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ArsTechnica Reviews The Intel Mac Mini (Core Solo)
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put together a review of the recently announced Intel-powered Mac mini. The model reviewed was the public's first look at a Core Solo desktop from Apple and the results are promising: 'Up until Apple's "fun" announcement on the last day of February, there was really no indication of how Apple's low-end Intel offerings would be presented. Now that Apple has disclosed the specification and price points for their entry-level machines, we can get a better idea of where Apple is trying to take their product line. For those people who might be unaware, two new Mac Mini models were released and by most accounts, the products have been well received aside from a few quibbles over specifications.'"
I'm happy it's al least processor upgradable. See here. Upgrading the processor would speed the internal graphics as well. Not a bad little bugger.
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
The only really important thing to me is that they improved on the atrociously poor HDD of the original Mini. About 80% of the beach-ball-spinning I've had to endure would just go away, and videos wouldn't immediately start stuttering whenever any other program at all touched the HDD. Compiling software should also be much quicker, which is another gripe I have.
It can display at that resolution, sure, but it's a question of performance when decoding H.264 files (or naked MPEG-2 files) on the fly.
It's also a question of what frame-rate and resolution it can handle when playing games.
The bump in CPU power over the old mini is significant, but the hit to the system from having a shared-memory GPU is a step in the opposite direction, where anything video-intensive is concerned.
I'm waiting to hear what happens when somebody hooks up an EyeTV 500 to it, and pulls up the info box to see if it displays the HDTV signal in full resolution and frame rate, or scales down to "1/4" like the G4 minis did.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
On the old G4 mini, my experience was that Quicktime generally out-performed VLC (which seemed to out-perform MPlayer). YMMV.
I was always under the impression that the problem with integrated graphics was that the cooperative sharing of memory between the CPU and GPU created a performance hit. That's not really something you can get around by writing "better drivers." It's just the nature of the beast.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
My mini has the same specs as you except double the RAM, and it's fairly snappy (not as nice as my G5 tower with 1.5 GB RAM, but still very usable). I think it's most likely just insufficient memory. I've had bad luck in the past with Apple's "minimum RAM" configurations.
> For starters, upgrading to paired DIMMs will
They ship paired anyway.
> the Intel compilers for Mac are on the way.
Nope... they've been around for months.
I'm not sure how you picked up an informative mod, since you asked questions and provided no information, but such is Slashdot.
Anywho: I couldn't tell you how it would do with an MPEG-2 stream at 1920x1080, but I do know my Core Duo mini plays 1080p H.264 QuickTime movies at full resolution with no frame dropping.
So far as games: who buys a Mac to play games in the first place? And when people do buy a gaming PC, do they typically go for the lowest end machine available? Personally, I'd have to answer no to both of those questions, so the gaming contention doesn't really make sense here.
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