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Had the opposite experience. My first Apple computer, a 27” iMac lasted less than 6 months on my desk. Gave it to my daughter, and bought a more robust Windows machine for less money. The horsepower just wasn’t there. It had a criminally under powered video subsystem in a $3k machine, and I had upgraded to the best available. Now I have a machine that can actually run my software at native 2560 by 1440 with acceptable frame rates. The more expensive iMac could not, and that’s a bottom line you just can’t cheat.

Where to start ...

If your iMac died - take it to Apple and walk out of the store with another one. Apple is probably one of the top end stores in the Customer Support arena

$3,000? Really? iMacs in the 27 inch range start at $2,000. Upgrading to a 2 Gig AMD HD6970M takes you to $2,299 (including the upgraded i9 Intel Chipset). It would be foolish to buy the additional memory from Apple, as they are 2-3x more expensive for the same DIMMs from Amazon.

At the $3,000 pricetag, you would want/need to hit the Mac Pro with the Xeon Processor, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Hard drive and then run two of the AMD HD5770's each with 1 GB of RAM. That would set you back to $2,749. You can get a very good Dell Ultrasharp 27 inch monitor in the $250 price range.

And, if this isn't enough - you can bump from the 4 Core Xeon processor, to the 6 Core Xeon.

I think you will admit that is a pretty powerful workhorse.

Apple or anyone else - pretty much everyone in this league uses the same Intel chipsets.

If your iMac died - take it to Apple and walk out of the store with another one. Apple is probably one of the top end stores in the Customer Support arena

It didn't die. It just had a substandard GPU, even though it was the upgraded GPU. It's a mobility card in a desktop. Couldn't deal with it.

Keyword: Starting. You can't blame it on the extra memory, as that was only $100. $200 for the better processor, $100 for 8gb of mem, $100 for the upgraded GPU and $600 for a SSD.

The comparable Windows machine has better specs including a 512gb SSD, and was still cheaper, and smokes the iMac in every way. The Mac was pretty. That was it's only strongsuit.

FWIW, the NV590GTX that's in the Windows box, is faster than two HD5770's by far.