Upgrade to 4GB--gives measureable speed increase results...

[Night_Sailor]

I have been upgrading my 1.83GHz C2D Mac Mini "LEO" every few months. At present it has a 5200rpm 320GB disk, 3GB Ram, and saving the best for last--a 2.33GHz CPU.

My original Ram purchase was from OWC, and I chose 3GB. After reading that the 4GB upgrade provided an improvement, I decided to pull one memory board and put in a second 2GB memory board.



Not long ago, I pulled the CPU heat sink off to change the Radio Shack thermal paste for Arctic Silver. While I was in there I swapped the two memory boards to put my existing 2GB Ram board on the bottom--knowing that my new OWC memory board would be arriving soon--I planned on pulling the machine apart and wanted to make it easier to pop in the new memory board. My goof was the 1GB board did not get firmly seated, so I was running on 2GB --not noticing the missing 1GB--which I rarely used anyway. I later checked and found my scores a bit higher with only one memory board compared to two mismatched boards.

One reason I didn't notice it right away was my XBench score didn't change. The machine was hitting almost exactly a score of 145 in three separate runs. Next I installed the second 2GB memory board and ran XBench again with a score over 153.

Here is a comparison of the best runs for 2GB Ram and 4 GB Ram. (ignore the image label citing 3GB--2GB was installed properly. You can clearly see their is a modest, 5% improvement in speed. 11% if you just compare memory tests.



When I was comparing XBench scores I noticed the missing 1GB or Ram. but I don't think it would effect the test scores because past test scores were almost exactly the same as the ones list above with 2GB of Ram.

Here is older XBench test run some months ago with 3GB of RAM. You can see the score is lower--but within the random variation of test scores. I think this is proof that their is little or no difference in XBench scorres between 2GB and 3GB other than the normal random variation in testing due to the odd scores in random disk testing--if anything, 3GB of Ram is slower than a single 2GB memory board.



Here is a side by side comparison of the two test runs without disk testing. This will produce a higher than normal number, but it give you a good idea of the improvement in speed. I compared the highest of three runs for each configuration.



So the lesson is, dual channel works and provides a significant speed increase. I measured an improvement of 7.6% for all tests and 7.6% for memory testing--comparable to the 5% overall and 11% (memory scores) measured with disk testing enabled.

Looking at just memory testing in XBench, we see scores vary between 7.6% and 11% in improvement by going to dual channel. These are more accurate since full tests include disk tests which are random and not valid for memory comparision.

So what else can be done to make a Mac Mini faster? Perhaps a faster 7200rpm hard drive, or better yet an SSD when prices drop.

While it will be impossible to achieve a test score that will match the diskless score of 203--at least we know the theoretical limit for a top score for a 2008 Mac Mini. Realistically, it might be possible to hit a score of 160 with a 7200 rpm hard drive--perhaps still better with a small partition on the outside edge of the disk, and perhaps a score of 175 or so with a fast SSD. That would be quite impressive for the "bottom of the line" Mac Mini. In any case, the only way to find out, is to try it.

Software speed increases: I've noticed that each release of Leopard has boosted XBench scores. I'm hoping Snow Leopard give a big jump in speed. So far SL, testing on other platforms [MacBook Pro] has not yield any big increases in speed--much slower in fact, but only the final release, and future patches will tell the final story there.
_________________
Night Sailor

[dwhite601]

Here are the results of my new Mac Mini with a Western Digital Scorpio Black 7200rpm 320GB drive and 4GB of Crucial DDR3 memory

Results 142.02
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G2030)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model Macmini3,1
Drive Type WDC WD3200BEKT-00F3T0
CPU Test 129.24
GCD Loop 227.45 11.99 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 109.35 2.60 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 88.98 2.94 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 162.11 28.23 Mops/sec
Thread Test 261.32
Computation 353.59 7.16 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 207.24 8.92 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 178.77
System 199.32
Allocate 254.32 933.95 Kalloc/sec
Fill 162.10 7881.55 MB/sec
Copy 202.03 4172.76 MB/sec
Stream 162.06
Copy 153.72 3174.95 MB/sec
Scale 154.49 3191.71 MB/sec
Add 171.37 3650.46 MB/sec
Triad 170.40 3645.24 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 168.94
Line 139.04 9.26 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 172.74 51.57 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 142.22 11.59 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 144.19 3.64 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 377.52 23.62 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 132.08
Spinning Squares 132.08 167.55 frames/sec
User Interface Test 268.04
Elements 268.04 1.23 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 67.07
Sequential 104.47
Uncached Write 126.07 77.41 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 123.27 69.74 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 65.38 19.13 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 143.90 72.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 49.38
Uncached Write 18.14 1.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 160.76 51.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 78.79 0.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 143.67 26.66 MB/sec [256K blocks]

[philiparcario]

which cpu is that new mini?
_________________
2010 Mm 2.4 C2D oem 320gb hdd 8gb ram
2012Mm base 2.5 with 16gb ram diy fusion drive
2012Mm quad with 8gb ram oem 1tb hdd

promise pegasus r6 3x 3tb + 3x 4tb =21tb hdds
lacie little big disk 2x 512gb ssds
synology 2tb disk station

[CDRacingZX6R]

First thing I did was crack the case open and put in 2X2GB sticks of ram.

I was going to wait, but it was bogging down when heavy multi-tasking and of course WM Fusion killed it.

With the 4GB it flys.

[Code Raven]

Night Sailor, I love that wallpaper! Where did you get it from?

[ADent]

This site has a comparison of 5 minis (including both 2009 models) with varying amounts of memory: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/apple/memory/Mini_Intel_Memory_Benchmarks .

If many cases the 2GB machine with matched memory was slightly faster than the 3GB with mis-matched memory. In all cases 4GB (matched) was the fastest.

[Night_Sailor]

[Night_Sailor]

[Night_Sailor]

[Night_Sailor]

[dwhite601]

It seems quiet to me. There is, however, a fair amount of background noise here (aquarium, cuckoo clock, nearby freeway, and my PC fan). I can't hear anything sounds from the Mini (except the occasional faint click) above all those other sounds.

[gigaguy]

night sailor, I sent you a PM from 123MM but it's still in the Outbox, not sure why. thanks for the response earlier.
good luck on your testing.

[Chris..S]

[Huff]

I went with 4GB of RAM from OWC and the 500GB Scorpio Blue @ 5400RPM from WD. It kinda, sorta looks like my disk scores are hanging in there with the 320GB 7200RPM model.

Results 138.75
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G2030)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model Macmini3,1
Drive Type WDC WD5000BEVT-22ZAT0
CPU Test 126.48
GCD Loop 228.45 12.04 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 109.36 2.60 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 83.83 2.77 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 161.98 28.21 Mops/sec
Thread Test 257.15
Computation 382.10 7.74 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 193.78 8.34 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 177.04
System 195.79
Allocate 240.02 881.43 Kalloc/sec
Fill 162.57 7904.56 MB/sec
Copy 199.80 4126.70 MB/sec
Stream 161.57
Copy 153.96 3179.99 MB/sec
Scale 154.44 3190.72 MB/sec
Add 171.60 3655.50 MB/sec
Triad 167.80 3589.61 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 181.49
Line 145.80 9.71 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 189.96 56.71 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 154.53 12.60 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 152.85 3.86 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 414.46 25.93 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 129.47
Spinning Squares 129.47 164.23 frames/sec
User Interface Test 262.18
Elements 262.18 1.20 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test 62.66
Sequential 103.49
Uncached Write 110.34 67.75 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 131.69 74.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 65.67 19.22 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 147.80 74.28 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 44.93
Uncached Write 17.03 1.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 129.14 41.34 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 69.17 0.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 123.62 22.94 MB/sec [256K blocks]