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24" last gen, good price, new, should I go for it?

A

applecultvictim

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 27, 2009
549
0
A friend is selling me his new, in the box, imac for a good price, it's a 24" with the ati card, should I go for it, or should I look at the new models?

From what I can gather just the ram is new and faster but imho the bottleneck is really the ssd instead of the hd and in synthetic tests the "new" imacs just get something around +10% or so... Screenwise it's also the same...

Anyone reckon I should go for the ati 24" imac and be happy I did?:):apple:
 
When the new models came out, I got a previous gen 24" with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro and 2.8GHz CPU. I'm very happy with it.

Sure, I won't be able to max my RAM to 8GB and the RAM is slower but I'm ok with that. The graphics memory is dedicated, unlike the new models, so there's a performance and system resource advantage there. I also hear that the ATI cards are better than the NVidia cards; I don't know this for a fact as I haven't done the research.
 
1) What's the price? Without a price there's no way we can comment

the bottleneck is really the ssd instead of the hd
Click to expand...

(Assuming you mean SSD = Solid State Drive)

2) If of ample size, the SSD on its own is probably worth an absolute bomb, if it was fitted to order when he got the Mac. They are incredibly expensive, regardless of the performance. If he is selling it on the cheap, either tell him he is, or buy it before someone else notices
 
hey guys, thanks a lot for commenting, appreciate it.

@db, that's the exact same model I ll go for too, I ve read the dedicated graphics from ati are just a tad slower...but who cares really...like you said they are dedicated to begin with.

@david
1. it's about 800 gbp.
2. No, he hasn't fitted any ssd, I was just saying that I think the speedier ram on the new machines isn't that great a thing since the bottleneck is the hd/ssd, that is a machine with an ssd will be much quicker ddr2 or ddr3 memory irregardless which is my general, but not very much researched, impression. Judging by how speedy something like the ssd air is.
 
There are some awesome deals on the 24 inch Imac 2.8GHZ right now. I got mine for $1199 with free shipping and no tax, and there is a $100 mail in rebate at Mac Connection. They have some other rebates too like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion for free, but I already have all that software so I didn't go for those.

I asked myself the same questions, and in the end I just decided the deal was too good to pass up! With the rebate, no tax, etc, I ended up saving over $600 bucks off a new one. RAM is cheap so I'll probably immediately pull the 2GB out and put 4GB in, I don't ever see myself needing 8GB. The interesting thing is the GPU uses DDR3, but the main RAM in the system is DDR2. I'm ok with that, how much faster can RAM really make a computer? I agree that the hard drive is the major bottle neck.

My poor little dual core home-made PC will now sit in my closet and be a file server until I have the time to buy a NAS and move the drives out of my PC and into the NAS. The only thing stopping me from doing that immediately is I'm pretty sure the RAID1 array would have to re-built if I move them into a NAS because most NAS I've looked at use the Linux fle system (much like the Mac), and my RAID array is currently formatted NTFS. ;(
 
djrobsd said:
There are some awesome deals on the 24 inch Imac 2.8GHZ right now. I got mine for $1199 with free shipping and no tax, and there is a $100 mail in rebate at Mac Connection. They have some other rebates too like Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion for free, but I already have all that software so I didn't go for those.

I asked myself the same questions, and in the end I just decided the deal was too good to pass up! With the rebate, no tax, etc, I ended up saving over $600 bucks off a new one. RAM is cheap so I'll probably immediately pull the 2GB out and put 4GB in, I don't ever see myself needing 8GB. The interesting thing is the GPU uses DDR3, but the main RAM in the system is DDR2. I'm ok with that, how much faster can RAM really make a computer? I agree that the hard drive is the major bottle neck.
Click to expand...

I bought the same computer for the same price. I don't regret it. I push my computers pretty hard sometimes, and I have been very satisfied with the performance. Glad I saved the $$ and bought the older model.
 
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