iMacs and eMacs

iMac Penryn (April 2008)

Overview

Apple has updated the iMac with Intel's more efficient Penryn processor, which has a larger level 2 cache and includes the SSE4 instruction set. The iMac has also moved from the 800 MHz system bus in last year's iMac to 1066 MHz, and clock speeds now range from 2.4 GHz to a 3.06 GHz build-to-order option.

The aluminum iMacs have 3 USB 2.0 ports, FireWire 400 and 800 ports, gigabit ethernet, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, and an 8x SuperDrive - as well as a slim keyboard with USB 2.0 ports.

The 20" 2.0 GHz iMac has 1 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, an 8x SuperDrive, Radeon HD 2400 XT graphics, AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth 2.0, and Apple's new keyboard and Mighty Mouse.

The 2.66 GHz and faster models ship with 2 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive, and use Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics (Nvidia GeForce 8800 is a built-to-order option on the 24" iMac). The new iMac ships with Mac OS X 10.5.2 and iLife '08.

The Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 Pro graphics processors, while better than the Radeon X1600 GPU in the previous generation 2.0 GHz iMacs in some respects (and worse in others) is a step down from the Nvidia GeForce 7300GT and 7600GT in the earlier 24" iMac. Gaming benchmarks measure GeForce frame rates as anywhere from 20% to nearly 200% higher. There are also many complaints about reflections due to the glossy display.

Note that 20" aluminum iMacs use an 18-bit LCD, which can only display 262,144 colors, not the "millions" all other iMacs can display. This should be good enough for most users.

2007 iMac

Unlike earlier iMacs, where every USB port could provide 500 mA of power, only a single high-powered device can be attached to the USB ports, and software will enable one of its downstream ports to supply 500 mA of power. If a second high-powered device is attached, it will behave like a normal bus-powered hub and only provide 100 mA per downstream port.

Intel-based Macs use a partitioning scheme known as GPT. Only Macintel models can boot from GPT hard drives. Both PowerPC and Intel Macs can boot from APM (Apple's old partitioning scheme) hard drives, which is the format you must use to create a universal boot drive in Leopard. PowerPC Macs running any version of the Mac OS prior to 10.4.2 cannot mount GPT volumes. PowerPC Macs won't let you install OS X to a USB drive or choose it as your startup volume, although there is a work around for that.

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