Making a switch to Mac...

As per my last post I'm thinking of making a switch to Mac and giving it a proper try.

At the moment I have a reasonable spec PC I was hoping to swap for an iMac 24" as I don't want to downsize my screen in display... I have also tried selling my package together but I'm getting silly low offers which has had me thinking.

I was hoping to sell my setup and get a Core2Duo 24" iMac ... But I could maybe sell my desktop unit and get a Mac Mini and use my current 24" display? Are there any advantages or disadvantages with this?

I'd buy a 24" iMac outright but then I have a lot of money sitting on my desk that I won't use the full use of, plus I have no job at the moment which makes things a little harder.

Here is my current setup, any suggestions what I could maybe do?

Cheers, Chris.

Dell 2407WFP 24" LCD Monitor (Has just over three years warranty remaining)
Thermaltake Soprano Silver Gaming Case
Asus P5N-E SLI 650i Socket LGA775 Motherboard
Intel Core2Quad 2.40Ghz Quad Core Processor
Seasonic S12 430W Silent Gaming Power Supply
nVidia 8800GT 512MB PCI-E Graphics Card
3GB (3 X 1GB DDR2 667Mhz) Memory
Hitatchi Deskstar SATA2 750GB Hard Drive
LiteOn SATA Dual-layer DVDRW Drive
Logitech X-230 2.1 Surround Sound Speaker System
Thermaltake Extreme Silent CPU Cooler
Antec Silent 120MM Speedfans
Dell Optical Mouse
Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard

I use a core2duo 1.8ghz mac mini as my main machine, its quite a decent little system.

Depends really what you want to do with the mac, if you want to be booting to windows to play games then your better off going for the imac, as the mac mini only has the intel gma950 integrated graphics card with no dedicated memory (it leeches of the system memory) where as the 24" imacs come with the geforce 8800 cards with 512mb ram

but if your not bothered about gaming then you may aswell go for the mac mini, i have stuck 4gb of ram in mine and it makes a difference, also upped the hdd to a 320gb drive. i also have 2 externals connected to the machine, 1 500gb for time machine and a 1tb drive with my media on.

The mini's are great for space saving, but if you want more performace then the imac would be your best bet. You can always plug your 24" display into that and have 2 screens :D

Hope this helps
Scottio

Excellent, cheers Scottio.

I think I'll be waiting until after Xmas... LoL.