Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New iMac, Mac Mini Benchmarks Show Changes Are Slight

Posted by timothy on from the increment-weather dept.

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.

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. They miss several mini points by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Worthless Benchmarks by Telvin_3d · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:test the video in the $1,199.00 $1,499.00 ones by kTag · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Video bench? by LeadLine · · Score: 5, Funny

    Plus the shared memory is usually physically located furthey away

    Isn't that why it takes the bus?