it's acutally not a bad idea to have a seperate gaming computer together with a imac. For the moment i'll assume that display is worth about $1000 and you already have a mac somewhere or you're planing to get one. I further assume that you want a 27" for gaming anyway (and the needed gpu power for such a display). That cuts you down to a price difference of $700!
Of course you should be willing to spend some bucks on gaming equipment.
Depends a bit on the setting you have. If the other mac you already have is always avaible to you and you're perfect fine on donig everything else than gaming on it, its a bit pricy.
The advantages:
-Family licenses: you don't have to buy windows and os x versions of e.g Microsoft Office (worth at least $100)
-you have a backup gaming machine if your gaming pc fails. (not as god as on Windows but more then nothing, right?).
-you get a good keyboard and mouse, worth another $100 (i put only $100 because you'd want to buy a usb switch).
-if you want a machine that's always on, the imac will use less engergy than a highend gaming computer, could save up to or even more than $100 a year, assuming at lest 3 years use: $300
-it looks good
-you don't have to invest money to silence you gaming pc if you want it to run silent when not gaming, saves around $100 on the PC price
-you're frineds will be impressed if they see that crisis runs on your imac that well (not nowing that is a gaming pc powering it
)
Of course this only works if youre willing and capable to spend another $1000 on fast gaming pc. Because you already have a mac, i recommand to make it a spare one: powersupply, mainboard,fast cpu, lots of ram, at the moment a ati radeon 5870 (or later an x2/5970). 500GB harddrive, a blue-ray drive or a cheap dvd drive, maybe a creatvie soundcard, big tower.
Sounds resonable for me.
