Info-Mac

Hello I want you to help me decide which computer to get I will give you the specs of both.

iMac 20-inch
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
640GB Serial ATA Drive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
Price:$1,374


Dell Studio XPS Desktop
Intel® Core™ i7-920 Processor(8MB L3 Cache, 2.66GHz)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition SP1, 64-Bit Windows 7 Upgrade Eligible
6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 6 DIMMs
640GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Price:$1,229


Ok So obviously the dell has way better specs but I have heard OSX is worth giving up those extra specs. I am new to mac and have never in my life used a mac. I would like your help in deciding which one to get.


Also I have one more question. The NVIDIA GeForce 9400M that comes with the MAC what is it capable of? I dont know much about the card and it doesnt look like the best but I will leave that for you to tell me. I dont game much on computers but I would like my card to be a little up from average. I would like to one day edit video and maybe play the occasional game so just tell me all you can about this card.

Thanks for your help

Well, I have a hard time recommending a PC to anybody. Yes, it is slightly cheaper, and somewhat better specced, but if you compare an XPS and an iMac side by side, the difference in quality is quite large. Those XPS reek of cheaply made garbage, and then that's just the physical.

Software wise, Mac OS X, iLife, iWork, and the plethora of apps that are designed to work in an integrated, fluid fashion far supersedes anything available on Windows.

As for the video, the current generation NVIDIA cards are not the highest end, but they can still supply you with an enjoyable gaming experience for the light gamer.

Yeah ilife looks great for it to be free with the mac. I like all the macs features also. My main concern here is the graphics card. I dont want to pay all this money and be stuck with a crap graphics card. I could go to the 24" 2.93 Ghz to get a better card but I really dont have the money to do that because it ups it to like $2,000

Although this is a review of the MacBook, it's essentially the same graphics card:

The performance of the 9400M G is comparable to current entry level GPUs with dedicated graphics memory (like the GeForce 9300M GS).Therefore, the graphics adapater is able to display older games (like Doom3) in high details fluently and new (not too demanding games) in low details fluently. Warhammer Online should for example run on the 2.4 GHz MacBook fluently. Compared to the predecessor in the MacBook, the Intel GMA X3100, the GeForce 9400M should perform 5x better.

Taken from http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeF ... 949.0.html

ok well I guess I will just have to deal with a little less graphic power but hopefully there will be price drops in macs when snow lepord comes out. Then maybe I will be ale to afford a AMD card.