cutting edge, then get the ATI 4850 machine, since ATI is just better in all ways than NVIDIA (one of which is that ATI does not make
f***ing defective GPUs that require
Apple motherboard replacements like I had to have).
Sorry just a little bit anti-NVIDIA after the crappy time I've had with this machine. I'd go ATI in a heartbeat.
-=DG=-