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27" iMac i7 first impressions

Fiete5401 said:
Ugh! The Mad Scientist himself! *bow*
Any results from i5 iMacs would helpful. Only one Geekbench result so far.
Where are the i5 owners? Did they touch their new iMacs and fell asleep?
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Well got my prepared for shipment today and it delivers on Monday. Ordered 2 hours after the store sent up.
 
Omg I want one soooo bad.

My parents gave my desktop away for who knows what reason so I have only my laptop....

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Omg so tempting....
 
Anyone test AVCHD encoding in iMovie09 or Final Cut Express yet?

Like 1920x1080i footage from a HD camcorder. Some heavy stuff, my MBP chokes on it... :(
 
Let say - how long will it take to encode 1 hour of high bitrate 1920x1080i video at 16/17 or even 24mps to e.g. 1280x720 in another format - maybe some web friendly format...
 
wesleyh said:
Not a fan of the glossy at all... Have a window 2.5 meters behind me AND an aquarium... Gonna get some thicker curtains to cover up the window..
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Ack. I am in a sunny room with windows on three walls with bright sunlight coming in. Will this glossy screen do me in? I know this is a subjective question, but I would appreciate your input.

No way do I want to put curtains up with the view I have.

If the glossy screen will not cut it, I will have to purchase a Mac mini and provide my own screen. I would prefer the option of a faster video card, but without going to the Pro - which is not an economic option for me - what else can I do?

I live out in the boonies and do not have the option to visit a Mac store.

Get a laptop and an external keyboard and screen? Expensive, too.
 
lhammer610 said:
Ack. I am in a sunny room with windows on three walls with bright sunlight coming in. Will this glossy screen do me in? I know this is a subjective question, but I would appreciate your input.

No way do I want to put curtains up with the view I have.

If the glossy screen will not cut it, I will have to purchase a Mac mini and provide my own screen. I would prefer the option of a faster video card, but without going to the Pro - which is not an economic option for me - what else can I do?

I live out in the boonies and do not have the option to visit a Mac store.

Get a laptop and an external keyboard and screen? Expensive, too.
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You could buy my Hackintosh, once MY i7 arrives :p
 
The computer is absolutely great. It's fast and capable. The screen is excellent.

It would definitely be a desktop I'd recommend to a friend.
 
nando2323 said:
Yeah I hear ya but its very hard to control it and stay alive at the same time while video taping that thing but it's definately smooth even when I bumped the AA to 4x and AF all the way never went below 30fps. Once that TM backup is done I'm gonna install XP back on it and try out AION hopefully that runs nice too. That will be more of a test then COD4 IMO.
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Aion runs very well, but the machine will get HOT! all 4 cores will hit 75ish-80 C and the GPU 4850 will run to roughly 96 C b4 the fan kicks on and bring the temp slightly lower, then it hovers in the mid 85 to 90 C. I've been playing Aion with the machine at these temps for almost 2 weeks, seems to be no prob.
 
New i7 arrive - I'm pretty happy. Did the target-disc to move old stuff over, then spend 2.5 hours trying to find which start-up item was crashing the machine during startup. :) Some apps are faster, some are the same. Have crashed the finder twice this evening. Maybe it needs to warm up a bit.

I'll have to wait for disc ripping and video encoding to see the real speedup.
 
First Impressions

Wow! Was my first impression. Before my first iMac (27 inch quad core) I had been playing on a 17 inch monster gaming laptop.

Firstly the screen blew me away. Never had a Mac before. I could hear some of the hard drive working but it wasn't too obnoxious. The screen is just simply amazing.

Wireless keyboard is awesome for reclining with the feet up and surfing, or watching movies or whatever. I am not sure if it sleeps when the machine does so I turn it off when I am going to be gone for a while.

Magic mouse: I love the scrolling feature and I use it when I am not going to be gaming. Side to side swipe I find awkward. There are just not enough buttons to use it to game with (I mostly play World of Warcraft).

Pertaining to gaming and gaming mouse (Razer) iMac recognizes it readily which is nice. I did find that the back of the machine got freaking hot in my opinion. I am mostly used to laptops with cooling pads so I am not sure if it was alarming the amount of heat that I felt, but I placed a quiet fan at the back of it when I game. It's not like I can see the fan LOL! I am not sure if it is needed but the back felt VERY hot. Since it seems logical that machines like cool. The fan stays and the back feels MUCH better imo.

It's kind of funny, I initially got the mac to be my "surfing" and multi media machine and now I hardly ever boot up my PC (laptop) that I swore would be my gaming machine.

The iMac runs WoW with everything full throttle, max settings without any hesitations, hiccups or issues and the screen is so damn big that I can readily run it in windowed mode when I need to look up resources etc and it still is larger than my laptop. I have even been dl bit torrents while gaming and surfing and noticed No performance issues.

If it keeps running well with no major issues, it may just convert me to an apple girl!
 
lhammer610 said:
Out of curiosity, what caused you to go with Apple rather than staying the hack route?
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A whole slough of reasons....

wanted a better display with integrated isight, but wanted more than the 24".
wanted to upgrade to the new CPU architecture, but didn't want to build a whole new hack
wanted a main desktop that would pretty much be guaranteed to work and not need re-hacking everytime I ran a system update.
love the design
live in a small apt, and want to ditch the big box.

My hack has been very stable and reliable under OS 10.5.5, but upgrading to SL has been a big stopping block for me, for some reason I just can't seem to get it working.

Even though the geekbench scores of the new iMacs are only about a thousand five-hundred better than my hack when my OC is enabled (Q9550 @ 3.33ghz), I still thought it would be an appropriate upgrade for me. I like to buy a new computer every two years or so, and in two years' time, this iMac will still be such an awesome machine that I'm sure anyone I know will be happy with it. I like giving my computers away to friends and family when I'm done with them. :) Though, in two years' time, my two-year-old will be a four-year-old, maybe the i7 will be his.
 
lhammer610 said:
Ack. I am in a sunny room with windows on three walls with bright sunlight coming in. Will this glossy screen do me in? I know this is a subjective question, but I would appreciate your input.
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OK, I got it and the glossy screen, even in my bright room (not as bright in the winter) with two walls of windows is not a problem. The screen looks great.

That aside, I have had issues. My old G5's firewire is fried. I was supposed to be able to transfer using the Migration Assistant over ethernet and that did not work. I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner to an external USB / Firewire via USB, then connected the iMac via Firewire - to get my settings and files over. Apple Support did not suggest this procedure.

I have also had to hard reboot the iMac with Snow Panther several times. I have not had to do that with 10.4.11 hardly ever.

Sadly, my archaic Adobe Dreamweaver (I am embarrassed to say what version) will not run on Snow Panther. It was primitive by CS4 standards, but it did the job for the little I do. I will miss it.
 
Sir Cecil said:
Do you mean Snow Tiger?
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Actually Snow Leopard. Which brings up an Apple rant: Why the heck do they insist on referring to their OS with names. I was running 10.4 in my old Mac, now 10.6. I would look for info on what software would run on 10.4 and I would get "Tiger", "Panther", "Leopard", etc. When checking "About This Mac", gosh, it just says 10.4. Not very user friendly.

But anyway, I found that I had a hard disk error that was fixed by booting from the DVD and then running Disk Utility. Now everything seems to be running fine.

Some of my problems may have been brought on by using the Migration Assistant which brought over all sorts of legacy software including extensions from a Beige Mac I had over 10 years ago.
 
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