Gadgetory

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 M 295 X yes actually eight gig versus Nvidia as 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 GS 30 stealth external graphics card notebook review is coming soon experienced silent performance with the new Coolermaster Silencio 652 s minimalist design maximum compatibility click now to learn more so boot camp is frickin awesome you just spotlight search boot camp assistant pop in a USB thumb drive pointed out an ISO then it walks you through resizing your OS 10 partition creating a Windows one and then without any pre boo FA 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 is except in cases where the extremely limited upgrade ability 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 Mac's 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 an AK 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 boot camp 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 49 70 K will typically operate it anywhere from 4 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 and under and seconds then in spite of the fin ramping up aggressively at 30 seconds begins to thermal throttle at 40 seconds hits a hundred degrees at 50 seconds and stays there operating anywhere between three point six to four 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 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 5ki Macs are out there in the wild even fewer of them are running Windows so there wasn't a ton of information about that what I'm doing here and I had to discover for myself that thanks to some combination are they in these 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 Macs so that's 3840 by 2160 on your 50 120 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 to be specific can be more accurate than the 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 out 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 m 295 X and it is g TX 980 m first a bit about the m2 95 X a GPU that has only shown up in this iMac in its top tier configuration so far to my knowledge along sir someone in the comments will correct me if I'm wrong it's based on the same Tonga architecture as a desktop r9 285 but with 14% more stream processors and texture units and an 8 percent 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 we're 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 median 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 r9m 295 X was in I mind the best choice for this machine while it unfortunately wasn't quite released when the system launched I'd love to see the 5k iMac updated with a gtx 980m option instead in our 1080p benchmarks the nine ATM which is based on the same GM 204 Maxwell Korres Nvidia's desktop flagship TTX 980 absolutely crushes I mean these top tier mobile GPU in spite of the fact that I ran my benchmarks for the nine ATM on an msi gt80 Titan laptop whose core i7 mobile processor was running about 10% slower than the IMAX throttled 49 70 K 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 a thick cuz 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 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 one give us a monthly contribution or change your bookmark for Amazon to one with our affiliate code so every time you buy an iMac or a dry erase marker or whatever else it is you buy on Amazon we get a small kickback that kind of thing helps us out a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe