Forums | MacLife

Video? Yes. Hard Drive? Not so much. You'll want an external for time machine, anyway.

I don't have a 1080p panel, so I can't give you any info on how a 9400 will handle the increased video resolution.

Are you a gamer? Even a little bit? Do you see yourself holding onto this computer for four or five years?

knobtwirler wrote:

Gamer. No. Four or five years, yes. It worries me when I see older macbooks running the new iTunes visualizer and it looks like something is broken.

Well, be honest: do you really care about something like the iTunes visualizer? It's not as if anything like that is an important function for your computer.

I'd say your "Gamer. No." response is most important. If so, then save your money and get the cheaper one. There might come a time when you may regret this because you want to run something that is graphics-intensive, in which case at that time you probably should opt for a Mac Pro instead of the iMac line.

It's kind of hard to predict the future, three years hence. Apple might take advantage of something that the ATI has, but the 9400M doesn't, but, technically, the nvidia is just a lot slower. I think.

When I got my Powermac G4, I kept it running as long as I could. New games (needed floating point shaders) quickly obsoleted the Radeon 9000, though frankly integer shader support just slowed down the framerate on not so new games. With the release of 10.5, though, floating point shader was used for things like the transparent menu bar. Even more casual games, like Penny Arcade's "Precipice of Darkness" sort of assumed that the chipset supported it.

But, hey, by the time the nVidia 9400m becomes that obsolete, you'll be hunting for peripherals that don't require usb3... And even the top of the line i7 imac won't help you there.

If Apple can get my parents video editing, they can do anything. I discussed it with them and only explained my concern that this is last years's video card, and that it's running a 21" HD screen. They decided it's ok to go with the better equiped version.