Mac Pro or iMac for FSX

[Rogier1991]

Hello guys,

A year ago I sold my Windows Gaming PC to opt for a Macbook Air, just because i had no more time to play FSX. Nowadays I want to purchase a Desktop PC to play FSX again. This must be a Mac, so don't opt for a Windows PC please. I want to purchase a Mac for school, and with bootcamp, to play FSX. I want to play it on the highest settings with add ons like REX, FTX Global. PMDG aircraft and some great airport sceneries. As FSX is the most CPU sensitive (and less GPU) I know a good CPU is important. My decision goes between the two configurations below (iMac or Mac Pro).

Can you help me with my decision? What will you recommend to play FSX on my standards? (that's not a Windows machine...)

Late 2013 27 inch iMac:

Specificaties
3,4-GHz quad-core Intel Core i5
Turbo Boost to 3,8 GHz
8 GB memory (2x 4 GB)
256 GB PCI-E flash storage
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M 2 GB

2013 Mac Pro:
3,7 GHz Intel Xeon processor
12 GB 1866 MhZ RAM
2 AMD Firepro D300 2 GB each (who are actually AMD W700's)
256 GB PCi-E flash storage

 

[Bear]

I'd say the iMac with one definite change, get the 780M. And one possible change - will 256GB be enough? Remember your bootcamp partition will be on the SSD.

When you say FSX is cpu intensive - will it make full use of an i7? If so that is another possible iMac upgrade.

 

[Rogier1991]

No FSX doesn't support hyper threading. And is the 780m a better graphics card for gaming than the D300?

 

[jlsm511]

I have a 2010 MP with the stock GPU, I too am curious how FSX might run on nMP, but am wondering how it will like the new ATI cards. FSX is notorious for not running well on ATI cards so it might still run badly. At the moment, I get 20-30 FPS in the PMDG 777 at large add-on airports like FSDT JFK and FlyTampa Dubai. Thats with the 2x2.4Ghz machine with 14GB of RAM and Windows and FSX running on an SSD. As an aside, I am curious of Apple will allow us to install Windows on a Thunderbolt drive on the nMP, or will we have to partition the SSD to be able to install Windows? If so, that may be a deal breaker for me.

 

[Rogier1991]

Some people say that the D300 cards are not the best cards for gaming...