Graphics Upgrade

Can i upgrade things like the graphics card in my iMac?

Its all in one and pretty but can i upgrade the inner guts of it? i want to play games on it but as its a couple of years old the graphics card is... just poor really, i have to play all modern games in low quality, can i upgrade the graphics card and if so, how? Thanks for all your help in advance :)

Public Comments

1. http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-desktops/51881-hypothetically-upgrading-imac-24-graphics-card.html
2. You cannot upgrade the graphics on your stationary macbook.
3. Generally you can't upgrade much in the all-in-ones. Far as I know, because it is basically a laptop in a standing case, best you can do is upgrade the RAM and replace the processor. Unfortunately, the same isn't true of the video card, you're stuck with whatever on-board Apple gave you.
4. hi will sorry,its difficult enough to improve gaming performance in windows based notebooks however since apple imacs are not upgradable this is nigh on impossible however asus who are better known for motherboards and graphic cards released a device called the "asus xg station" ( http://uk.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=5430 ) which is basically a external high end graphics card and allthough its been designed and manufactured for windows based notebooks i am sure there is a osx driver somewhere online,theres linux based nvidia drivers on the nvidia driver page so osx should be avalible somewhere anyway the xg station is a external graphics device/adapter that connects to your apple imac via the express card slot and this then goes to a medium size unit that houses a pci-express x16 interface,and as standard the xg station comes with the nvidia geforce 7900gs which is more than capable of running todays games there are other external graphic cards avalible for example AMD's XGP( http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/06/06/amd_launches_xgp/) is another attempt at producing a graphic card for notebook users and from first impressions it looks quite good the XPG houses a ATI Radeon HD 3870 which is far superior to the direct x 9 compliant geforce 7900gs and will support most of todays dx10 games such as crysis and bioshock and finally theres the amilo graphics booster from Fujitsu Siemens ( http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/home/products/notebooks/amilo_graphic_booster.html ) which has a awesome ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3870 with 512 MB GDDR3 dedicated video memory which is currently the best single gpu gaming card around,well at least from ati however the prices for these devices are the worrying factor,the xg station retails for around £150 were as the xpg is rumoured to be around £250,however the amilo graphics booster has no current price but again will be around the £300 to £400 price frame however when you consider a HD4870 retails for around £200 anyway this makes the amilo graphics booster the best choice out of the three,and especially since it comes with loads of outputs including DVI-I (incl. HDCP), HDMI (incl. HDCP and S/PDIF out), USB 2.0 this is the main problem when buying a laptop/notebook,you buy the notebook most of the time because of the way it looks or the processor however most people seem to forget the gpu(graphics processing unit) and this only comes to light when you try to run a game however some manufactuers are beginning to ship their notebooks with some decent graphic adapters however these tend to start at around £700,so the best advice is if you want a gaming computer then get a desktop pc,notebooks in my opinion never will or have never been the best choice for gamers(unless you have a few grand to spare) any problems let me know good luck mate !
5. No you cannot. You have a mac; one does not buy a mac in hopes of upgrading its video subsystem down the line. That's what windows boxes you build with parts from NewEgg are for. And Brian: Nice wall of text run on sentence O.O