Mac mini: 1.5GHz Core Solo vs. 1.66GHz Core Duo

[James T Kirk]

[devo]

[Fox]

[OGN]

Office has always been a bloated pig. How does iWork and iLife run?
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2.4GHz MacBook Pro/4GB/320GB HD
2.26GHz Mac mini/4GB/500GB HD
16GB iPhone 3G
2 x 20" Apple Cinemas
http://www.hawaiimacnuts.org

[mgnovenie]

[James T Kirk]

[Sparkstack]

[devo]

[djscuttle]

If you got a mac because you wanted a stable system the new intel mini probably isn't for you just yet. The reason I switched to mac last year was mainly for system stability and overall compatability between software and hardware. You know on osx when something drastically bad happens it shows you that transparent box that features like 10 different languages telling you its time to restart... well on the 1st gen mini I have seen that about three times give or take... On the intels, minis and imac models I see this nearly once a week. Also once a week final cut 5 must be reinstalled on these intel machines. The error involves finding an AGP card. Not only that but illustrator photoshop and dreamweaver frequently encounter errors and must close. This is frustrating and actually makes my G4 mini and my G3 imac se 700 way more productive overall unless I do extremely frequent saves. OSX becomes much more like windows in this way. Supposidly with adobe CS3 there will be intel support but until then.. and until all the other software manufacturers start supporting the hardware the G4 or G5 is probably going to be the best bet. Rosetta is basically a G3 emulator with about half of the G4 extensions added in. The bus speed related tasks are infact quicker on the intels but the majority of things actually seem about the same. According to apple if you have a powerbook that is 1.5 or slower then the intel will be a speed improvement. For 1.67 G4 Powerbooks the PPC is infact faster in comparison to the intels with most software applications. Well obviosly the intels are way faster because if rosetta can emulate the processor and still come out faster then a 1.5 PPC then surely it has great potential. The intels are a little on the warm side in comparison to the PPC G4. Remembeer some G4's dont even use a system fan. And according to the speciifications they can get hot enough to boil water before there are any mathmatical errors. Thats a processor that is good with heat and in a small case like the mini i would imagine those holding out better then the intels. The video ram on the 1st gen minis run at 400 Mhz which is similar to the 400 Mhz of the shared DDR2 fron the intel minis, which most later stealth upgraded ppc minis have 64 mb also. However the intels do run most games better then the stock ppc mini. However on my g4 mini i can play doom 3 with no problems and thats pretty much the most advanced mac game. Hopefully once the software support is in sink with the new intels perhaps they will become just as stable as the PPC's.. lets hope so.. remember also os9 wont run on an intel mini but will run on a ppc mini. Im suprised none of these topics have come up in the forums to help people decide which mini is better for them. The only complaint seems to be about the shared video which really isnt a big deal because they both run at the same clock speed. The biggest advantage is seeming to be the 2 gb memory capacity in my opinion.
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1.5 @ 1.67 GHz 1st gen PPC mini
ATI 9200 64 mb vram
1 gb RAM
ATIcellerator VRAM @ 12% VCPU @12%

[Titom]

Thinking of buying the solo mini mac.

Now the DVD add on is only $50, seems like a good deal.

And Apple ram ($100) to 1 GB also seems like a good deal, most places are selling ram for more then that.
Apple's design of the new mini makes manually upgrading the RAM in this machine a slightly more arduous task.
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Ti400 old man

[Sparkstack]

[Sparkstack]

[devo]

[resuna]

[James T Kirk]