With an unusual Monday morning product announcement, Apple released an update to its line of aluminum-clad iMac [1] consumer desktops. The 20-inch and 24-inch flat-panel all-in-one computers now sport faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors, replacing the previous slate of 2.0, 2.4, and 2.8 GHz processors with 2.4 and 2.66 GHz options in the 20-inch form factor, and 2.8 and 3.06 GHz processors in the 24-inch units (see "Apple Releases New Aluminum iMacs, Refreshes Mac mini [2]," 2007-08-13).

The iMacs can be customized with up to 4 GB of RAM, as well as larger SATA hard drives, up to 500 GB in the $1,199 low-end configuration and up to 1 TB for the $2,199 high-end iMac.

Hard-core gamers will love the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GS video card with 512 MB of video memory in the top-of-the-line iMac configuration (and available as a $150 option on the 2.8 GHz 24-inch model). Apple says its testing with Quake 4 demonstrates twice the performance from the Nvidia graphics card over the ATI Radeon HD in the other iMac configurations. (The first three iMac models offer varying Radeon cards with 128 or 256 MB of memory.)

[1]: http://www.apple.com/imac/
[2]: http://db.tidbits.com/article/9107

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