Mac mini to PC Hack

DiZASTiX writes "Kevin Rose, the ever so popular host of G4/TechTV's The Screen Savers, has managed to fit a PC inside the Mac mini. 'I've seen a ton of articles around the web lately comparing the Mac mini to the near full size desktop PC. What they fail to compare is the amount of computing power per square inch you get with the Mini. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create the fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor.' The article covers most everything he did and includes pictures."

Comments

Re:MirrorDot link

[hostyle]

how hard was an actual non-mangled clickable link?. Kind of a pity mirrordot is /.ed too

faster?!?

[ecloud]

No way is a 1 GHz Via Nehemiah going to be faster than a 1.25 GHz G4. The mini is already one of the fastest PCs (personal computer, this includes macs by the way) that has been fit into such a small space.

I have an Epia system; to me it feels pretty anemic for its clock speed in comparison to say a PII or better.

So..

[beelsebob]

It's lacking a CD drive, it's probably gonna overheat because he trimmed down the heat sync provided and it's a slower CPU... I say that the phrase we're all looking for is:

macMiniScore++;

Re:Need a review

[kc8apf]

The Espresso does not even seem to come close to what a Mac mini offers performance wise. The specs you link to show that it has a max processor speed of 500Mhz. The Mac mini goes up to 1.4Ghz. They say that a celeron can go higher, but not 900Mhz higher.

The video card is also a 4MB card. The Mac mini has a ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB of RAM. Again, a huge difference.

While the Espresso is in the right ballgame for size, weight, etc, performance is not even close.

Re:Nah! Let's try something better...

[cpt kangarooski]

The original name of the Macintosh was Macintosh. It stemmed from a project (called Annie) to create a cheap gaming console, but they weren't related except that the person assigned to Annie countered with the proposal for Macintosh.

The Lisa was a completely seperate thing, but a lot of ideas did get shared between the two groups.

Nehemiah 1Ghz Processor?

[Halo5]

I sold my Mini ITX (1Ghz Nehemiah) setup on eBay so that I could purchase my Mini Mac without losing any money. After having used both, I can state this difinitively: In no way does the Nehemiah come close to coming close to being as fast as the G4.

Never mind the media encoding/decoding capabilities of the G4. It doesn't even come close in regular desktop use. Not even with Linux installed. To even do half what the G4 can do encoding/decoding wise, you'd have to add a PVR card (which won't fit in that case).

If the guy is doing this to build the "fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor," he should have left the G4 in there (unless PC=Intel/AMD in this case).

I'm all for hardware hacking, but I hate to see a perfectly good machine go to waste. I hope at least that he retrofitted in a non-destructive way so that he can put the original machine back together again. Some people just have too much money... :)

BTW, If I was a VIA executive, there's no way that I would loan out a Nehemiah for review so that it could be pitted against the G4. Nothin' but bad news there. Somebody outta get fired over that one!

Re:Need a review

[Dr. Sigmund Freud]

Tiger's core video will require 64mb to operate but Apple's releasing systems with a paltry 32mb of vram.

Just a clarification. Some of the new eye-candy needs 64 Mb VRAM to work (Droplet works with 32Mb, Burn and Flash don't; and this is on Panther 10.3.7)

Tiger will need 64MB VRAM for CI/CV to be crunched in the GPU. However, if the GPU does not have the requisite memory/power, Tiger will be smart enough to direct the CI/CV crunching to be done by the CPU (unlike Panther, which just sends the eye-candy to the GPU, regardless of whether or not the GPU can do it).