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I'd have to agree with the above-- my 8,1 iMac (yes its old-ish), though it does get hot at times running games, will never peak above 80, and even then the fan speeds are only 1280... lol. Granted, it doesn't have a quad core or anything else with a super high TDP (ATI 2600 HD Pro :rolleyes:), but sometimes I do push this pretty hard. I guess what I'm getting at is that I would trust their engineering team-- it may get hot, but they appear to have known their limits for some time, so if they can squeeze in the extra TDP, i'd say they would.
 
Note that as the current iMacs have moved to desktop CPUs, the greater heat generated by them (and their future upgrade path) will need to be taken into account. Also, an extra 20W of power requires a bigger power supply which generates more heat on its own so the entire system needs to be taken into account. If His Steveness could allow a slightly thicker iMac of say 1/4" or so, it might be enough to get the desktop GPU in there.
 
Nah the 27" iMac is one of the cooler computer's I've ever used.

First, I'm a firm believe in engineering from apple, so there's no doubt they found a way to further the 27" iMac's cooling.

Also, like I said the cooling of the 27" is very good. The hdd almost never goes above 50c, the cpu only gets over 50c if you're doing lots of video playback and video encoding, if the cpu gets to 70c, fans will kick in, and even the smallest increase in fan speed brings cpu back down to around 50-60c.

The gpu gets up to 85c while gaming, but never above that. What's even better is the fact that apple doesn't even put a fan on the gpu heatsink itself, and even if the user increases the optical drive fan by the slightest amount, the gpu never goes above 60c. So I'm a firm believe the iMac would feature a 15-20 tdp hotter gpu.

+20W is pretty much, ATI 4850 is 45-65W (no precise TDP:() so if it's near 45W, ATI 5750 would be almost twice as hot it being a 86W card. ATI mobile 5850 is based on the Juniper chip (desktop 57xx) so it wouldn't be THAT much faster (desktop is just higher clocked), especially as mobile 5850 is 39W while 5750 is more than twice as hot. In raw processing power, 5750 is only 0.008 teraflops faster than 5850.

Note that as the current iMacs have moved to desktop CPUs, the greater heat generated by them (and their future upgrade path) will need to be taken into account. Also, an extra 20W of power requires a bigger power supply which generates more heat on its own so the entire system needs to be taken into account. If His Steveness could allow a slightly thicker iMac of say 1/4" or so, it might be enough to get the desktop GPU in there.

Then people would just start bitching about why now desktop 5870 :p
 
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