Q6600 OC'd with 5850 vs. Apple iMac i7 with 6970m

[SoupyFlow]

I currently own both a custom gaming PC I built a couple of years ago, and a recently purchased 27 inch Apple iMac. The gaming PC has older tech, but of course can be upgraded and doesn't use any mobile parts. Where as the iMac has newer tech, but cannot be upgraded for the most part and does use mobile parts.

I am trying to decide if I should keep my trusty gaming PC, or just sell it and use my iMac via boot camp as my main gaming machine. Or another route would be some small upgrades to the gaming PC that would still make it much better for gaming.

With either machine, i will be using a monitor that displays a 1920x1080 res. Also, the only thing I have OC'd right now is the gaming PC's Q6600.

Here are the basic specs of each machine:

GAMING PC:

-Q6600 OC'd to 3.0 GHz
-4GB DDR2 (Mobo is expandable to 8GB)
-Radeon 5850 1GB
-Asus P5K-E Mobo
-650 watt PSU
-Windows 7 64 Bit

27 INCH APPLE IMAC:

-Core i7 3.4 GHz
-12GB DDR3
-Radeon 6970m 2GB
-Windows 7 64 Bit


The main games I play or plan on playing are BF3, Old Republic, Black Ops, MW3, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and others.

Right now I use the Gaming PC for gaming and the iMac for work, but any suggestions on if I should just ditch the gaming pc for now or keep it would be great. Thanks in advance

 

[Termie]

The HD6970m is a notebook graphics card. It is basically equivalent to an underclocked HD6850 on the desktop: http://www.amd.com/us/products/note...md-radeon-6900m/Pages/amd-radeon-6900m.aspx#2

That makes is just slightly slower than your 5850. It would be nice if you could overclock it, but I have no idea if that's possible on a Mac.

Looks like that iMac processor is a quad-core from the website. Maybe even an i7-2600? If that's true, I actually think your iMac may be the better gamer going forward. Pretty amazing, but if Boot Camp actually works for gaming (haven't really heard of a lot of people trying that), then that system will be pretty capable. Also, 4GB of ram is just the minimum for gaming today, so that's another factor in favor of the iMac.

 

[SoupyFlow]

Thanks for the reply Termie. Yeah, boot camp installs Windows on a Mac 100% natively with no emulation what so ever. I believe all of the parts in the iMac are mobile version parts, the i7 is quad core and a sandy bridge as well.

I do have the ability to upgrade the 5850 in the gaming PC to something higher, but I am also afraid at some point my Q6600 will start being a bottleneck. I can also upgrade the iMac from 12GB to 16GB pretty easily, but I don't know how much of a difference that will really make. Or additionally I can upgrade the gaming PC from 4GB to 8GB as well, but 8GB is the max for the gaming PC.