Brand new 27‑inch iMac for playing WoW

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Hello guys!

I really need your advice. I’m planning to get rid out of 6 years old gaming rig and substitute it with the new desktop. I really want to buy a new iMac with top-notch configuration like Intel’s 3.6GHz 8-core 9th-generation Intel Core i9 processor, 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory and Radeon Pro Vega 48 with 8GB of HBM2 memory. I know Macs are not the best for gaming, but I have several reasons to choose it:

  • My entire family are hostages of Apple’s ecosystem for more than 10 years already: we all have MacBooks, iPhones and Apple TV 4k.
  • I use desktop PC mainly for work, but want it capable of WoW
  • And the most important - I play only World of Warcraft (semi-hardcore raiding, M+ high keys, etc) and no other games.

I know that this new iMac will cost me a fortune and for this sum of money I can easily get an amazing gaming PC, but I don’t really need it.

All in all, my questions is: do you guys believe that the configuration mentioned above will allow me to comfortably WoW on iMac? will I get like 90-100 FPS? Will it handle all the addons and raiding environment?

Thank you very much in advance for time and patience. Will appreciate seeing your opinion on this.

Regards,
George

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Seems a 80+ average FPS should be expected.

The high amount of RAM is gonna help you in raids/dungeons/anywhere with many effects.

The CPU is actually (in many peoples cases) the piece of hardware to look at when you wanna estimate your FPS. 3.6Ghz isn’t crazy, but it is not gonna serve as a bottleneck for your GPU.

I think all in all, you are wasting money on the system, unless u want it for school/businees use aswell :slight_smile: Besides that it will function exactly as you plan in WoW.

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I use the new generation Mac mini - 6 core 3.2Ghz i7 with 16Gb DDR4 (2667) memory and SSD drives.

That was just shy of £1500 and I do still need to but the external GPU.

I bought the Mac because we are also slaves to Mac products and the iCloud and it makes life much easier.

I have to be realistic though - I could have spent considerably less on a Windows machine with far superior on-board graphic card.

The plus side is, I suppose, that the Metal2 engine works very well with WoW

The biggest downside to me is that lack of cursor speed on the Apple Mouse - get a cheap aftermarket one - I hate mine and only use it because I spent the money

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16gb would be enough I think unless you are planing on using it for video photo editing rendering ect I cant really see that becoming obsolete in the next few years for gaming.

I would probably go with the i5 being a 6 core CPU is more then enough for current games but it is a bit of a tough choice games are now starting to become a lot more multi threaded and there are a couple that will already push a 6 core CPU pretty hard and if you are planning on using the Mac for other things the i9 would be the better option and if you are planning on keeping the Mac for quite a long time then the I9 might be the better choice I know you are only play WoW now but having a more powerful CPU could come in handy if you find another game you really like in the next few years that’s more demanding .

if you can afford it go for the Vega 48 then go for it and I would go for the SSD upgrade as well the faster load and boot times just makes everything feel that bit snappier and more responsive and if you need extra storage space you can always get an external drive for back up.

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Hahahahha, just don’t buy that apple crap and your problem is solved.

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Hey, thanks for your replies guys, really appreciate it. Wondering do I need external eGPU as well or Vega 48 will be more then enough?

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Don’t get bogged down looking for high RAM as it’s not needed for gaming. It’s all about the processor. I’m running an AMD Ryzen 5 quad core which performs a lot better than the intel equivalent. I used Macs years ago for things such as photoshop (where high RAM is useful) but I prefer a Windows machine. Personally I’d avoid SSD too, it’s a bit of a gimmick. Yes your boot times will be seconds faster but at the expense of storage capacity and WoW does take up a fair bit of space. You can indeed host it on an external drive but it’s a bit of a faff. Set yourself a budget and simply look online for gaming spec machines and read their reviews. If the budget has no limit then there are some stunning machines out there but you can expect to get a decent gaming PC that’ll do the job perfectly well for around the £1k mark. Prices have come way down from a few years ago.

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I’m curious about this as well.
I use a 2017 imac with 580 video card. It has some cooling issues which seem to be solved in the new macs. I don’t think you will be able to run at 5k resolution but I play at 50% render scale and set the detail to 5. If I play on an external 4k monitor at render scale 50% I can set the details to 10 but the screen is less bright. You won’t get 90-100 fps at any decent setting.
I’m not sure how wow runs on the new mac. Usually “eden clone” on youtube posts a video on WoW/mac combo but I haven’t seen a video on this particular mac yet.
I also use the mac for work and prefer to have just a mac ecosystem in my house. I could try buying a PC, but if I did I would get a RTX2080ti or something and those machines cost 3-4k as well (something like Corsair one). They don’t have such a nice screen though. You still need to buy a decent screen for it on top of the 4k.
The best part of playing on a mac is the great screens, very bright and great colours. It really improves the experience a lot.

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Yeah, Mac screens are really great. I agree on that.

The thing is that I really play only WoW nowadays, but I take it quite serious: mythic raiding, M+ runs, logs and so on. So, for me it is really important that my skills in raids are not decreased by technical inability of the Mac to deliver good performance.

Besides WoW, Macs are really good working machines for me. So, my thought behind it were like … the new iMac costs a fortune, it should definitely run the 15 years old game :wink:

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The Vega 48 should be fine you shouldn’t need an external GPU.

I don’t know if you can under volt them on a Mac but if you can it is worth doing on the PC you can do it in the AMD drivers I have my Vega 64 under volted uses quite a bit less power runs cooler and quieter and boosts a bit higher than running it at stock i’m guessing with it being a Mac you probably cant but if you can it is well worth it…

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Hey George, I’m curious if you got your configuration with the Vega GPU and how well it all performs on 2K/5K resolutions?

Also, have you had the chance to check the temperatures during gameplay?

Cheers!

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Hey Katia,

Thank you for your input, but you are responding to a thread that is 2 months old. I’ll lock this now to prevent further bumps.

Have a few seconds to spare? Let me know how I’m doing!