Anyone bought a new 21.5 recently?

[Bodhi395]

the 9400murder sucks. http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9400M-G.11949.0.html it cant play games. after a year, youll regret it get rhe 4670

What if you don't play any games, is it worth the $300 extra to get the 4670?

 

[hundert]

What if you don't play any games, is it worth the $300 extra to get the 4670?

yes, but get the 27 then.

Things like effects in photoshop or Final Cut depend on grafics card. They are often NOT renderable on 9400 at all. Or if you decide to do a little photoshop with huge 20 megapix pictures, or 3D modelling. You need a good graphics card here.

4670 is not "very bad". Plenty of people in these forums have reported being able to play recent games at medium settings and older games at max.

BTW, a hackintosh is more of a hassle to maintain. You need to wait for tweaked system updates, and it may be more crash prone because of non-standard hardware. Not everyone wants to deal with that.

I am not able to play with HD4850 so that games flow like they should. 4670 makes games playable, but they are not running smooth.

I see a huge difference between 4850 and 4890 in battlefield bad company 2!!! (I have a desktop with 4890). With 90 the game is always smooth. With 50, when there is a lot of smoke, fps drop and the game jerks noticably. But still playable of course. There is a reason why there is Ati 5850 and GFX400 and other stronger cards.

Computer is bought not to handle the games of today, but for the future games. 4670 will become a bottle neck soon.

But people, who don't need games, 4670 is an amazing card.

 

[TMRaven]

The 4850 in the iMac is mobility, so that's probably the reason you see a major difference between it and 4890-- if you're talking about the 4850 in the iMac that is.

 

[dolphin842]

Apple advertise it as an HD 4850, not an 4850. [...] So they do the opposite of what you're saying, precisely because they are not allowed to advertise that you are buying something better than what you actually receive.

But ATI's desktop card is also called "Radeon HD 4850" (see this listing for example), so Apple's not covering themselves as you suggest. Again, given the form factor limitations, this is all understandable and maybe even preferable, but the fact remains that Apple does not reveal that it's a mobile chip, even in System Profiler. Anyway, back on topic...

What if you don't play any games, is it worth the $300 extra to get the 4670?

It all depends on what's important to you. If you plan on running dual screens, the faster GPU will make the user interface run smoother (Dock, Expose, Dashboard, etc.). A faster GPU will also help with OpenCL once apps start taking advantage of that.

On the other hand, with the ATI chip, you lose video decoding acceleration (the CPU in the iMac is more than capable of handling any video you throw at it, but offloading video work to the graphics card lets your CPU work on other stuff you may be doing). So if you foresee watching videos while running processor-intensive stuff, it may be better to stick with the 9400m.