[Help]iMac graphic card

[Requiem]

Hi,

I've just bought my new customized iMac 2.8Ghz. As many of you know, the graphic card totally sucks for playing game. So is there anyway to change the graphic card for iMac? If there is, then is it easy to perform the changing?

Any comments will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Mac.Jnr]

I'm sorry to say but you cannot change the graphics card on your iMac. Although it is pretty weak, it is still decent for gaming at reasonable settings.

You can also overclock your graphics card but I advise not too.

 

[Muncher]

To contradict the post above, you CAN technically change it, the card being an MXM card (I believe). Actually doing so is very hard, and not worth it unless your warranty has already run out, and you don't care if you can't put it back together again. Check out taking it apart on google.

 

[flopticalcube]

To contradict the post above, you CAN technically change it, the card being an MXM card (I believe). Actually doing so is very hard, and not worth it unless your warranty has already run out, and you don't care if you can't put it back together again. Check out taking it apart on google.

Although the card uses the MXM connector, no other MXM cards will work since the card uses Apple's own firmware.

 

[Gabriel Cazali]

for gamming?
crysis its the most demanding game now..... check this video


http://youtube.com/watch?v=y4wvsehdyOk


i think the video card its good enough

im playing need for speed pro street right now with full graphics
on my imac 20" 2.4, and 4gb of ram
NO problem at all

 

[AppleWoW]

You cannot change out your video card on the iMacs. They are on the logic board, meaning you would have to get a whole new logic board from apple to do so...which I dont think would be happening soon..sorry. You can overclock your video card but you're not going to see a noticeable increase in performance for the risk of stability.

 

[gormond]

Hi,

I've just bought my new customized iMac 2.8Ghz. As many of you know, the graphic card totally sucks for playing game. So is there anyway to change the graphic card for iMac? If there is, then is it easy to perform the changing?

Any comments will be highly appreciated.

Thanks.

What game have you tried that it couldn't manage? I have tried a couple including Crysis and they have all worked just fine.

Make sure you install the latest ATI drivers though.

 

[Requiem]

I'm playing Quake 4, which is a pretty normal game. The game runs at a playable speed with normal settings. Anyway, even though I have a Core 2 Duo 2.8 Ghz Extreme, I only use 1GB RAM, this might be the main reason.
What's wrong with Apple anyway. Is it technical problem (heat, space...) that they cannot attach any better gaming card to their system. My friends' MBP even performs way better than my iMac. Damn! Nonetheless, no offense here but I have to admit that my iMac just looks devastatingly cooler than his MPB.

 

[psonice]

Are you playing under windows or OSX? You'll get far better performance in windows as the drivers are much better (especially if you stick the latest versions on). Actually the ati 2600 card is pretty good, but bear in mind that it's a mid range card. The only thing it really does struggle with is antialiasing, but you can turn that off at higher resolutions and it still looks good.

Why can't they put a high-end gaming card in there? Well, a high end gaming card with it's massive fan and heat sink is probably nearly as thick as the imac is, so there's a serious space issue. Plus the high end cards probably use 2x more power than the whole imac does, so you'd need a huge power supply to run it (which would mean big, ugly lump on the back, or an external power brick). Then there's the heat they produce... to get all that heat out of an imac case, you'd need big, powerful fans, which would make it LOUD.

So, choice of big, noisy computer and great game performance, or thin sexy imac with pretty good game performance.

 

[gormond]

The Macs card is indeed pretty good but as has been said the drivers atm ain't that good, but if you use windows and install latest ATI drivers then it will preform much better, also another 1GB of ram wouldn't hurt either.