Oh please. Spare us the Wintel Snobbery™. The current line-up of Macs are great machines, and I've heard every argument under the sun since the early 90's why Apple and their products "suck". When Jobs left the company, yes, they sucked. Now? Please.Originally Posted by 'Eteocles',index.php?page=Thread&postID=63262#post 63262
The new iMacs run Windows in BootCamp (native) or in Parallels (emulation) just fine. All current Macs do, from the Mac Mini to the Towers and MacBook Pros. Best of both worlds, really, you can't complain. I run Vista and XP on my Mini, and it's just fine. I prefer the Mac OS, as I use it more professionally (I get paid to use Photoshop), but both platforms have their strengths, weaknesses, and it all boils down to what you can *do* with a computer. Anyone can buy a computer, show me what you can *do*, not sit there and act like a 11 year old fighting about which Power Ranger is better. That doesn't impress me.
As for parts, Macs have used PC parts for years, the only things right now that are Mac specific are the motherboards, video cards (and that's a lot better than it used to be), and cases.
As for the OP, I would buy one dual quad core Xeon Intel Mac tower, and put two decent video cards in - the iMac has a slower system bus, and you can't put as much ram in - and you'll need a LOT - same as if you ran Windows. The iMac is simply not designed to do the kind of thing you are going to be doing, I would worry about heat a LOT with an iMac - the towers are well ventilated (ever look inside a Mac tower? It's gorgeous). Also, with the tower, you have much better choices for video cards (PCI-X). A dual quad core Mac is going to be one hell of a machine for a while, they are insanely fast. One piece of advice -do not buy ram, harddrives or video cards from Apple - buy the base machine and upgrade it yourself much cheaper through NewEgg or CDW. The iMacs are nice, but they're really not built for that kind of heavy lifting you're planning on doing. If you buy 2 iMacs, you pretty much are spending the same amount.
If you get separate cpus add in the cost of the KVM/multi-caster, because there is no software solution I can find to broadcast keyboard commands over TC/IP or Ethernet. I am going to try a D-Link DBT-120 Bluetooth dongle later this week or next to see if I can pair one keyboard to all of my Macs (Dual G5 Tower, 17" Powerbook, Intel Mini) for 3-boxing or more, which might be a cost-effective solution until I can afford a multi-caster. There are a couple of cool free apps for screen and mouse sharing, tho - Synergy works great on my G5 and Mini. If you run 4 copies on a tower, one copy of CloneKeys is all you need, it works great.
I run 3 copies of Wow just fine on a dual G5 with a Radeon 9800 video card and 23" HD Cinema, 4.5 gigs of ram. A new dual XEON quad core? Forget about it. If I had the cash right now, I'd have one.
Plus, it'll run all of your Windows stuff.
If I had the room/money, I'd set up a Windows based system with mini ATX boxen for a 5-box setup in a heartbeat, so I could try multi-boxing in other games - not all of us Mac users are snobs.
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