iMac Core Duo reader report

ciparisciparis
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
After picking up my new 20" iMac on Saturday afternoon, I've had some time to get some good usage in and get a feel for its performance. Some notes so far:



This thing is Quiet. If there is any ambient noise, I can't hear the machine. If the room is completely silent, I can hear a faint, low frequency hum from the bottom front of the machine if I'm close to it. Very nice. Easily the quietest non-handheld machine I have ever owned, Mac or PC (including PowerBooks). My Thinkpad T43 is the only thing I can hear right now, and I'm typing this on the iMac.



Monitor spanning works great. I connected a Gateway FPD2185W 21" widescreen to it (which matches the native 1680*1050 of the iMac) and it's a great combination. No problems with running out of video RAM on the stock 128MB X1600 yet --- Dashboard and Expose are silky smooth. The mini DVI adaptor is the same as the one for the 12" PowerBook, so it's probably already in stock at your local Apple Store.



WoW was able to install from the CDs, launch, and patch just fine. It runs under Rosetta (until a universal binary patch is released later this month), and the GPU performance is promising, but I don't want to comment on overall performance until I upgrade my RAM (512MB is not enough for this).



Safari is brilliant. General browsing feels faster than my old Dual G5 (w/6800 Ultra), and this iMac feels as snappy on non-Flash sites as my PC (AMD 64 X2, 7800 GTX 512MB). On the WoW Support site, if I'm not watching closely when making a selection in the forum drop-down box, I don't even see the page refresh -- it just loads instantly. Flash sites aren't quite as fast, and I think the reason might be that the Flash plugin is probably running under Rosetta for now.



It looks like I got a bad DVD drive; it reads CDs just fine, but it fails to mount DVDs (including the system DVDs, which I was amused to have to point out to the late-night Apple support people after they suggested I try to run Hardware Test from my original system discs. Waiter, taste the soup!). This will probably require a return for replacement. Pity. The drive is identified as PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-K05: Firmware RevisiontQ523.



I'm a developer, so I needed to get Eclipse up and running for my java projects. After a quick patch of swt, it's looking good, and seems zippier than I've seen it run on any Mac. Java on these machines is a universal binary -- and it's fast. I'll be doing some compiling later today (hopefully) so I should have direct comparisons of ANT builds.



Photoshop, once launched, seems fine. Not super snappy, but not noticeably laggy either. Launch is a bit slower than usual on native systems.



Startup of the iMac is fast. From the chime to the login window takes 15-18 seconds (assuming you have the machine set to not log in automatically).



«1

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 40
    jasenj1jasenj1 Posts: 923member
    Thanks for the report. I hope to be joining you soon in tasting of the new iMac goodness.



    - Jasen
  • Reply 2 of 40
    majormattmajormatt Posts: 1,077member
    I heard a reason why browsing is snappier on a PC and now a X86 Mac is that websites check for intel tags and somehow it is faster?



    Have you encountered any PPC apps that wont launch?
  • Reply 3 of 40
    jonejone Posts: 102member
    I must have got a bum LCD, the lower left corner of my iMac 20" has an enormously huge backlight leak. Time to take it back already.
  • Reply 4 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by MajorMatt

    I heard a reason why browsing is snappier on a PC and now a X86 Mac is that websites check for intel tags and somehow it is faster?



    Have you encountered any PPC apps that wont launch?



    Architecture, speed, and compiler are the main reasons for improvement I'd say. No broken apps so far (knock on wood)...



    I did check to see if the iMac could handle Centrino-spec DDR2/533 RAM. No go darn. Unusual for an Intel chipset to not handle slower RAM, but not at all unusual for Apple so I guess that's about what one would expect.
  • Reply 5 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    A teaser about java performance doing ant builds from Eclipse (using Java 1.5.0 on both machines):



    Compiling 92 java files and building a schema for MySQL.... iMac Core

    Duo (2.0 GHz, 512MB RAM) vs. IBM Thinkpad T43 (2.0 GHz Pentium M, 2GB

    RAM, power set to max performance):



    iMac: 5 seconds

    IBM: 8 seconds



    ..this is after repeating the task several times on both machines.

    Very reproducible.



    Building MySQL in a terminal session (trying to make a native build of MySQL), during "make", both cores were pegged for at least a couple minutes solid (I was browsing at the same time, performance was very good), and the fan speed never increased.
  • Reply 6 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    I found my first misbehaving app: Yahoo Messenger. It launches and runs fine, but eventually it turns into a runaway process, chewing significant CPU for some period of time before crashing.



    Yahoo! Messenger for Mac OS X

    Version 2.5.3 (Build 1062)



    (ps: MySQL native build was a success. Wahoo!)
  • Reply 7 of 40
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    ciparis, thank you for sharing your experience. I would like to ask you to run some non-native older games. For example Return to Castle Wolfenstein. How does it run under Rosetta? fps, resolution, whatever you can report. Or how about UT2003, if this is not too much to ask?
  • Reply 8 of 40
    nauticalnautical Posts: 109member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by MajorMatt

    I heard a reason why browsing is snappier on a PC and now a X86 Mac is that websites check for intel tags and somehow it is faster?



    On a more constructive note, I think what you're talking about is the NetBurst architecture that was marketed by Intel as an accelerator for The Internet(s) despite the fact that it wasn't. Besides, the new MacIntels use a line of processors which are not built around the NetBurst architecture anyway.
  • Reply 9 of 40
    pbpb Posts: 4,255member
    One MacInTouch reader reports that the built-in iSight camera in the new model works now with iMovie (previously it required QT Pro or other USB-aware software). ciparis, or anyone else, could you confirm this report?
  • Reply 10 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by PB

    One MacInTouch reader reports that the built-in iSight camera in the new model works now with iMovie (previously it required QT Pro or other USB-aware software). ciparis, or anyone else, could you confirm this report?



    It does. The camera icon on the front panel includes "Built-in iSight" as an option in the drop-down box.







    UT 2003 was playable with Rosetta (at reduced settings) but on the slow end of that range. I'd say 20-30FPS, though I have forgotten the command to show the fps. I had to turn off quite a bit to make it work reasonably well, not knowing which options are CPU-affecting items and which aren't (meaning it could probably be made to work with better options if you figure out which ones you can get away with).
  • Reply 11 of 40
    fotnsfotns Posts: 301member
    Here are some questions I am curious about:

    What's in the /usr/standalone/i386 folder?

    Does it use a zero boot method or does it boot from a file as with PowerPC and open firmware?

    Is there a snag key combo to go into EFI like apple-option-o-f did for open firmware?

    Is there some sort of setup utility where you can set the date/time and other options independent of the OS?
  • Reply 12 of 40
    xoolxool Posts: 2,460member
    I'm super tempted to replace my Dual 2 GHz G5 tower with a new high-end iMac. Maybe I just want to buy buy buy!



    ciparis, mind if I send you the AAC file I used in my MacBook Pro tests so we can compare how well the new iMac encodes AAC files?
  • Reply 13 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by FotNS

    Here are some questions I am curious about:

    What's in the /usr/standalone/i386 folder? 



    Code:


    /usr/standalone/i386 michael$ ls -la

    total 224

    dr-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jan 4 07:11 .

    drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 Jan 3 22:10 ..

    -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 113780 Dec 25 01:56 boot.efi







    ...that's a binary file, cat is semi-useless with it. Though it did dump some ascii error codes...





    [Anders edit: The test screwed up the formatting. The text is in my post below as a .txt document uf anyone is interested]



    Quote:

    Originally posted by FotNS

    Does it use a zero boot method or does it boot from a file as with PowerPC and open firmware?

    Is there a snag key combo to go into EFI like apple-option-o-f did for open firmware?

    Is there some sort of setup utility where you can set the date/time and other options independent of the OS?



    I don't know what the first part means (sorry ). I haven't found a key combo, though the basic ones (single-user, option for boot volume select, reset pram) all still work, though the boot selection looks different (different icons than OF had). I haven't found a setup menu despite lots of key-mashing.
  • Reply 14 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Xool



    ciparis, mind if I send you the AAC file I used in my MacBook Pro tests so we can compare how well the new iMac encodes AAC files?



    Be my guest it's a mac.com address (same name as forum id).
  • Reply 15 of 40
    a_greera_greer Posts: 4,594member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ciparis

    I found my first misbehaving app: Yahoo Messenger. It launches and runs fine, but eventually it turns into a runaway process, chewing significant CPU for some period of time before crashing.



    Yahoo! Messenger for Mac OS X

    Version 2.5.3 (Build 1062)



    (ps: MySQL native build was a success. Wahoo!)



    I had that happen on my G4 once, same version, so it may be non-rosetta-specific.



    permission repair seemed to fix that...but it was in 10.4.3
  • Reply 16 of 40
    fotnsfotns Posts: 301member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ciparis

    I don't know what the first part means (sorry ). I haven't found a key combo, though the basic ones (single-user, option for boot volume select, reset pram) all still work, though the boot selection looks different (different icons than OF had). I haven't found a setup menu despite lots of key-mashing.



    Zero-boot refers to the method bios PCs use to load. Bios does not understand file systems so it has to load a boot loader by its sector pointer on the master boot record. EFI, like open firmware has the ability to look inside file systems and load binary files.

    Maybe the key combination to get into the efi shell is something like apple-option-e-f-i?
  • Reply 17 of 40
    andersanders Posts: 6,523member
    As noted above

     

     
  • Reply 18 of 40
    ciparisciparis Posts: 87member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by a_greer

    I had that happen on my G4 once, same version, so it may be non-rosetta-specific.



    permission repair seemed to fix that...but it was in 10.4.3



    Tried that, still crashes out after a little while. Time to try Adium or something else...
  • Reply 19 of 40
    halsehalse Posts: 53member
    can you do a verbose boot (command + v) and tell us what you see? you should end up in safe mode (command line) and then you just might have access to the NVRAM
  • Reply 20 of 40
    sunilramansunilraman Posts: 8,133member
    good stuff ciparis ...some interesting benchmarking going on here as well: http://www.macaddict.com/forums/topic/76536/1
Sign In or Register to comment.