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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.
For the first time, both the mini and the imac have enough memory capacity to be useful. Now if only they'd learn how to keep their cool when you actually use them, and make key components (like disk drives) accessible for replacement, they'd be killer machines.
What about a video benchmark between the old 2Ghz MacMini and the new one? The main change in this machine was chipset/video related.
Menzoberranzan Networks
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 was glad to see Firewire 800 on it, but it would be much better if they just gave an eSATA jack on the back. With appropriate storage, it would be just right to run XBMC.app under the television to serve movies. I already have an older Mac Mini serving as the family dictionary/browser/billpay machine and light server, but wifi just isn't fast enough to do significant data transfers.
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The new mac mini can handle world of warcraft without it looking like the original Quake, only blurrier. I wouldn't call this a "minor update".
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
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
Apple changed the hardware across the product lines to support the new features in Snow Leopard. Will the performance still be slight then?
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.
You'll have to look for a while as the Mac Pro is the only PC available today on the market with a Nehalem processor. But keep shouting, somebody might believe you.
They found that processor speed is virtually unchanged between the older and newer models.
I recently bought some Sun servers. My colleagues told me they were "very slow", but since I had a loaner pair in-house, I decided to benchmark them just for a "baseline".
I benchmarked them, and found that these new machines were the fastest I could buy in class.
Were my colleagues wrong? The answer is no - its just that their benchmarks were useless for my application. Their application's needs were quite different than mine. Their app was FP intense, and mine was memory i/o intense.
I ended up buying the machine they didn't buy. They passed them up because they were slow. But I bought them because they were fast.