Marrying the iMac monitor to a PC

September 4, 2006 8:32 AM

A long shot, I know. Can the monitors on Intel iMacs be connected to a Windows box?

I'm tempted by the new 20" flat-panel iMacs, but I'd like to run games on my Windows box as well.

This is doable via boot camp, you say. Well, maybe. But I'd prefer to run the games on Windows, taking advantage of the non-emulated environment and (somewhat) speedier graphics card one can buy for a PC box.

Best solution: connect the PC box to the iMac monitor, and use as is. Any semi-kludgey way to accomplish this?

posted by Gordion Knott to computers & internet (10 answers total)

Windows isn't emulated on iMacs. If you boot through Boot Camp, you'll be running just as fast as you would on a Windows box ... faster, because it's likely that the specs on your iMac as far as proc power are *better* than what you've got in your PC.

I haven't had any issues with video card being slow, but I don't tend to play FPS.

That being said, it's annoying to have to reboot.
posted by SpecialK at 8:37 AM on September 4, 2006

Boot Camp isn't emulation; it's running Windows natively on the machine.

You can plug into an iMac's monitor about as well as you can plug into a laptop's screen: i.e., you pretty much have to open it up and get the soldering iron out. It's not like there's a video-in.
posted by mcwetboy at 8:42 AM on September 4, 2006

mcwetboy sums it up succinctly.
posted by furtive at 8:51 AM on September 4, 2006

You can plug into an iMac's monitor about as well as you can plug into a laptop's screen: i.e., you pretty much have to open it up and get the soldering iron out. It's not like there's a video-in.

Not even that. You'd need to find a PC graphics card that can output LVDS (the internal video format of laptops and iMacs).

Intel Macs have a standard-ish PC motherboard. Boot Camp is really just a set of Windows drivers for Apple hardware and a cute installation wizard. It's not emulation.
posted by cillit bang at 9:39 AM on September 4, 2006

Running windows on an IntelMac can be slower, because of boot camp's BIOS layer. Disk I/O is reportedly slower because of the I/O mode used in the BIOS Layer (provided by boot camp because the Intel Macs use EFI not BIOS).
posted by nightwood at 10:44 AM on September 4, 2006

to refute nightwood: Windows, unless you've got the drives set to PIO mode, use DMA for disk access. DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. the basic gist of it is the hard drive/controller takes up a bit of memory, and all access to that bit of memory go straight to the controller. that bypasses the BIOS. if Windows is using PIO mode (Programmed I/O) then it's still using the BIOS, but you can turn that off, and it's not enabled by default (though Windows will fall back if it has problems getting at the disk).

(this, incidentially, can be a problem but not with the iMacs - just the Mac Pros right now, and it seems to be a driver issue. link is a google search. all the other Intel-based computers don't seem to have the problem, since they use different chipsets.)
posted by mrg at 11:45 AM on September 4, 2006

I haven't had a problem running demanding Windows games on an Intel iMac. You can overclock the GPU in it quite a bit.
posted by trevyn at 1:46 PM on September 4, 2006

(Sorry about the confusion regarding emulation. My bad.)

trevyn - is the system up to running games less than six months in age -- the "hardcore gamer only" games? Any slowdowns or stuttering due to the flat-panel monitor?
posted by Gordion Knott at 2:28 PM on September 4, 2006

To second (and third, etc) what everybody's saying, Boot Camp is most certainly not emulation. That couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, it is a full, native installation of Windows on a separate partition of the Intel Mac's hard drive. It runs software at full speed, and is not part of any 'environment.' It's Windows, running directly on an Intel computer, just like any you might get from Dell or any other PC vendor. It just has an Apple logo on the front.

You may be confusing Boot Camp with the other recent piece of software, Parallels, which runs Windows in a virtualization scheme from within OS X.

In my experience, Windows games, even recent and resource-intensive ones, run smoothly from within the Boot Camp Partition (Half-Life 2, WoW, etc). The monitor is a beaut, and though I don't know what you mean about stuttering "due to the flat-panel monitor," I haven't had any problems running high-level games at pretty high framerates.
posted by Eldritch at 2:54 PM on September 4, 2006

on my macbook pro i was able to run the half life 2 demo pretty well (nb : i don't have a "gaming machine" to compare to). i'm sure someone out there has done benchmarks using a typical battery of tests on an imac vs a dell or hp or what have you.
posted by tip120 at 7:18 PM on September 4, 2006