 Now I had originally intended to do using the iMac with Windows and a top tier mobile graphics card performance showdown with the Radeon R9 M295X 8GB, yes actually 8GB, versus Nvidia's King of the Hill GTX 980M mobile as separate videos, but my wife and the rest of the internet complained that we've been doing too many multi-part episodes, so here they are together. You won this battle, but not the teaser battle. My GS30 Stealth external graphics card notebook review is coming soon! Experience silent performance with the new Cooler Master Silencio 652S. Minimalist design, maximum compatibility. Click now to learn more. So Boot Camp is frickin' awesome. You just spotlight search Boot Camp Assistant, pop in a USB thumb drive, point it at an ISO, then it walks you through resizing your OS X partition, creating a Windows one, and then without any pre-boot F8 nonsense, it runs the setup process, all the while restarting automatically into the correct thing. Then finally, you land on the Windows desktop, you're prompted to install all the necessary drivers from one executable, it reboots again, and boom! You are ready to rock. The experience is so seamless compared to when I've dual-booted in the past, although admittedly it's been a while. I have so many drives that I rarely see the point in partitioning for multiple OSes, except in cases where the extremely limited upgradability of a particular machine forces me to do it. Now I've had a lot of people ask me to comment on what it's like to run Windows on a Mac, and frankly I don't know what they were expecting. Macs are not made of Dragon scales and the Force, or whatever, so it's exactly the same as running Windows on a PC with the same specs as that Mac. I cannot stress this enough, there is nothing about a Mac that makes it special, other than subjectively beautiful industrial design, driver validation, and component quality control are arguably important things, but they don't affect performance. Oh, and I guess there's a little boot camp doodad in the system tray that lets you reboot directly to OS X if you want. Now the astute among you may have noticed that asterisk on the exactly about 40 seconds ago. What was that thrown in there for? Well, a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that for anything to perform exactly the same, it has to not be hamstrung. On a normal PC with a separate tower and monitor, a 4970K will typically operate at anywhere from 4 GHz to 4.4 GHz, depending on how multi-threaded a workload you're throwing at it, thanks to Turbo Boost, which you can learn more about here. On the iMac, thanks to the quiet, but not particularly powerful cooling system, that CPU idles around 50 degrees, ramps up to 80 degrees in under 10 seconds, then in spite of the fan ramping up aggressively at 30 seconds, begins to thermal throttle at 40 seconds, hits 100 degrees at 50 seconds, and stays there, operating anywhere between 3.6 to 4 GHz with a multi-threaded workload. About a 5 to 15% reduction in the performance that CPU could achieve in something like, you know, multi-core video rendering, if it had a better cooler. It really raises the question, why did Apple bother to give users the option of a top tier chip like this, when it was never going to reach its rated speeds when it matters most anyway? The other reason my asterisk was put in there is something that I was very, very, very disappointed by. Not a lot of these 5K iMacs are out there in the wild, even fewer of them are running Windows, so there wasn't a ton of information about what I'm doing here, and I had to discover for myself that thanks to some combination of AMD's driver, AMD's hardware, and Apple's custom timing controller that enabled them to deliver a 5K single tile display in Windows, you will be limited to 4K resolution max. So that's 3840 by 2160 on your 5120 by 2880 display. Something that doesn't seem to be bothering this fella in the Apple community discussion thread, where folks are saying they've been bounced around between Apple and AMD, and at one point someone says he or she was told to talk to Microsoft about it, but it bothers me a lot. Thanks to the much higher resolution than normal, and much higher pixel density than normal of this display, the approximations that come along with any non-native resolution operation of a monitor, an LCD monitor to be specific, can be more accurate than they otherwise would be, but there is still discoloration and blurriness on text that makes everything look a little fuzzy. What a disappointment. So the only real new information I have since my previous videos on the 27-inch Retina 5K iMac is that it thermal throttles while performing CPU-intensive tasks, seemingly by design, since Apple avoids ramping the cooling fan up for as long as it can before finally giving in and cooling that poor CPU, and it cannot run its display at 5K in a native Windows environment, which coupled with the fact that it also can't be driven as an external display on another PC or Mac, makes this machine optimal for very specific people. So with that mini-conclusion out of the way, we can move on to the next segment of this video, the performance of the R9 M295X versus Nvidia's GTX980M. First a bit about the M295X, a GPU that has only shown up in this iMac in its top-tier configuration so far to my knowledge, although I'm sure someone in the comments will correct me if I'm wrong. It's based on the same Tonga architecture as a desktop R9285, but with 14% more stream processors and texture units, and an 8% reduction in core clock with the same 256-bit memory bus, but in the case of this computer anyway, it features a massive 8GB frame buffer versus the 2GB one on its closest desktop equivalent, presumably because Apple felt it needed it to drive the Retina iMac's 5K display. Not that it kept OS X Yosemite from frequently stuttering while switching desktops or using Mission Control anyway, but today's video is not about running the iMac in Windows anyhow, where jerky animations by the way were a non-issue, until I fired up some games. I tried to game at 4K to at least get some of what I paid for out of the machine, but outside of casual games like League of Legends, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2, which by the way ran fine, I suspect most people will end up turning the system down to 1440p or even 1080p. The good news is that if you want to game on the iMac, some fairly demanding games can be run, if you're okay with reducing your resolution. Crysis 3 on medium details hovered around the 50-60 FPS range with 2x MSAA, and while it was pretty weird, for lack of a better word, sitting there gaming on an iMac, it's got more horses than I think a lot of people give it credit for. Which isn't to say that the R9 M295X was in my mind the best choice for this machine. While it unfortunately wasn't quite released when this system launched, I'd love to see the 5K iMac updated with a GTX 980M option instead. In our 1080p benchmarks, the 980M, which is based on the same GM204 Maxwell core as Nvidia's desktop flagship GTX 980, absolutely crushes AMD's top-tier mobile GPU in spite of the fact that I ran my benchmarks for the 980M on an MSI GT80 Titan laptop whose Core i7 mobile processor was running about 10% slower than the iMac's throttled 4970K in games. So I think that's it. I'm done with the iMac for good now. It was fun while it lasted. I think I've had all the experiences that I care to have with it. Guys, I hope you've had all the experiences you care to have with it, because this is it. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment if you hate multi-part episodes! And as always, there's a link in the video description if you want to support us. 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