I've heard that unlike the macbook pro in which the cpu is soldered to the motherboard, the imac actually has a socketed CPU. I've read reports where people have changed the CPU with no problems. As far as I know, the CPU is upgradable as well, although I don't know just how down and dirty you have to get...

-Ken

See it for yourself; the CPU here

There's a link on the article to a page with a disassembled iMac, the page is here.

Uhm, no offence here, but you may want to clean your glasses and re-read page one

Congrats...you're doing a good work investigating the mac world.

Now, you should try one!

That page isn't mine FYI

I know the page isn't yours. These japanese guys are totally crazy, regularly when a new mac is out they buy it on the very first days they're on sale and disassemble them, just to see the internal parts.

BTW, rpsgc, have you tried any kind of Mac?

No. I was never really fond of Apple.

When was the last time you've tried one, for a long period?

Give them a chance, Mac OS X is a lot of fun!

As I've said, I never tried one. I detest iPod and its trend, I detest their white colour and I detest even more the Apple elitists. So no, I won't give them a try.

They have done a good job with this though [iMac], and they're quiet. So I don't just thrash their products

And this thread has gone way offtopic.

Um, it's only an MP3 player, there's no need to get so worked up about it....

One has to eat the cake to know if its tasteful. At least a couple of times to be able to have an opinion.

For my part, I've no problems using what suits best my objectives, be it Windows, Mac OS, Linux or BSD. Choice is a good thing!

If you want to buy me a cake.... feel free to.

I'd love to have a Mac for its looks personally, but they're selling for at least twice the price of a x86 system that does what I need it to do.

As I've advised Aris previously in this thread, did you take a look at www.osx86project.org ?

If you have a recent computer you can try Mac OS X. The best experience will be if you have a CPU that supports SSE3, EM64T and Executable Disable Bit.

Yes, I looked into it before. I have an Athlon XP. No SSE3, no 64-bit, no NX, no pressing need to "upgrade" since it's plenty fast.

Do you have SSE2?

qviri, without SSE2 you're out of luck. SSE2 is the minimum requirement. Hopefully, you'll find a friend with a more recent rig where you can try OS X or you have to spend something like $200 for a new board and CPU. I can tell you that I've an Asus P5GD1-VM coupled with a Celeron D331 and 512 MB of RAM and it runs OS X smooth.

Prices from Newegg.com:
Asus P5GD1-VM: $89.99
Celeron D331: $53.00
Kingston 2x256 MB DDR 400 : $42.55
Total: $185.54

Just to bring this topic back around... It's entirely possible to monitor temps in OS X. I don't own an Intel-based one, so I'm not sure if the monitoring is Universal (in the universal app sense).

Here's a screeny of what I see running iStat nano in my dashboard (cute use of nano, eh? I'm thinking of officially changing my name to iColin nano).

It's not a complete readout, but it gives a good idea of which sensors are implanted. (I can't remember which program it was I downloaded, but there's apparently upwards of 12 temp sensors in a G5 tower, plus fanspeed sensors.)

I didn't find that particular program, but I did look at a program called Thermal Monitor which could not find a CPU sensor. I had access to SMART, and, if I paid for it, the sensor on the X1600. It made no mention of a CPU temperature, and I was unable to find any record of the Intel iMacs being successfully monitored. I did find one instance of someone who claimed to monitor the CPU on a MacBook Pro, but it may have been a hoax.

I got a 15" 1.67ghz powerbook at my new job in about febuary, and started to quite enjoy the operatingsystem. The performance was not really great, even though it was not alot slower then a centrino. A few weeks ago I had it replaced with a macbook pro, and the performance is great (even though it's a tiny bit louder then the powerbook it's still one of the most silent notebooks I've used).

After using a mac for a few months, I find using Windows to be very tedious. I've had a pc at work with Windows and Linux, and noticed I was never booting it to Windows anymore. At home my computer (P180 with 1 Nexus at 5v for the case and the same for the processor, powered by a Seasonic s12) was running windows, but mainly used by my wife for browsing the web...

I found an old G4 tower from work which was really loud, and got permission to take it home. I changed the case fan to a 120mm Nexus and the powersupplies fan to a 80mm Panaflo L1A. At the office it seemed inaudible, but when I took it home it was really damn loud, especially compared to the pc. My wives first impression was "you are not replacing the pc with that vacuum cleaner are you?". Uhm... Well the pc was allready sold.

I was quite suprised when my wife suggested getting an imac, as she had seen one at a friends place and it "looked nice".

My main concern was noise, as with the G4 it is impossible to evaluate how loud something is at the store. Thanks for the great review, I think I can safely buy an imac and trust it won't be alot louder then the old pc.

Hello,

Two comments; on the question in the caption here:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article594-page3.html, the speakers are in the bottom edge of the case, that oval opening must be an air intake.

The second comment is that anybody who owns this computer should run the SMP Folding@Home client -- it screams! My brother's 17" iMac Core Duo has gotten up to over 1,000 points per day average -- amazing!

If that's Nathan, what settings makes it possible to get 1760 point work units?

Hello,

You install the SMP client (I recommend the one with the installer), and you'll get a fair number of the 1,760 pointers -- there is no way to choose them. But they are ~3/4 of the projects that get assigned, both on his and on my (Linux 64bit) machines.

ok i see, don't think SMP client supports a single multi-threaded P4 so can't use it. Sorry for being off topic

I'd be interested to see how the video performance of an integrated graphics solution like that compares to the actual card. These comparisons are difficult given that they are not running the same software. While the pricing seemed competetive at the time, current prices on much of that hardware have dipped quite a bit. It did look like the card was kind of just integrated into one big board.

I would be curious to try OSX, however, I believe that is illegal to put OSX on a PC.

Nice revive

I believe it is also immoral, and in Luxemborg they cut your hands off!