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Upgrading old Imac as Gaming machine

S

SquareRobot

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 5, 2011
11
0
Hey everyone - I'm hoping someone here has some experience with this. Basically, a relative of mine gave me an "old" 24" Imac. It's a 2.16 GHz core 2 duo with 1 GB ram. The screen is awesome, and I'd been thinking of building a gaming PC, so I figured this could save me some money if I upgraded the Imac rather than built a tower from scratch. I have a few questions:

1) Can I put a new processor + graphics card in there? The current graphics card is a geforce 7300 GT w/ 128 mb vram.

2) I'm obviously going to need more than 1 GB ram, but this is one of the reasons I'm wondering if it's even worth it to upgrade. The bus speed is 667 MHz so I'm reluctant to spend money upgrading when that's relatively slow. This leads to my next question:

3) Assuming my upgrades went well, what kind of gaming performance could I expect for about a $200- $300 upgrade? Overall, is it worth the money or am I just upgrading into old tech?

Thanks in advance for any info you guys can provide.
 
You *might* be able to upgrade the CPU, but no guarantees on that. Pretty sure the graphics card isn't going to happen. Basically, there is no way to make it relevant for today's games. It would be significantly easier to just build a gaming PC that would give you much better performance.
 
Ok, thanks. I guess I'll abandon that idea. Maybe I'll just use it as a monitor at some point then.
 
I have that generation iMac with the 2.33GHz and ATI X1600 with 256mb VRAM. Not worth it to "upgrade". Gaming PCs today for less than $1,000 will smoke that machine, seriously.
 
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