On Second Thought??

[Rookie1986]

I'm still looking to run Warhammer Online and so far haven't settled on what I'm going to do yet but earlier today i was thinking about Booting windows on to my iMac, would this be a worth while option or am i still going to be best buying/building a system specifically for windows and gaming?

/Rookie

[staffsMike]

Worth a shot isn't it. save yourself lots of money if what you already have does the job you want it to. I wouldn't exect native res if that is a 24" iMac though.

[DratUK]

If you have the 8800 in your iMac you should be fine.
Buying my daughter the 24 inch imac next Tuesday as her media production course uses Apple Final Cut.
Jeeze what a price That was a useless piece of info but I thought I would share

[staffsMike]

He has an HD2600 it's in his system specs. It'll do a good job of lower res work.

[Thorsson]

But not WHOL on a 20" monitor IMO. At least I wouldn't want to be running it. Know nowt about Macs, but couldn't he just upgrade the video card?

[DratUK]

Not according to these guys

http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl...o-upgrade.html

Some further reading

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=549117

http://jimlynch.com/index.php/2008/0...e-on-your-mac/

[staffsMike]

Quite hard really. iMac's as far as I know are on laptop internals.

[Rookie1986]

After reading up about macs and using windows on them the results seem to leave a lot to be desired so I think things will just be better if i go for a full windows based system, i have been looking at some good systems on Scan.co.uk for around the £800-£900 range and there prices appear competitive, does anyone know of any other sites that offer reasonable spec systems in the £800-£900 range with interest free credit? And yes i would consider something from Alienware or Dell if its not to over priced or under Spec'd,

Also I've just hit another big problem, and thats the size of the tower units, some of the dimensions mean that the towers are up to 25" deep from front to back, this would be a huge problem for me as my desk is only around the 19-20" mark, what case would you guys recommend that will fit on my desk?

/Rookie

[Pob255]

I seem to remember that with a bit of hacking people got OSX running on pc's with better resaults than the other way around. note: I'm not sure of the leagality of this

Most cases are fairly long, there are shorter cases about but you will start to run into special hardware/hardware limitations.

However there are some good ones about
Akasa Zen 500mm/19.6" good quality, reasonsable cooling and size (and comes in white to match your mac )
Antec 300 465mm/18.3" good quailty and cooling, reasonable size.
Lian-Li PC7-B Plus II 490mm/19.2" high quality, reasonsable cooling and size, all Aluminum no plastic, most costly here but not a vast amount (£50ish)

Basically you're looking at basic midi-tower sizes, all should be fine but can be a bit of a tight fit getting bits in at times, generally not a problem if you plan your build. (put the cpu cooler on iut side the case, trying to fit a cooler esp a large one outside the case when it's this small can be a real problem, although I'd do that for all cases)
Some of these will start haveing problems with the really big graphics cards, so check before you buy.

There are shorter/smaller but you're not moveing into HTPC territory and it gets very restrictive on hardware then.

[Webby]

Silverstone TJ06 not very deep but oh so tall and no problems with the length of graphics cards as the is nothing but the motherboard front to back.

Dimensions 205mm x 474mm x 566mm (Width x Depth x Height)

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=246328

[s_kinton]

For a nice compact case, go for the Silverstone TJ08, its a uATX case so you'll need a uATX board obviously. It comes in Silver or Black and has 2x120mm fans as standard. It also fits a full size graphics cards with ease.

195 x 381 x 378 (WxHxD mm)
http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=378734