27" IMAC with ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card for gaming

I love mine, play with Open Sim which is very graphics intensive.

I am sorry to say after spending a heap of money and time that the 27" iMac with i5 and ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics is complete rubbish for gaming under windows 7.

This is a brand new 27" iMac i5 with 8GIG RAM and with ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics (512 MB graphics ram) delivered early July 2010 to Australia.

It keeps locking up. I can play a game for about 15-20 minutes then it locks and I have to reboot. I have the bootcamp graphics drivers - had the problems, downloaded the latest graphics drivers for the card from ATI on 22 July 2010 and worked a little better, games loaded faster, but still they lock the machine and I have to reboot. I have had no problems in MacOS - but I haven't used any graphics intensive applications in MacOS.

If you want a games machine, I would recommend getting a dedicated windows desktop machine. Use the iMac for mac stuff and work like I do. Pity as I was looking forward to playing some games on its lovely big screen but the iMac just can't handle it. The windows gaming machine would be half the price too.

farscout:

Have you tried playing under 10.6? If so, do you have the same problem?

Your locking up issues I think are most likely due to overheating. I was running a flight sim on mine (realflight 5) for about 25 minutes and I felt the back of the case at the top and it was smoking hot! got out my temp gun and it was near 180 degrees F. Ouch! I immediately rebooted into mac OS and installed SpeedFan and kicked the fans up to 3500 rpm to cool it off.

Apparently when in win 7 mode the processor runs wide open, I think my mac will burn up at this temp, may be going back to Apple. I bought this to run this sim mostly and a few other mac video stuff!

*****!!!

After spending hours to get ati drivers on windows 7 64, I discovered the problem. The hd4850 is a Mobile. Downloaded newest mobile suite, installed perfect, desktop even looked better after install, runs games np. No heat problems.

it really depends on what you plan on gaming.
if you always want to play the latest high-end games: don't.
the HD4850 is decent, it will run most current games fine (if you don't plan on playing them on the native resolution. full HD (1920*1080) has to be enough), but the HD4850 is actually outdated now (most new graphic cards come with 1024MB or more) and that won't change.

like I said: it's not a bad card, but if you want to play high-end games in 3 years that just will not work. also consider that on an imac you can't just put it a better one like on a PC, so you have to use the card that comes with it. if anything you should go for the HD5750, but you only get that one in the most expensive imac, which is ... well, pretty expensive. the HD5750 is still not the newest card on the market (apple tends to rather use cards that produce less heat and use less power than go for the newest high-end cards) but it still outperforms the HD4850

in the end, the HD4850 can do fine, but you shouldn't expect too much from it, especially in a couple of years. but I guess the same goes for the HD5750, but it will hold out longer I guess