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New iMac, Mac Mini Benchmarks Show Changes Are Slight
jfpoole writes "Primate Labs has posted some preliminary benchmarks of the new iMacs and Mac minis. They found that processor speed is virtually unchanged between the older and newer models. Clearly these new Macs are minor updates rather than the major upgrades many Mac users were hoping for." As reader olddotter points out, there are changes, also slight, to the new Mini's case.
With the possible exception of going from Intel's ghastly embedded graphics to Nvidia's merely weak embedded graphics.
Geekbench 2 only measures processor and memory performance which is why models with the same processors but different video cards have roughly the same score.
I was under the impression that most of the upgrades were to the video cards. With Snow Leopard and OpenCL coming I'd like to see how the new machines compare.
Second, why use GeekBench? Yes it's Cross Platform but it's not free. XBench is free (beer/not speech) and does include video. My 9600 trounces my old ATI card. It even includes a Submitted DB like GeekBench.
I recently took the Mac plunge. After two months, my verdict:
Pro's
1. It's not Windows! Yay!
2. It's not just not Windows, OSX has some really cool features. Mac products seem to have some more thinking put into them as opposed to the Windows-based machines. Yeah, they have their moments of stupid like with cracking Mac Cube cases, powerbook latch failures and screen cracking, but it's nice to get a new OS and be tickled by smart ideas instead of the feeling I get with Windows which is "how are they going to bone the next version this time?"
Con's
1. Damn them for keeping upgrades under wraps. I would have held off if I knew the new one was only two months away.
2. Too dangerous to work on inside. The iMac is technically user-servicable but there's no way I'd risk doing it myself. PC innards are built like tanks and the iMac looks like it's built out of aluminum foil, tissue paper and dreams. I'd rather let the Mac store people risk breaking it and buy me a new one than do anything myself. I'd be much happier with a more robust design but understand that twinky-dink laptop parts is how they make it fit in such a small package.
3. You really pay a lot more for the parts with Apple. People will go back and forth with you on this one, are you paying for quality or hype? Even if your Vista computer is cheaper, do you really want to use Vista? Ok, you could by a generic Windows pc and run Ubuntu, are you happy? Ah, but then support for Linux isn't as good as for Windows/OSX. You can go round in circles with this.
Overall, Apple has done good and bad but the good is ahead this time around. Versus Microsoft, I don't think I've had a cheerful thought about any of their products since Windows 2000.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The older MacMini already had shared video memory using the Intel GMA chipset. It could be a win here, since the last time the memory was dedicated was with the PowerPC minis!
Menzoberranzan Networks
Of course there is little change in the CPU benchmarks: the CPUs changed only very slightly. The real meat in these new machines is the significantly upgraded graphics chips. If you are a gamer, these machines are now acceptable for all but the most extreme requirements. The ATI 4850 is ATI's #2 performer right now, which is pretty good for an iMac. I consider this to be a *value* upgrade, as well, since you are now getting a bit more machine, 2x ram, faster graphics, for a little less than before.
While Mac gear has a higher price point for a reason, this upgrade is nice on the base unit. :
1. Superdrive - the old base base model could only burn CD and read DVDs.
2. NVIDIA vs Intel 950 display chips - the five fold improvement make more games playable - especially with all the Windows options.
3. Although the article still only references CPU an 8% improvement is of course an 8% improvement.
4. Firewire 800 vs Firewire 400 - again a very nice speed gain.
5. Dual display vs. Single display interface for HTPC - my main use.
6. iLife 9 with several big improvements to what is already the most important reason for owning a Mac.
7. 13 watt low power mode - I assume this is sleep.
There are two negatives:
1. Remote costs extra I believe 15-20
2. Display adaptors aren't cheap at 20-30 for each of the display outs.
Which I can live with as a trade off. This on top of the nice Core 2 Duo + Bluetooth + Wireless N + GigE
I personnally look forward to salting a few of these around to get me out of the "My PC is slow again" trap.
Divemaster
test the video in the $1,199.00 $1,499.00 ones that when from 128 - 256 vram to system ram for video.
Also the $1,799.00 has a weak NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 256MB memory that is just a 9500gt card.
The $2,499 mac pro has a very weak card for it's price when you can find systems for over a $1000 LESS WITH X2 THE RAM, SAME OR BETTER CPU POWER AND MUCH BETTER VIDEO.
The question is what will Psystar and others do now?
Haha, amazing, you're absolutely right. Both the older and newer models are using shared memory. According to this, the NVIDIA 9400M should blow the that intel 950 out of the water. You might actually be able to play games on the mini now.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Any Mac Mini should be able to do DVD-quality video over WiFi without breaking a sweat. (Assuming a dedicated 802.11g network with reasonable performance.)
I use GigE to an AEBS using a Drobo as an AirDisk with a 2006 Mac Mini. 720P video is no problem at all. It can't quite handle 1080P video, but I believe that's a CPU issue. Other than the CPU, read performance on the Drobo should be the weakest link, and it should be able capable of reading back multiple Bluray streams concurrently.
-Peter
These benchmarks are meaningless and worthless. The site itself says that these are artificial tests based almost entirely on processor power. So, similar processors with the same RAM is going to give the same 'score' regardless of OS, video card, hard drive performance or any other factor. In an update defined by new graphics chipsets that were build specifically to accelerate high definition video playback these geniuses are testing the processor performance.
These are not Mac benchmarks. They are intel processor benchmarks. You could have gotten the same numbers months ago (and many sites have) by testing the new intel processors as they came out.
If you are interested in some useful numbers, anandtech did some good competitive tests on the current generation of integrated graphics chipsets. No, these are not inside a Mac Mini, but it provides much more relevant information than this ridiculous article.
One of the big reasons shared memory is bad is because you have to share a bus, rather than have a dedicated bus just for video memory. Also, you have to deal with different memory timings, for CPU and Video access. Plus the shared memory is usually physically located furthey away (just kidding!).
Do what my friend did who is really into digital photography, but his daughter is in college. So a new Mac Pro was out of the question. He bought a Mac Mini to replace a dual 867 G4 PowerMac. It works great for running Photoshop and Aperture. Then he slapped 4 320GB drives (which were the best bang for the $$$ at the time) into the PowerMac and uses it as a file server over Firewire 400.
It works like a charm and I know he has well over 200k digital images between his 10MP digital camera and lots and lots of scanned slides. I think he spent about $1100 total for the Mac Mini and the extra HDD's.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Not at all. They're located in the NAP4 building of Switch Communications in Las Vegas. It's a rather cute looking cage.
They can host rather cheaply, as the machines do not take much space or power, bringing down the price for the provider. If you really want to colo an OS X server and don't need an X-Serve or Mac Pro, it's a rather neat option.
Obviously you don't make full use of yours... This is the current state of my imac:
PhysMem: 761M wired, 1526M active, 716M inactive, 3010M used, 62M free.
VM: 13G + 374M 946799(0) pageins, 313514(0) pageouts
When I eject an optical disk from the drive, it's hot to the touch, and the vent on top makes a good handwarmer.
When I was setting up the mini I got for my parents a few months ago, I started BOINC on it. Within short order (half hour or so), it was hot to the touch. A little while later, the network stopped working (it would transmit and not receive or vica versa, I forget which) until I rebooted, and then it would work for a few minutes. It was ok after I reconfigured BOINC to only use 50% of the cpu, but sent it in for repair as it was no longer reliable. It's been running ok since that way.
Likewise, my Macbook Pro (1rst gen Intel) got so hot you couldn't put it on your lap until I installed smcfancontrol to up the fan speed; I use it as my HTPC for some things, and the internal temperature (reported by the same tool) typically runs up to 130+F even with the fan at 3000rpm. BOINC is out of the question, and I'd think twice about trying to do any video rendering on it.
Macs have a lot of nice things about the hardware, but heat management is not one of them.
FWIW, this is the state of my Mac Pro at home (w/6G ram):
PhysMem: 905M wired, 3087M active, 849M inactive, 4839M used, 1305M free.
VM: 19G + 374M 323753(0) pageins, 169268(0) pageouts
I don't believe in idle computers...
The new mini's do in fact support dual monitors. They have a mini DVI port and a mini display-port. They come with a mini DVI to DVI adapter, so you'll need to get a separate display-port to DVI or VGA adapter to run a second monitor (or I guess if you have one of those fancy new Apple monitors maybe you won't need any adapter.)