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Few questions before purchasing:

gamerz

gamerz

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 2, 2006
479
0
Hey guys,

I am so happy now that the new imacs are out. I am almost going to buy one, but first I have a few questions.

1. Will there be any shipping delays because they are in high demand?

2. Is the ATI 2400 XT a good video card? How does it compare to the video card on the MBP's? Is it better than the X1600? Lastly, how much worse is it than the 2600 Pro?

Thats all for now, thanks for the help. Also, I am aware that not many people have new imacs at the moment, I was just asking these questions because I have never really heard of that video card.

Anyways, Thanks for the help.
 
From the benchmarks I have seen floating around, you would be better off spending the extra and getting the mid-range iMac. The video card appears to be a special Apple-only version of the Mobility 2600XT which by all accounts isn't half bad. The 2400XT appears to be fairly slow for a modern card. Definitely low-end stuff.
 
Is the video card concern mostly about playing games? I mean people have ran two monitors and edited all kinds of media with only 16mb ram video cards. Why is the 2400XT so horribly low end?
 
gamerz said:
Oh... also: How well will the 2400 XT run WoW?
Click to expand...


I dont know about the 2400XT but the 2600 Pro does a good job runnning wow a mid settings i avg about 40 to 60 FPS. I would recommend going with the 20" with the 2600 if you can afford it.
 
urbanskywalker said:
Is the video card concern mostly about playing games? I mean people have ran two monitors and edited all kinds of media with only 16mb ram video cards. Why is the 2400XT so horribly low end?
Click to expand...

It has a lot to do with a crappy memory bus, among other things.
It may have a decent amount of memory, but it simply cannot utilize it effectively.

The 2600 Pro performs at about the power of the 9800XT (a 5 year old card), so I guess the 2400XT will perform like...well, its anybodys guess, really.
 
Alright, so I am just better off with getting the 2.4ghz 20" version? Or would the 2400XT still run WoW with 20 fps minimum?
 
gamerz said:
Alright, so I am just better off with getting the 2.4ghz 20" version? Or would the 2400XT still run WoW with 20 fps minimum?
Click to expand...

Probably not with any decent resolution. The ATI 2x00 appears to perform very well on lower graphics with no AA or AF on older games. Up the res or add AA and things grind to a crawl, apparently. This is probably an artifact of the immature drivers and the design of the card which is forward looking.
 
Grenadier said:
The 2600 Pro performs at about the power of the 9800XT (a 5 year old card), so I guess the 2400XT will perform like...well, its anybodys guess, really.
Click to expand...
This is incorrect, the 2600 Pro in the new iMacs is not equal to the '2600' windows desktop card from 9 months ago.

The 2600 Pro in the new iMacs is a custom card ATI designed for apple and uses the same GPU as the Radeon Mobility 2600 XT which is capable of being clocked to perform about equal with the best of the Nvidia mobil chips (8800 GS?). We don't know what the clock rates on Apple's card are yet so we can't characterize its exact performance but expect it to run at least as well as the 1600 XT in the previous iMacs with older games and probably much better with new ones. (in addition to encode/decoding BlueRay/HD DVD/ect and support 100% of DX 10 which means it should be able to at least RUN (no promise on how fast at max settings) any windows game released in the next couple of years.)
 
How about the 2400XT? Could that run well enough to play games with low to med settings? I don't really want to spend $300 extra for a semi-better video card.
 
gamerz said:
How about the 2400XT? Could that run well enough to play games with low to med settings? I don't really want to spend $300 extra for a semi-better video card.
Click to expand...
The games should run alright. I mean, it's not like the gma950. I'm not saying that you're gonna get the highest settings at framerates of 100+, but they should be playable.

As for the cost, it depends on how powerful you want your computer to be. Remember that you're not spending $300 on the video card alone in the upgrade. You're also getting a bigger hard drive and faster processor. Either way you go, though, you're getting a great computer.
 
gamerz said:
Hey guys,

I am so happy now that the new imacs are out. I am almost going to buy one, but first I have a few questions.

1. Will there be any shipping delays because they are in high demand?

2. Is the ATI 2400 XT a good video card? How does it compare to the video card on the MBP's? Is it better than the X1600? Lastly, how much worse is it than the 2600 Pro?

Thats all for now, thanks for the help. Also, I am aware that not many people have new imacs at the moment, I was just asking these questions because I have never really heard of that video card.

Anyways, Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...
1) What you see on the webpage will probably be quite correct, I'm sure they update it if they fall behind a lot.

2) Depends on for what, but no, not that good compared to other new graphics cards. Someone thought the specs said it where faster than the 8600m gt but benchmarks for the regular versions of the graphics cards have suggested it's not. Also it doesn't seem to be better/much better than the X1600, but it's DX10 compatible and have built in support for HD-video I think. Macworlds UT2004 benchmarks says 70 fps for hd 2400 xt and 84 fps for hd 2600 pro so it's not that much of a difference. The later one has 256MB vram aswell.

If you can afford it I'd go with the 24" since you get a better panel type and higher resolution, the price difference of a new 20 vs 24" standalone TFT is quite huge so the extra cost of the 24" in the imac is quite ok.
 
Grenadier said:
The 2600 Pro performs at about the power of the 9800XT (a 5 year old card), so I guess the 2400XT will perform like...well, its anybodys guess, really.
Click to expand...
But then I've played wow on GF2 Ultra 64MB, Radeon 9200 and GF4 TI-4200 ;D

Sure it was few effects and 800x600 and it was beta and I was max lvl 25 but anyway.
 
gamerz said:
How about the 2400XT? Could that run well enough to play games with low to med settings? I don't really want to spend $300 extra for a semi-better video card.
Click to expand...

It will be worth it. The chip in there is actually a mobility 2600xt (as discovered in another thread) possibly just using same GPU we are still working on it but in any event it is better than the 2600 pro. But i digress. It would be worth it to ge the 20" 2.4 with the 2600. If your going with games, dont go for the low-end mac.
 
I think I will take my chances with the 2400XT. The only real graphics intense game would be Age of Empires 3, or WoW. And if they do play bad, I can always get more RAM.
 
I played WoW on my old eMac 1.25 with the Radeon 9200. (32MB) The settings were low, but it ran good, from what I remember. It was just the free 15 day or month trial or whatever.
 
gamerz said:
I think I will take my chances with the 2400XT. The only real graphics intense game would be Age of Empires 3, or WoW. And if they do play bad, I can always get more RAM.
Click to expand...

If you are going to get an imac I would shell out the extra money for the 2600 card. Both cards suck, but the 2600pro is far superior to the 2400XT.

Quick question, I know the older 24inch imac had a BTO of the 7600GT card. My question is, was this immediate or did apple add it later?
 
I played WoW on my old eMac 1.25 with the Radeon 9200. (32MB) The settings were low, but it ran good, from what I remember. It was just the free 15 day or month trial or whatever.
Click to expand...

Yes, but I plan on doing battlegrounds and raids. I'm not sure if the 2400Xt can runs those also. What to get???

:confused:
 
gamerz said:
Yes, but I plan on doing battlegrounds and raids. I'm not sure if the 2400Xt can runs those also. What to get???

:confused:
Click to expand...

Back before Burning Crusade I use to play WoW w/ GeForce FX5200 and it ran perfectly fine...

I think the ATI2400XT will do good... Unless the game has changed THAT much.
 
I second getting the 2600pro...not only a much better gpu, but better processor and bigger harddrive...if the MBP 2.4 was only 300 more, i would have definitely upgraded and the processor boost is half that of the iMac's...my 2 cents
 
Would there be a noticeable difference between the 2 ghz and 2.4ghz, And I really dont need 320G of HD. 100G would be fine for me.
 
You should see a big enough difference between the 2.0GHz and 2.4GHz while playing WoW.

The game runs fairly good on my

Powerbook G4 1.67GHz
2GB of DDR667 ram
128MB ATI Radeon 9700pro

I would expect it to be a lot smoother with the new iMacs especially in areas with a lot going on.
 
Do you think that the 2400Xt could run battlegrounds and raids, or other high intensity situations well? Sorry if I am asking alot of questions, I just don't want to waste my money, but also don't want to spend more then I need too.
 
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