The upgrades to Apple’s iMacs announced Monday might seem pedestrian, but some observers see them as heralding an exciting new future for the Mac — gaming.

The high-end version of the iMac costs $1,799 and boasts a 24-inch screen, a 2.8-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with an option for 3.06 GHz, and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card, among other goodies.

Writing on his Hardware 2.0 blog, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes provided some intelligence on those specifications and some speculation on the hardware. The 3.06-GHz option, he writes, is a “special run on an existing CPU overclocked to handle the 3.06-GHz workload and 1,066 MHz” on the front-side bus. It’s hosted on a Santa Rosa motherboard, he added.

Working the Hardware

“Apple’s working the current technology hard to get 3.06 GHz out of something designed to give 2.8 GHz here. Why?” he asked.

As for an option for a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics processor,

Kingsley-Hughes said, “This is a high-end GPU and certainly offers far more capability than most Mac users currently need from the iMac.”

“Putting the overclocked processor and a high-end NVIDIA GPU in a box makes that system look like a gaming system to me,” he wrote. Even though Apple has some iMac design constraints, “the company does seem intent on squeezing as much ability as it can out of the components.”

whether Apple is aiming for the gaming market, it might just be expecting gamers to run Windows games via BootCamp — the software that lets users run Windows on Intel-based Macs — or a Mac-based gaming push might be in the works. “Either way, it looks to me like Apple is getting into gaming. And why not, it’s a lucrative market!” Kingsley-Hughes wrote.

Beyond the GPU

However, several blog readers doubted Apple has any such intention. Noting that Apple…

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