Friday I finally got my new machine delivered to my doorstep: 24’’ iMac, Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7600GT.
First impression: it’s huge. Really huge. “A couple of smaller iMacs are orbiting it!”-huge. But very shiny. My 20” Dell flatscreen is still sitting next to it, looking small.
The transition from the Mac mini to the new box was uneventful, almost too easy, if there is such a thing. Next I moved a few gigabytes of porn data over from my PC, the 250GB drive took it with a mere shrug, as expected.
I also installed World of Warcraft/Burning Crusade, since it’s the only game I have lying around for OSX at the moment. (Which reminds me, I also have Uru and Warcraft III and should probably take them for a spin as well.)
Short verdict: frickin’ sweet. 1920×1200px, all settings cranked to max, glow enabled, 16xAF—I get 30-60fps all the time, no matter where I am. One thing that for some reason doesn’t work, tho, is FSAA. Apparently the 7600GT doesn’t do FSAA in WoW, but it’s a known problem, and I hope they’ll fix it at some point. That said, it’s not like the lack of anti-aliasing is really apparent. :)
Also, the box doesn’t really break a sweat running anything. For example, the CPUs hover around 20% while playing WoW. Even when converting AVI videos to something my iPod can handle it was blazingly fast, yet quiet and still responsive, the way it should be. The difference between a single G4 Mac mini and a Core 2 Duo iMac 24” is nothing short of breathtaking. (If it wasn’t, I’d be seriously disappointed anyways.) It performs admirably.
I named it Rupert.
