Can You Game on an iMac 5K? & Windows Experience on iMac - iSwitched to Mac Part 4
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
1,537 words · ~7 min read
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now i had originally intended to do using the imac with Windows and a
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top-tier mobile graphics card performance showdown with the Radeon r9
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m295x 8 gig yes actually 8 gig versus
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NVIDIA's king of the hill gtx 980m mobile as separate videos but my wife
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and the rest of the internet complains that we've been doing too many
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multi-part episodes so here they are together you won this battle but not the
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teaser battle my gs30 stealth external graphics card notebook review is coming
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soon
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experience silent performance with the new cooler master silencio 652s
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minimalist design maximum compatibility click now to learn more
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so bootcamp is freaking awesome you just
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spotlight search bootcamp assistant pop in a usb thumb drive point it at an iso
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then it walks you through resizing your os 10 partition creating a Windows one
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and then without any preboot f8 nonsense
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it runs the setup process all the while restarting automatically into the
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correct thing then finally you land on the Windows desktop you're prompted to
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install all the necessary drivers from one executable it reboots again and boom
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you are ready to rock the experience is so seamless compared to when i've dual
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booted in the past although admittedly it's been a while i have so many drives
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that i rarely see the point in partitioning for multiple os's accepting
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cases where the extremely limited upgradability
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of a particular machine forces me to do it now i've had a lot of people ask me
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to comment on what it's like to run Windows on a mac and frankly i don't
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know what they were expecting macs are not made of dragon scales and the force
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or whatever so it's exactly the same as running Windows on a pc with the same
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specs as that mac i cannot stress this enough there is nothing about a knack
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that makes it special other than subjectively beautiful industrial design
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driver validation and component quality control are arguably important things
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but they don't affect performance oh and i guess there's a little bootcamp doodad
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in the system tray that lets you reboot directly to os 10 if you want now the
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astute among you may have noticed that asterisk on the exactly about 40 seconds
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ago what was that thrown in there for well a couple of reasons first and
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foremost is that for anything to perform exactly the same it has to not be
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hamstrung on a normal pc with a separate tower and monitor a 4970k
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will typically operate at anywhere from four gigahertz to 4.4 gigahertz
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depending on how multi-threaded a workload you're throwing at it thanks to
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turbo boost which you can learn more about here on the imac thanks to the
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quiet but not particularly powerful
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cooling system that CPU idles around 50
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degrees ramps up to 80 degrees in under
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10 seconds then in spite of the fan ramping up aggressively at 30 seconds
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begins to thermal throttle at 40 seconds hits 100 degrees at 50 seconds and stays
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there operating anywhere between 3.6 to
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4 gigahertz with a multi-threaded workload about a five to fifteen percent
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reduction in the performance that CPU could achieve in something like you know
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uh multi-core video rendering if it had a better cooler it really raises the
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question why did apple bother to give users the option of a top tier chip like
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this when it was never going to reach its rated speeds when it matters most
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anyway the other reason my asterisk was put in
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there is something that i was very very
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very disappointed by not a lot of these 5k imacs are out there in the wild even
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fewer of them are running Windows so there wasn't a ton of information about
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what i'm doing here and i had to discover for myself that thanks to
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some combination of AMD's driver AMD's hardware and apple's custom timing
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controller that enabled them to deliver a 5k single tile display in Windows you
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will be limited to 4k resolution max so
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that's 3840x2160 on your 5120 by 2880 display something
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that doesn't seem to be bothering this fella in the apple community discussion
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thread where folks are saying they've been bounced around between apple and
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AMD and at one point someone says he or she was told to talk to microsoft about
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it but it bothers me a lot
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thanks to the much higher resolution than normal and much higher pixel
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density than normal of this display the approximations that come along with any
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non-native resolution operation of a monitor and lcd monitor be specific can
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be more accurate than they otherwise would be but there is still
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discoloration and blurriness on text that makes everything look a little
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fuzzy what a disappointment so the only real new information i have
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since my previous videos on the 27-inch retina 5k imac is that it thermal
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throttles while performing CPU intensive tasks seemingly by design since apple
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avoids ramping the cooling fan up for as long as it can before finally giving in
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and cooling that poor CPU and it cannot
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run its display at 5k in a native Windows environment which coupled with
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the fact that it also can't be driven as an external display on another pc or mac
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makes this machine optimal for very specific people so with that mini
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conclusion out of the way we can move on to the next segment of this video the
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performance of the r9 m295x versus
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NVIDIA's gtx 980m first a bit about the
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m295x a GPU that has only shown up in this
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imac in its top tier configuration so far to my knowledge although i'm sure
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someone in the comments will correct me if i'm wrong it's based on the same
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tonga architecture as a desktop r9285
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but with 14 more stream processors and texture units and an 8 reduction in core
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clock with the same 256 bit memory bus but in the case of this computer anyway
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it features a massive 8 gig frame buffer
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versus the 2gig one on its closest desktop equivalent presumably because
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apple felt it needed it to drive the retina imax 5k display not that it kept
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os 10 yosemite from frequently stuttering while switching desktops are
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using mission control anyway but today's video was not about running the imac in
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Windows anyhow where jerky animations by the way were a non-issue until i fired
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up some games i tried the game at 4k to
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at least get some of what i paid for out of the machine but outside of casual
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games like league of legends dota 2 and team fortress 2 which by the way ran
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fine i suspect most people will end up
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turning the system down to 1440p or even
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1080p the good news is that if you want to
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game on the imac some fairly demanding games can be run if you're okay with
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reducing your resolution crysis 3 on medium details hovered around the 50 to
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60 FPS range with 2x msaa and while it
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was pretty weird for lack of a better word sitting there gaming on an imac
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it's got more horses than i think a lot of people give it credit for which isn't
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to say that the r9 m295x was in my mind
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the best choice for this machine while it unfortunately wasn't quite released
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when this system launched i'd love to
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see the 5k imac updated with a gtx 980m
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option instead in our 1080p benchmarks the 980m which is based on the same gm
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204 maxwell core as NVIDIA's desktop flagship gtx 980 absolutely crushes
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AMD's top-tier mobile GPU in spite of the fact that i ran my benchmarks for
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the 980m on an MSI gt80 titan laptop
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whose core i7 mobile processor was running about 10 slower than the imax
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throttled 4970k in games
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so i think that's it i'm done with the imac for good now it was fun while it
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lasted i think i've had all the experiences that i care to have with it
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guys i hope you've had all the experiences you care to have with it because this is it like this video if
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you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you hate multi-part episodes
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and as always there's a link in the video description if you want to support us you can buy a cool t-shirt like this
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watching and as always don't forget to subscribe
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