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Full user review
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"The New iMacs narrow the gap between consumer and professional Macs!"
Pros: 24" Screen, FW-800 Port, Bundled Software, Refurbished is like New
Cons: No Blueray disc., 4GB Ram Limit
Summary: I purchased this machine as a refurbished Computer from Apple. When it arrived (5 days from California to Maryland) the only difference between new and refurbished is the cardboard box it was shipped in. All plastic coverings, appearance and performance were as if it was brand new.
This iMac is replacing my home desktop, an Apple G4 (sawtooth) upgraded to 1GHZ and was starting to show it's age (8-1/2 years). I didn't want to risk losing important family photos and itunes music so I decided a replacement was in order. I debated over and over about getting another notebook, but really believe that a decent desktop is critical component as part of home network, but if I had to choose between a macbook or an iMac?.I would go with the macbook because of convenient mobility.
A 100.00 rebate also allowed me to purchase a replacement printer (Canon i4500), which I've been happy with.
Because you can't customize refurbished products when you order, this computer has the standard 500GB hard drive (I would've preferred a 1TB internal). I looked past this limitation because of the included FireWire-800 port on the back. This allowed me to connect (daisy-chain) two FireWire-800 hard drives (G-Force 1TB, and a 750GB FW-800 iomega drive that was on clearance at BestBuy (159.00)). The iMac immediately recognized both drives. This effectively raised my total hard drive space to 2.25 TB with minimal performance impact, thanks to the FW-800 ports.
The iomega drive serves as my itunes repository and the G-Force 1TB is my Time Machine backup for the iMac and the Iomega drive.
The screen looks incredible, although not technically a High Definition screen the specs of this screen are impressive and DVD movies look fabulous. 1920 x 1200 resolution compared with Dell's XPS High Def 20" resolution of 1680x1050.
Ram upgrades are made easy by access to the bottom of the iMac. The iMac limited to a max upgrade of 4GB (as stated in product literature), but considering that RAM chips higher than 2GB (notebook RAM) are prohibitively expensive, 4BG is the max I'd upgrade to anyway. Also I've read in various forums that this may be an artificial limitation and the real limit should be higher because Apple boosted the system bus speed from 800MHz in the previous iMac to 1,066MHz in the new versions. The system bus plays a major role in communications between the processor and system memory...
Graphics Card - The included graphics card in the iMac 3.06 (and upgradeable in other iMacs) is a NVIDIA's 8800, which is part of the GeForce 8 series of graphics cards. These cards are ideal for playing the most demanding 3D games; plus working with high-end imaging applications such as Aperture 2.0 and 3D apps.
The card itself comes in several different flavors: GS (used in the iMac); GT (used in the Mac Pro) and there are also GTX, GTS and Ultra cards available for PC users.
Both of the cards used by Apple possess 512MB of RAM, which raised is interesting because NVIDIA's 8800 GS card is only supposed to have 384MB of RAM
It actually transpires that the 8800 GS in the iMac isn't actually an 8800 GS at all, but the same 8800 GT card from the Mac Pro that has been clocked down to match the 8800 GS speed.
The machine looks like a piece of art sitting on my desk, not just another tech gadget. The stand has a hole in the back for wire management and really creates a clean look.
The bundled software is outstanding, iTunes is the premier music database management software, and iPhoto has been improved immensely from previous releases.
The seamless integration of this computer with all various types of peripherals and the ease of creating a wireless network using Apple's airport extreme, make this computer one of my best purchases.
- 1 reply to this review
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This is the best and most comprehensive review of the new iMac 3.06 I have read on the web. It has a wealth of information for those of us who are seriously considering buying this expensive computer to replace a home/office or home/stuido computer, as I am.
The other reviews on this site and others were good in stating that it is a machine greatly liked. But your review does give us so much more information to help make that decision. My only other need is confindence that I can dual boot XP Pro and run all of my Windows office software on it. From reading various other sites, this seems to not be any problem at all. All other work I would do would be on the Leopard OS.
Thanks again for taking the time and sharing your thoughts. I'm pretty much sold on getting one.
