New iMac, Mac Mini Benchmarks Show Changes Are Slight 200
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.
Video bench? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about a video benchmark between the old 2Ghz MacMini and the new one? The main change in this machine was chipset/video related.
Re:test the video in the $1,199.00 $1,499.00 ones (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.
Benchmarks without an app in mind are useless. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Held Hostage by OS X (Score:4, Insightful)
This is really Apple's huge hole in their product lineup and has been for years now. If you want a replacement for your G4 or even a G5 Powermac tower you're shit out of luck unless you want some huge beast with 8 cores that is setup for being a server, a laptop with a 24" monitor attached to it, or a laptop without a screen or keyboard (bring your own!).
Oh, alternatively you can just buy a Macbook or Macbook Pro laptop and have laptop performance with a smaller screen than the iMac. All they need to do is release a tower "Mac" (drop the Pro even) with standard non-Xeon Intel processors (Intel quad-core Core i7 920 would be perfect), and a *nice* video card lineup option of either low end, medium end, and a high end gamer video card option. Throw in a 640GB or 1TB SATA option, 4GB of memory standard, and so on and you'd have a smoking desktop system. Sadly, Apple will not release this so even though my next system will have these specifications, it will not be a Mac. I'll happily run Windows 7 on it.
Re:Video bench? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh wow, looking at that entry is just sad. I own a PPC mini with the Radeon 9200 with 32 MB of dedicated RAM, and that could certainly handle games (some of them anyway - WoW, Railroad Tycoon 3, Freedom Force, Darwinia, the Pterodactyl shooter it came with) as well as you'd expect a cheap machine to do.
Pretty sad that they gutted the graphics in the later models. Seems like they've almost caught up to 2005 again.
Re:Held Hostage by OS X (Score:3, Insightful)
So what do I buy?
If you're set on a Mac, buy a refurbished tower or other used one. Or, buy a cheaper Mac (mini?) and plug your drives into an external firewire enclosure.
What bugs me, is that they should be trying to get market share up...
They are trying, but they're doing so by appealing to the big market segments and a few specific niches. If they spread themselves too thin they lose overall share. You're one of about 1% of the population that ever adds a drive to their computer. You're part of a mostly non-intersecting group that also can't afford a pro machine. The sad truth is, you are part of a very small market segment it doesn't make business sense for Apple to go after yet. They're just one OEM and already have twice the number of models of other OEMs with half again their market share. It's a drawback to using Macs, they will never have as much hardware variety as all other PC OEMs combined.
Re:Held Hostage by OS X (Score:3, Insightful)
What's wrong with an iMac with external storage? ... The only real downside is that storage is over USB2 or Ethernet (I went with ethernet), neither of which is as fast as internal or external SATA. But if 20MB/s is good enough then it isn't a problem.
For everything but gaming, the graphics on older iMacs was good enough already, including spanning to an eyeboggling 3840 pixels wide with an extra monitor.
You're mistaken about USB or ethernet only. I have 6 external drives. Most of them are on the firewire buses (400 and 800) for video work. Backup and secondary storage is on USB. It works well, though firewire is buggy for some video decks and cameras (outrageous, really).
The only real downside is having a great IPS-quality screen that requires a darkened room because it acts like a freakin' mirror!
Re:test the video in the $1,199.00 $1,499.00 ones (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Held Hostage by OS X (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be thought provocative to suggest this, but what you need is a hackintosh.
Just go over to macintouch, make a note of the spec of the efi-x machine from their review, and either put it together yourself or get someone to put it together. Then, if you've a little spare money and just want a machine that works, buy efi-x, a retail copy of OSX, and do the installation. Otherwise get a copy of the open source efi boot package and do it yourself, without efi-x.
This is probably the most cost effective and performant way to go, and gets you an absolutely standard system, configured however you want, able to use the standard updates. If you read the review, it simply works. The Psystar systems appear to work well also, but the nice thing about efi-x is that it really is a totally standard installation from a standard DVD.
People will object that its not legal or moral. As to the morality, you are just buying a product Apple sells and using it. Admittedly not how they want or expect you to use it, but so what? If I use a chisel as a screwdriver in a moment of desperation, is that immoral? You will, to do the install, have to agree to the EULA, which means you agree to a contract forbidding what you are doing. Is that immoral? Personal question. The counterargument would be that Apple has no moral right to tell you what to do with what you have bought.
Is it illegal? No, you are breaching a EULA clause the enforceability of which has yet to be decided by the courts. It is certainly not illegal to do it in the sense of, its not against the law. It might, conceivably, expose you to civil suit from Apple. If they ever found you had done it. If they then started to sue end users. Not very likely. Go do it!