iMac gaming!

[Willstone525]

Hi guys.

I am about to purchase my first iMac PC and the price is a huge step up from my average pc costing around £600-700. There are still a few things I am unsure about so hopefully someone here will have an idea

The iMac I'm looking to get is the 27 inch model starting at £1699. I will be using it for both media and gaming use but only on one game. The game I will be using on it is world of Warcraft which although is many years old is updated regularly with graphics, the recommended specs are in the link below:

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/300493

I aim to go well above these specs as I want to be playing the game on ultra settings for a good few years but this is what I am unsure of. My main questions a to do with upgrades on the base model, this has the i5 3.2 ghz quad processor, 8gb ram, 1tb sata drive and nvidia GeForce 675mx 1gb.

1)do I need the i7 upgrade (3.4ghz with hyper threading)?
2)do I need the 2gb 680mx graphics card?
3)will the fusion drive really help when occasionally loading up bigger items?

With all of these questions they relate to being able to have a good 4/5 year life on the mac running ultra/high settings on wow and being able to generally run fast with day to day tasks with the prospect of using other games in the future.
I really need it to last me as long as possible before really dropping on speed to justify paying the price it is as I know it can't be upgraded apart from ram but also wanting to keep the cost low, which is why I was hoping the base model at £1699 would cope with the requirements

Cheers

 

[Steve121178]

I'm confused, to clarify you only intend to play WoW and just that?

 

[Ddyracer]

Hi guys.

I am about to purchase my first iMac PC and the price is a huge step up from my average pc costing around £600-700. There are still a few things I am unsure about so hopefully someone here will have an idea

The iMac I'm looking to get is the 27 inch model starting at £1699. I will be using it for both media and gaming use but only on one game. The game I will be using on it is world of Warcraft which although is many years old is updated regularly with graphics, the recommended specs are in the link below:

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/300493

I aim to go well above these specs as I want to be playing the game on ultra settings for a good few years but this is what I am unsure of. My main questions a to do with upgrades on the base model, this has the i5 3.2 ghz quad processor, 8gb ram, 1tb sata drive and nvidia GeForce 675mx 1gb.

1)do I need the i7 upgrade (3.4ghz with hyper threading)?
2)do I need the 2gb 680mx graphics card?
3)will the fusion drive really help when occasionally loading up bigger items?

With all of these questions they relate to being able to have a good 4/5 year life on the mac running ultra/high settings on wow and being able to generally run fast with day to day tasks with the prospect of using other games in the future.
I really need it to last me as long as possible before really dropping on speed to justify paying the price it is as I know it can't be upgraded apart from ram but also wanting to keep the cost low, which is why I was hoping the base model at £1699 would cope with the requirements

Cheers

680m. Future the hell out of that suka! And once you feel how fast it is you probably will branch out to other games as well which are much more demanding than WoW.

Fusion drive is a buy, i7 you don't need.

 

[Willstone525]

I'm confused, to clarify you only intend to play WoW and just that?

Yeah just world of Warcraft however in the future I may go to some other games as well. So I want to future proof it for at least 4 years.

 

[iamgalactic]

this is your 3rd post on the same subject in a few days - were the extensive answers in your first post not good enough info?

 

[Willstone525]

Previous ones have been similar but I still felt very uncertain about it so just felt I should post one completely informative about my queries.

 

[Steve121178]

You can't completely future-proof anything for 4 years, especially when it comes to gaming. Have you seen Watch Dogs for example? That is a "next-gen" PC game that will struggle to run on the fastest iMac available today and you want to try and future proof a purchase for 4 years?!

And lets say Apple release OS 11 or whatever in 1-2 years and it allowed touch (for example) then every single non touch-screen Mac or MacBook suddenly becomes gimped.

So much can happen in 4 years...

 

[Willstone525]

You can't completely future-proof anything for 4 years, especially when it comes to gaming. Have you seen Watch Dogs for example? That is a "next-gen" PC game that will struggle to run on the fastest iMac available today and you want to try and future proof a purchase for 4 years?!

And lets say Apple release OS 11 or whatever in 1-2 years and it allowed touch (for example) then every single non touch-screen Mac or MacBook suddenly becomes gimped.

I understand that but for a game like world of Warcraft. It's not the most demanding game so you can get a rough ideas surely?

 

[mslide]

With all of these questions they relate to being able to have a good 4/5 year life on the mac running ultra/high settings on wow

On WoW, maybe, but you don't need anything close to a max'd out iMac to play WoW on ultra settings. Games that actually require newer hardware, no way. You'll be lucky to get 3 years out of it for newer games.

from my average pc costing around £600-700

I'd bet a PC like that will probably play WoW about as well as a max'd out iMac.

 

[forty2j]

1)do I need the i7 upgrade (3.4ghz with hyper threading)?
2)do I need the 2gb 680mx graphics card?
3)will the fusion drive really help when occasionally loading up bigger items?

1) No. HT is never helpful in games, and you won't miss the few points in speed. Games are GPU-limited, not CPU-limited, almost exclusively.
2) Need? No, not for WoW. But it's a great upgrade at a small price, and will let you run WoW at max settings for a couple years while the 675mx would probably run at something closer to "high" than "max".
3) It's difficult to measure, but Fusion will definitely help in launch time and in loading assets to paint on the screen.

 

[Georgio]

You only need the i5 for games so forget the i7
Definately buy the 680MX for gaming.
Fusion drive possibly, but with the reliability of flash drives being an issue over time, it might be better to go for a 1GB internal HD and get an external flash drive.
Personally I've not bought any flash drives yet, I'm waiting until the technology is a bit more mature, but I'll probably go external with a thunderbolt interface.
I tend to only play Planetside 2 these days as my time is limited and I can get 40+ fps on high and it looks absolutely gorgeous.

 

[Mac32]

Fusion drive doesn't work in Bootcamp, as the SSD part will only be utilized for the OSX partition. i5 CPU, 8gb ram, 680MX are the recommended/minimum specs for gaming on an iMac (an expensive alternative for gaming).

 

[Georgio]

All the more reason for not getting a fusion drive at the moment considering that most if not all gaming is windows based.

Fusion drives doesn't work in Bootcamp, as the SSD part will only be utilized for the OSX partition. i5 CPU, 8gb ram, 680MX is the recommended spces. If you have money to burn go for i7 CPU, but it's not necessary for gaming.

 

[forty2j]

Fusion drive possibly, but with the reliability of flash drives being an issue over time, it might be better to go for a 1GB internal HD and get an external flash drive.
Personally I've not bought any flash drives yet, I'm waiting until the technology is a bit more mature

Where are you getting this? The spinning HDD is the most likely component of a computer to fail. Flash drives have higher reliability than spinners.

All the more reason for not getting a fusion drive at the moment considering that most if not all gaming is windows based.

I support the claim that if one plans to spend a great deal of time doing windows gaming, the fusion drive is not the best choice for them. I'd recommend a full-SSD solution in that case.

I dispute the claim that "most if not all gaming is windows based". There are a ton of Mac games out there; there is a large and increasing number of games that see simultaneously Mac & PC release; cross-platform multiplayer is an option in Steam and Blizzard games. While I will go into Windows on occasion for Windows-only titles like the Total War franchise, I spend just as much time playing games like Civ and recently Diablo and WoW in OS X. The joy and convenience in staying in OS X is worth the small (and ever-shrinking) performance hit.

 

[dollystereo]

If you plan to play wow in a raiding eviroment, max out the graphic card. Wow is pretty intensive specially in 25man raids. I dont know if it will run the game flawlesly in ultra.
My macbook pro i7 2.2 with radeon HD6570 1GB can't handle WOW in high, I usually play in medium or low. (I am talking in raid 25man, progress group)
I would wait to see if new imacs are around the corner, but a gaming PC is going to cost half, and play games way better. Maybe get the entry level imac and a PC.
Many people in this forum say wow runs good beacause is an old game, and that's not true, or they play in a recreational level.
I love the imac, is an excellent machine, but for that money, you could build a WAAAAAY better gaming machine. Look at the setup of the month from MMO-CHAMP
http://www.mmo-champion.com/content...cts-Blue-Tweets-Setup-of-the-Month-News-Recap

 

[Razeus]

I just ordered a fusion based iMac with the 650m GPU and 16GB of RAM. The first thing I'm going to do is load Starcraft II and Diablo III and Portal 2 and Civilization 5, and see if it plays smoothly at native resolution with a few of the more important graphics settings turned up. If it plays smooth (at least 60fps), I'll keep it, if not, it's being returned so I can wait for the next gen iMacs.

 

[Georgio]

So you're saying that all the information readily available talking about flash drives erroring after just a few months use is just propaganda put out by HD manufacturers, interesting.
Like it or not a mature tech. like a mechanical HD is still more reliable than current flashdrives. It will improve obviously as the demand is there, but I for one wouldn't rely just on a FD as primary storage; We had a designer's fusion drive go down in a brand new Mac and it cost us thousands to sort out.

Where are you getting this? The spinning HDD is the most likely component of a computer to fail. Flash drives have higher reliability than spinners.



I support the claim that if one plans to spend a great deal of time doing windows gaming, the fusion drive is not the best choice for them. I'd recommend a full-SSD solution in that case.

I dispute the claim that "most if not all gaming is windows based". There are a ton of Mac games out there; there is a large and increasing number of games that see simultaneously Mac & PC release; cross-platform multiplayer is an option in Steam and Blizzard games. While I will go into Windows on occasion for Windows-only titles like the Total War franchise, I spend just as much time playing games like Civ and recently Diablo and WoW in OS X. The joy and convenience in staying in OS X is worth the small (and ever-shrinking) performance hit.

Sorry, but you're wrong here as well, apart from the lack of titles on native Mac OS there is a performance hit on titles that are cross-platform, WoW for instance. Aside from the fps hit, windows games utilising DirectX/latest drivers look and perform much better in a windows environment.

Maybe if Apple stopped being so conservative with their drivers and adopted a decent version of OpenGL then things might be different, but there you are we are where we are.

 

[forty2j]

So you're saying that all the information readily available talking about flash drives erroring after just a few months use is just propaganda put out by HD manufacturers, interesting.

Link?

Flash is quite mature.. it was appearing in MP3 players before the the iPod came out, and came about quite a bit before then.

The only negative I'd heard on Flash is that if you attempt to "defrag" it you'll lessen its life considerably.

 

[librarian]

the 680MX is the real deal. I dont even think WoW ever go below 40 fps with this card in 99% of situations, with maxed out settings and resolution - antialiasing included.