Hi,
I made some experiences in the past using Apples IMac with Bootcamp to run the Pandoras Box Manager on it.
Basically it is a nice idea to use the big IMacs since they have a great display, but I had a lot of Problems with them.
One Problem was that the performance goes down very quick if you are using the preview. What happend is that the Manager is not running smooth enough any more. If you run clips on the timeline you will see that the clips rendered by the server are not running smooth. It seems that they are speeding up and down. This stops as soon as you switch off the Preview.
The other thing, and this is really a big Problem, is that the IMac has a big temperature Problem. The whole body of this computer gets very hot, and as soon as the room temperature rises, the IMac tends to just switch off. I had this with different computers in different enviroments, but its always the same way. You do see kind of a blue screen for a second. For my opinion the grafic cards gives a temerature alert to boot camp, and boot camp sends the computer so shut down. This issue is a big Problem, since this can happen on sudden during a show.
Actually yesterday night, it happen in a musical show I was operating. I was able to reboot the system within a few minutes and most of the audience did not recognize it. This was the first crash ever I had in a show.
After that I turned down the display backlight to minimum and for luck the IMac stayed on for the rest of the show. We used the same computer for programming during five days and almost five nights. It never crashed, but in the show the heating of the venue was on, and we hat a lot of audience in. So it was probably a 15° warmer than in programming state.
From this experince I recommend NOT to use a IMac in Show situations. It can simply switch of without warning and your show is done.... So please do not use the computers for Pandoras Box in Show situations.
best regards
Patrick