iMacs are just as prone to overheating as laptops and as such I wouldn't recommend gaming on them but if you are going to, make sure to replace both CPU and GPU thermal compounds regularly to avoid overheating.
Manually regulating your fans or underclocking your CPU aren't real solutions.
Although I agree that iMacs don't qualify as legit game hardware....The do however have much bigger fans and heatsinks than laptops.
MacsFanControl does not
only manually regulate fans.
Yes, you can set fans to whatever you want manually, but what makes it a reasonable solution for anybody doing any heavy lifting with any all-in-one mac is the ability to
see all the temps from
all the sensors, to see what is specifically getting hot, and set temp range for components and or/zones so the fans will ramp up
automatically to keep everything at an acceptable temp.
It actually works surprisingly well. It is clear that Apple sets fan speeds/ramp temps too conservatively (likely to keep fan noise at a minimum). The fans ramp up to speed to late, and too slowly, and don't maintain a constant medium speed under heavy, constant load. A good tool like MacsFanControl (there are others too) lets a savvy user mitigate this, and use their machine without cooking itself.
Have used it on many machines. It works well, not unlike a well built gaming rig with fans ramping up early, and staying at the right speed for the heat load (once the user dials it in).
It's too bad Apple does not set fan ramp temps a bit lower, or gave us some control. If they did, there would be no need of third party fixes.
