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.

Slight, but important

[vanyel]

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.

under the TV

[Speare]

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.

Yeah, the mac mini can play games now.

[mr_da3m0n]

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".

Re:Video bench?

[je ne sais quoi]

I agree, in particular I want to see if twice as much shared DDR3 is any slower than dedicated DDR2 for the GPU. When this was announced yesterday, there were a huge number of people [slashdot.org] insisting that the graphics processors were a step downward because the graphics memory wasn't dedicated any more. Since I'm using DDR3 in my new home built PC, I suspect that the speed of the DDR3 will offset any advantage by using dedicated DDR2 memory, but no one really agreed with me. Of course, they couldn't prove me wrong either, they just kept insisting over and over again that "shared memory" sucks, but I'm not so sure in this particular comparison which would be better.

gasp

[Quiet_Desperation]

Minor updates in a cratering economy. Color me stunned. :-\

I was considering an iMac if it had a quad core, though. Not sure what to do now. The 24" falling to the price of the previous 20" is a pretty good deal, I would think.

What about Snow Leopard?

[__aaclcg7560]

Apple changed the hardware across the product lines to support the new features in Snow Leopard. Will the performance still be slight then?

Re:Video bench?

[jandrese]

On the other hand, it's hard to get any slower than Intel GMA graphics. There are some cases where it is faster to use software rendering instead of the Intel chip.

Re:They miss several mini points

[Anonymous Coward]

7. 13 watt low power mode - I assume this is sleep.

No way this is sleep. It must be 13 watts when idling turned on. Sleep is easily less than 4 watts on most machines. I'd bet it's closer to 1W on the mini.

Held Hostage by OS X

[acomj]

I like mac OSX a lot. I'm using it on a macbook and and old (needs to be replaced) dual 1ghz g4. I have 4 drives in the old g4 for a total of 1.5 TB (it has a sata card). I take a lot of photographs a do video editing , all the stuff that mac software makes usefull. I have a great lcd.

So what do I buy? I'd like a tower, but at 2500$ or whatever its too expensive. The mini doesn't have the expandable storage. FW800 might work with external drives, but I'd like lots of ram for photoshop and lightroom. When looking at 1200$ PC towers, they give a lot for that price.

I'm willing to pay a premium for OSX, but they don't have the hardware I want.

Thus the HW lock in I'm suffering. I use Apeture so I'm actually contemplating switching.

What bugs me, is that they should be trying to get market share up, so each machine is worth more (more software will be written). Gametap just dropped mac today.

Re:Memory?...keep their cool?? Huh???

[that this is not und]

Heat management has ALWAYS been a Mac issue. Jobs made it a point of ideology with the Mac Plus that it would NEVER have a cooling fan. They'd identified cooling fans as an IBM (what they called non-Mac computers back then) thing. So there were expensive hardware upgrades like a muffin fan in a plastic shroud that you could shove down into the handle hole of your Mac Plus (the fan assy cost 300 bucks or so!) to keep the thing cool. It had to remain a third-party accessory because of ideology.