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The unusual delay of the release of the 2012 iMac will probably ruin my plan to get a decent price for my 2010 iMac. So my pockets are not deep enough to pay more than 200€ for an BTO GPU upgrade. My iMac is used for work AND for entertainment esp. gaming and therefore I need a decent GPU.

I'd like to know if the 675MX is decent enough GPU to provide me for 2 years of a decent gaming experience or if I have to swallow the pill and shell out more for the 680MX. I don't need to play BF3 or Witcher 2 on ultra but I don't want to play on low either.

Have a look at benchmarks for the 680M. It will provide similar performance to the 675MX. The 680MX will be even faster. There aren't any benchmarks of the 675MX or the 680MX yet.

The graphics performance of the GeForce GTX 675MX should be significantly faster than the old Fermi based GTX 675M and therefore similar fast as the Geforce GTX 560M SLI combination. Even demanding games of 2012 should therefore run fluently in highest detail settings.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-680M.72679.0.html
 
Have a look at benchmarks for the 680M. It will provide similar performance to the 675MX. The 680MX will be even faster. There aren't any benchmarks of the 675MX or the 680MX yet.

Thanks.

475MX seems good enough. Running "demanding games of 2012" fluently should provide enough power to play not-so-demanding games in 2013/early 2014.
 

Those benchmarks are just dummy place holders based on where they think it will fit in.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX is a high-end DirectX 11.1-compatible graphics card for laptops and was announced in Oct. 2012

And if you read at the bottom you'll see "No reviews found for this graphics card."

It's only been announced this month and there aren't any benchmarks for it. There aren't any products that shipped with it yet.
 
Those benchmarks are just dummy place holders based on where they think it will fit in.



And if you read at the bottom you'll see "No reviews found for this graphics card."

It's only been announced this month and there aren't any benchmarks for it. There aren't any products that shipped with it yet.

So whats your opinion on the 675MX?
 
But it also says:
Game Benchmarks

The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailled information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.

So the real reviews are still missing. Thats right
 
So whats your opinion on the 675MX?

Judging by the specifications it looks very good and is good enough for most people. If I become bored of waiting for the mythical 2013 Mac Pro, then I'll probably pick up the 2012 27" iMac. Since I cannot upgrade the GPU, I'll end up getting the 680MX option. I am lucky that it's just a business expense so the cost of the upgrade means little to me, apart from reducing my company's profit and tax.

If I was buying as a home user, then I would certainly reconsider and probably stick with the 675MX.
 
Judging by the specifications it looks very good and is good enough for most people. If I become bored of waiting for the mythical 2013 Mac Pro, then I'll probably pick up the 2012 27" iMac. Since I cannot upgrade the GPU, I'll end up getting the 680MX option. I am lucky that it's just a business expense so the cost of the upgrade means little to me, apart from reducing my company's profit and tax.

If I was buying as a home user, then I would certainly reconsider and probably stick with the 675MX.

Im gonna grab two of the top end iMacs with the 680MX for my two other designer/developers, while I stick with my '09 8 Core Mac Pro (which has been heavily upgraded apart from the GPU, which is still a 4870). I'll eat poop for a while with a seemingly slower machine while my other two designers use a snappier machine than me until the new Pros come out :)
 
Im gonna grab two of the top end iMacs with the 680MX for my two other designer/developers, while I stick with my '09 8 Core Mac Pro (which has been heavily upgraded apart from the GPU, which is still a 4870). I'll eat poop for a while with a seemingly slower machine while my other two designers use a snappier machine than me until the new Pros come out :)

I don't know if I have the patience to wait that long, but I would certainly prefer a 2013 Mac Pro. As long as Apple does not mess it up.
 
I don't know if I have the patience to wait that long, but I would certainly prefer a 2013 Mac Pro. As long as Apple does not mess it up.

To be fair, the 09 Mac Pro is no slouch. I don't really game on it. It has 3 x SSD's, USB3 PCI Card, 32GB RAM etc etc... For what I do with it (web design, development, graphics etc), it's super. I can wait till sometime 2013 :) But I WILL be envious of the 2 iMacs teasing me on the other side of the studio!
 
To be fair, the 09 Mac Pro is no slouch. I don't really game on it. It has 3 x SSD's, USB3 PCI Card, 32GB RAM etc etc... For what I do with it (web design, development, graphics etc), it's super. I can wait till sometime 2013 :) But I WILL be envious of the 2 iMacs teasing me on the other side of the studio!

If Apple had done some sort of an upgrade to the 2010 model this year, like SATA III, USB 3 and a modern graphics card, then I would have snapped up the single 6 core 3.33 GHz. It's still a beast of a CPU, but I cannot buy a computer for this sort of money without basics like SATA III and a GPU that is 3 generations behind.
 
Some good stuff here in this thread. I think it has reaffirmed my decision to sell my low budget gaming machine I built a year ago so my wife and I can get a 27" BTO iMac. Both of our 4+ year old Black MacBooks are completely shot and I haven't really used my gaming machine a whole lot anyways and pretty much all the games I play have Mac clients (can always go BootCamp if needed down the road). The main reason I built it in the first place was just for the sake of building a PC for the first time, so I'm glad I got that experience and also some use out of it too (I only dropped $500 into it). I'm tempted to try a Hackintosh, but I don't think the savings will be worth the headache of dealing with potential software issues and with keeping it updated with new releases.
 
IT's a great update, but buying an Imac for gaming ...not so great.

*iMac

And I'd say as long as you realize that the machine cannot be upgraded and you buy the best machine your dollar can afford then it will be a great gaming machine.

I'm a gamer and I'm still playing modern games at 2560x1440 on an SLI setup that is 3.5 years old.

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What do you think will the 680MX BTO upgrade cost?

1 BILLION DOLLARS. Probably 150-250 like previous gpu upgrades.
 
Overclock

If you look at this spec sheet on Nvidia's website, you will notice the value of cuda cores is the same as the desktop version. This will ultimately make the iMac top of the line model a true gaming machine. Sure, Apple will probably underclock the settings, but it will perform somewhat equivalent to a desktop 680, which is a big deal in my opinion. I'm very surprised Apple would offer an even higher graphics card that just recently released, rather than using the GTX 680m, which we all expected.

I hope we see more details of this GPU. It would be interesting to see the benchmark comparison between this and the GTX 680m, although Nvidia claims it is up to 30% faster than the AMD 7970m so we can expect maybe 5~7 FPS game increases for intensive games like BF3. Nonetheless, it is incredible that Apple has figured out a way to manage a high-end GPU in such a slim design.

Then I will overclock it to what nvidia wants it to be.

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*iMac

And I'd say as long as you realize that the machine cannot be upgraded and you buy the best machine your dollar can afford then it will be a great gaming machine.

I'm a gamer and I'm still playing modern games at 2560x1440 on an SLI setup that is 3.5 years old.

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1 BILLION DOLLARS. Probably 150-250 like previous gpu upgrades.

Sure, it will void the warenty but the RAM, CPU, and GPU can be upgraded.
 
Then I will overclock it to what nvidia wants it to be.

Nvidia "wants" it to be at the speed it is running at - there's a reason it's a clocked down desktop part; heat, power consumption and noise.

Sure, you might be able to push it up to desktop speeds, but without knowing what the thermal overhead is, or even if the iMac can push the necessary current to the card in the first place if it's overclocked by 30% (the supposed delta between the desktop and mobile version) you might have to deal with instability etc.
 
It's practically a GTX 660ti but if you want to call it a 680 I guess you could do that. A GTX 670 will be faster. It is definitely not as hobbled as previously thought as a higher clocked vanilla 680m. So, thumbs up!
 
Apple underclocks

Nvidia "wants" it to be at the speed it is running at - there's a reason it's a clocked down desktop part; heat, power consumption and noise.

Sure, you might be able to push it up to desktop speeds, but without knowing what the thermal overhead is, or even if the iMac can push the necessary current to the card in the first place if it's overclocked by 30% (the supposed delta between the desktop and mobile version) you might have to deal with instability etc.

Apple usually underclocks graphics and overclock to the factory specs wold not hurt an iMac.
 
It's great news but unless Apple has found some revolutionary way to cool it, I remain suspect that it will be anything but quiet or durable for even a moderate gamer.

It's worse under OSX when a lot of games are merely cider wrappers which use the CPU to translate DX9 to OGL because not only do you have the normal load and heat on the GPU but now your computer has to cope with the heat from maxed CPU cores. Since they've made the iMac enclosure even smaller, I just have to wonder what kind of furnace it's going create in that thing for users that fire up GW2 at native res and play for a couple of hours.
 
The 680MX will be similar to a desktop 660

While it has similar specs to a full GTX 680, the clock speed is around half or so, along with the fact its a MOBILE GPU, which are never as good as they sound/look/seem based on specs. For example, the 660m is around equal to a desktop GT640 (GDDR5 version, not ddr3). The 650m in the base iMac and MBP is also not equal to a desktop 650 (which is VERY low end already), and I'd would say(guess) its similar to a desktop GT 640 DDR3.

Apple will also most likely under clock it further, due to the fact that the new iMac has HORRIBLE ventilation, and is inadequate to cool a card of this power at stock speeds. I would imagine the end perf. is between a desktop 7870/660 and the 7950/660ti (closer to 660).

Also, calling a Mac a gaming machine is an incorrect statement for a few reasons. A) 99% of them have mid-range hardware (the exception being the Mac Pro's CPU[ultra high end except clock speeds] and the 27in iMac 680mx[not high end, more like mid-high end]) and would be inadequate for modern, high end games. B) Macs CANT be a gaming machine as they don't have games to play(lol).

Another point, no mac game will require anything more than the 660m in the base 27 in, or at the most, the 675MX will max any mac game.

Basically, don't pay for the 680mx or 675mx unless you need it for rendering/3d work (at which point a Pro is better) and buy a lower end model. Use the saved 800-1000 dollars to build a PC with equivalent graphics if you wanna game (or access windows only apps) and have the mac for everything else.

tl;dr its not equal to a GTX 680 and is closer to a 660ti, don't waste your money. Use the saved money for a PC for just games, you'll be happier that way.

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Real men game on Falcon Northwest computers such as this one I configured for myself. Note the price tag at the bottom but this is the real deal, no compromises. Unfortunately, it does not run OS X so you will of course need to purchase an appropriate Mac for your needs as well. :D

Here is your customized Mach V system configuration.


System Details

Chassis
ICON2 Exotix - Any Single Color
Chassis Logo Insert
White Light
Chassis Fan Kit
Performance Fan Pack
Sound Dampening
AcoustiPack Sound Dampening Foam
Power Supply
1500 Watt Modular
Motherboard
Rampage IV Extreme
Processor
Intel® Core™ i7 3960X 3.3GHz
Processor Cooler
Liquid Cooling - Mach V
Processor Overclock
No Processor Overclock
Memory
Elite 1866MHz 64GB (8x8GB)
Video Card
Quadro 6000 (6GB)
Video Card 2
Quadro 6000 (6GB)
Video Card 3
Quadro 6000 (6GB)
Monitor
30" 2560x1600
Sound Card
On-Board Audio
Speakers
Z-523 2.1
Networking
On-Board Ethernet
Hard Drive
m4 SSD - 512GB
Hard Drive 2
m4 SSD - 512GB
Optical Drive
24x DVD Writer
64-Bit Operating System
Windows 8 Standard
Office Software
Office Professional 2010
Warranty
3 Year Warranty - Mach V

Shipping options

UPS Ground : $240.10
UPS 2-Day : $624.03
UPS Overnight : $966.24
USPS (APO Only) : $915.00
UPS 3 DAY : $366.00

Total System Price: $17140.75

This my friends is what a top of the line gaming PC costs not to be confused with something cobbled together with parts from newegg.com. This bad boy is a state of the art PC gaming rig.

Personally, I think the iMac is a better value given that it can also run games pretty well for most mere mortals and costs quite a bit less plus you don't need to buy another computer just to have a decent desktop operating system (OS X).

you sir, do not know gaming desktops, that system is a piece of overpriced garbage. all desktops use the same parts.....and new egg is the best, cheapest way to buy them INDIVIDUALLY. i could build a pc from new egg at half that price that would still beat it handily.

also, quadro 6000 isn't for gaming, and a 300$ desktop GPU would beat it for 3d gaming, :p

if i wanted i could double gaming/productivity performance for the same price if i chose parts from newegg (think 16 core, 32 thread. 4x7970 ghz[it beats 680 now] 96 gb 2800 RAM plus some sweet watercooling)

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44.8fps on ultra so yes pretty much.

bootcamp will slow it down a little, so paying this much for 40fps at nonnative 1080p is a rip

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Are there even any big benefits for the normal home user to get the CPU upgrade for the 27"? Would it extend the lifetime of the iMac?
nothing really, an i7 is NO diff from i5, except HT

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Nvidia "wants" it to be at the speed it is running at - there's a reason it's a clocked down desktop part; heat, power consumption and noise.

Sure, you might be able to push it up to desktop speeds, but without knowing what the thermal overhead is, or even if the iMac can push the necessary current to the card in the first place if it's overclocked by 30% (the supposed delta between the desktop and mobile version) you might have to deal with instability etc.

apple doesn't support drivers with the ability to over clock. :p the necessary nvidia based drivers are PC only

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my opinion: do what I do, have a mac for general use, and then a high end PC for Games, rendering, heavy power use

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The 680M is currently the fastest mobile GPU there is. It's just slightly slower than the desktop 670. The 680MX, which is not in any device right now and appeared on Nvidia's product pages this morning is even faster than the 680M.

Your 5750M is very far behind and many times slower.

680m is slightly better than a GTX 660, the 670 would blow it out of the water

to clarify, for nvidia: GTC 690>590>680>670>660ti>580>680mx>660>680m
 
The 680MX will be similar to a desktop 660

While it has similar specs to a full GTX 680, the clock speed is around half or so, along with the fact its a MOBILE GPU, which are never as good as they sound/look/seem based on specs. For example, the 660m is around equal to a desktop GT640 (GDDR5 version, not ddr3). The 650m in the base iMac and MBP is also not equal to a desktop 650 (which is VERY low end already), and I'd would say(guess) its similar to a desktop GT 640 DDR3.

Apple will also most likely under clock it further, due to the fact that the new iMac has HORRIBLE ventilation, and is inadequate to cool a card of this power at stock speeds. I would imagine the end perf. is between a desktop 7870/660 and the 7950/660ti (closer to 660).

Also, calling a Mac a gaming machine is an incorrect statement for a few reasons. A) 99% of them have mid-range hardware (the exception being the Mac Pro's CPU[ultra high end except clock speeds] and the 27in iMac 680mx[not high end, more like mid-high end]) and would be inadequate for modern, high end games. B) Macs CANT be a gaming machine as they don't have games to play(lol).

Another point, no mac game will require anything more than the 660m in the base 27 in, or at the most, the 675MX will max any mac game.

Basically, don't pay for the 680mx or 675mx unless you need it for rendering/3d work (at which point a Pro is better) and buy a lower end model. Use the saved 800-1000 dollars to build a PC with equivalent graphics if you wanna game (or access windows only apps) and have the mac for everything else.

tl;dr its not equal to a GTX 680 and is closer to a 660ti, don't waste your money. Use the saved money for a PC for just games, you'll be happier that way.


There's some good points in here but it's laced with so much FUD that it's very disappointing.
- We don't yet know how the cooling is on the new iMac, but I'm willing to assume Apple had a plan.
- We don't yet know if the 680MX is underclocked, because it isn't out in the wild yet. But given that nobody had heard of this chip until it was announced for the iMac, having it be underclocked would be quite odd.
- The OS X game library is healthy, and growing. For games that don't yet have an OS X port, Bootcamp is usually preferable to making room on your desk for a separate computer that needs to be maintained.
- When you're talking to Mac gamers, you're talking to people that have already rejected the notion of running Windows as a primary OS, usually because they've already done that before and don't like it. Telling them to stick their hand on the stove again is generally not going to end well.

It's true that, as far as we can tell without benchmarks actually having been run, the 680MX is roughly equal to the 660ti. What is worth pointing out, though, is that the 660ti is about the same or better than the usual PC gamer ends up with. The market for 670s and (especially) 680s is quite niche. The gaming laptop crowd can't even get anything as good as the 680MX right now without spending the money on a SLI option.
 
true, but we actually do know clocks of 680mx, and its pretty low tbh,.... i love macs for general use, but if you try to game on it, it will generally end in headaches.

besides most ppl are unfairly biased against windows, they compare their 1k macs with 400$, outdated machines with limited security. After getting a pc for gaming, and then protecting it properly, i find they both work equally as well, and it comes down to preferance. Most of the ppl who despise windows have had no good experience with a pc.
 
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to clarify, for nvidia: GTC 690>590>680>670>660ti>580>680mx>660>680m

.. never mind, misread

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bootcamp will slow it down a little, so paying this much for 40fps at nonnative 1080p is a rip

Given that bootcamp is Windows running directly on the hardware, I don't see how it could slow anything down...

Surely you weren't thinking it was virtualization?
 
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