now i had originally intended to do using the imac with Windows and a
top-tier mobile graphics card performance showdown with the Radeon r9
m295x 8 gig yes actually 8 gig versus
NVIDIA's king of the hill gtx 980m mobile as separate videos but my wife
and the rest of the internet complains that we've been doing too many
multi-part episodes so here they are together you won this battle but not the
teaser battle my gs30 stealth external graphics card notebook review is coming
soon
experience silent performance with the new cooler master silencio 652s
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so bootcamp is freaking awesome you just
spotlight search bootcamp assistant pop in a usb thumb drive point it at an iso
then it walks you through resizing your os 10 partition creating a Windows one
and then without any preboot f8 nonsense
it runs the setup process all the while restarting automatically into the
correct thing then finally you land on the Windows desktop you're prompted to
install all the necessary drivers from one executable it reboots again and boom
you are ready to rock the experience is so seamless compared to when i've dual
booted in the past although admittedly it's been a while i have so many drives
that i rarely see the point in partitioning for multiple os's accepting
cases where the extremely limited upgradability
of a particular machine forces me to do it now i've had a lot of people ask me
to comment on what it's like to run Windows on a mac and frankly i don't
know what they were expecting macs are not made of dragon scales and the force
or whatever so it's exactly the same as running Windows on a pc with the same
specs as that mac i cannot stress this enough there is nothing about a knack
that makes it special other than subjectively beautiful industrial design
driver validation and component quality control are arguably important things
but they don't affect performance oh and i guess there's a little bootcamp doodad
in the system tray that lets you reboot directly to os 10 if you want now the
astute among you may have noticed that asterisk on the exactly about 40 seconds
ago what was that thrown in there for well a couple of reasons first and
foremost is that for anything to perform exactly the same it has to not be
hamstrung on a normal pc with a separate tower and monitor a 4970k
will typically operate at anywhere from four gigahertz to 4.4 gigahertz
depending on how multi-threaded a workload you're throwing at it thanks to
turbo boost which you can learn more about here on the imac thanks to the
quiet but not particularly powerful
cooling system that CPU idles around 50
degrees ramps up to 80 degrees in under
10 seconds then in spite of the fan ramping up aggressively at 30 seconds
begins to thermal throttle at 40 seconds hits 100 degrees at 50 seconds and stays
there operating anywhere between 3.6 to
4 gigahertz with a multi-threaded workload about a five to fifteen percent
reduction in the performance that CPU could achieve in something like you know
uh multi-core video rendering if it had a better cooler it really raises the
question why did apple bother to give users the option of a top tier chip like
this when it was never going to reach its rated speeds when it matters most
anyway the other reason my asterisk was put in
there is something that i was very very
very disappointed by not a lot of these 5k imacs are out there in the wild even
fewer of them are running Windows so there wasn't a ton of information about
what i'm doing here and i had to discover for myself that thanks to
some combination of AMD's driver AMD's hardware and apple's custom timing
controller that enabled them to deliver a 5k single tile display in Windows you
will be limited to 4k resolution max so
that's 3840x2160 on your 5120 by 2880 display something
that doesn't seem to be bothering this fella in the apple community discussion
thread where folks are saying they've been bounced around between apple and
AMD and at one point someone says he or she was told to talk to microsoft about
it but it bothers me a lot
thanks to the much higher resolution than normal and much higher pixel
density than normal of this display the approximations that come along with any
non-native resolution operation of a monitor and lcd monitor be specific can
be more accurate than they otherwise would be but there is still
discoloration and blurriness on text that makes everything look a little
fuzzy what a disappointment so the only real new information i have
since my previous videos on the 27-inch retina 5k imac is that it thermal
throttles while performing CPU intensive tasks seemingly by design since apple
avoids ramping the cooling fan up for as long as it can before finally giving in
and cooling that poor CPU and it cannot
run its display at 5k in a native Windows environment which coupled with
the fact that it also can't be driven as an external display on another pc or mac
makes this machine optimal for very specific people so with that mini
conclusion out of the way we can move on to the next segment of this video the
performance of the r9 m295x versus
NVIDIA's gtx 980m first a bit about the
m295x a GPU that has only shown up in this
imac in its top tier configuration so far to my knowledge although i'm sure
someone in the comments will correct me if i'm wrong it's based on the same
tonga architecture as a desktop r9285
but with 14 more stream processors and texture units and an 8 reduction in core
clock with the same 256 bit memory bus but in the case of this computer anyway
it features a massive 8 gig frame buffer
versus the 2gig one on its closest desktop equivalent presumably because
apple felt it needed it to drive the retina imax 5k display not that it kept
os 10 yosemite from frequently stuttering while switching desktops are
using mission control anyway but today's video was not about running the imac in
Windows anyhow where jerky animations by the way were a non-issue until i fired
up some games i tried the game at 4k to
at least get some of what i paid for out of the machine but outside of casual
games like league of legends dota 2 and team fortress 2 which by the way ran
fine i suspect most people will end up
turning the system down to 1440p or even
1080p the good news is that if you want to
game on the imac some fairly demanding games can be run if you're okay with
reducing your resolution crysis 3 on medium details hovered around the 50 to
60 FPS range with 2x msaa and while it
was pretty weird for lack of a better word sitting there gaming on an imac
it's got more horses than i think a lot of people give it credit for which isn't
to say that the r9 m295x was in my mind
the best choice for this machine while it unfortunately wasn't quite released
when this system launched i'd love to
see the 5k imac updated with a gtx 980m
option instead in our 1080p benchmarks the 980m which is based on the same gm
204 maxwell core as NVIDIA's desktop flagship gtx 980 absolutely crushes
AMD's top-tier mobile GPU in spite of the fact that i ran my benchmarks for
the 980m on an MSI gt80 titan laptop
whose core i7 mobile processor was running about 10 slower than the imax
throttled 4970k in games
so i think that's it i'm done with the imac for good now it was fun while it
lasted i think i've had all the experiences that i care to have with it
guys i hope you've had all the experiences you care to have with it because this is it like this video if
you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you hate multi-part episodes
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