[X4U] New Mac Mini's

[Philip J Robar]

On Feb 28, 2006, at 2:18 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:

This is all off of the top of my head.

> I see that the new Intel based Mac Mini's are available.  As a  
> result, I've
> got a few questions.
>
> 1. Has anyone seen any performance information on the 1.5Ghz Core Solo
> model?

Apple seems to have very carefully not included numbers for the Core  
Solo on their web page,  but I'd say cut the Dual number in half  
(since it's a SPECrate number) and take a little off and you should  
have a rough estimate.

Note that SPEC numbers grossly exaggerate the performance improvement  
of the Intel chips over the G4/G5 that you're going to see with real  
life apps. Apple says that the Dual Core Mini is about twice as fast  
as the 1.42 GHz G4 Minis, but the Solo core may be considerably  
slower, depending on how multiprocessor sensitive the app is.

Reports I've seen put the Intel MacBook Pro/iMac at only 10-20  
something percent faster than G5s.

On the other hand the Intel base machines seem to be much better at  
decoding HD content than the G5s. I haven't seen an explanation for  
this yet, it may be due to the graphics chip they use.


> 2. Is there a DVI-to-Component Video converter available?

Both ATI and Nvidia make graphics cards that support component  
output. Getting from DVI to component on a card that doesn't include  
the right cables is going to take a little work. A little Googling  
shows that the hardware needed is going to cost $40 to $100+  
depending on what actually works.

Unfortunately, there may be a software issue to resolve. To get your  
graphics card to talk correctly to a TV you have to be able to  
generate the correct mode. Cards which support TV out have software  
that does this and there is after market Windows software that also  
does this. The X Window System can also be tweaked to do this.  
Whether this can be done on new Minis needs to be determined.

The Intel graphics chip used in the new Minis are definitely third  
tier, behind both Nvidia and ATI. It's too bad that Apple felt  
compelled to use this chip.


> 3. Is the 1.5Ghz model good enough to play any Video files?  I  
> can't see any
> reason why a 1.5Ghz computer couldn't.


> 4. Any ideas as to how good the audio out is?

The new Minis support optical digital out so if you run this to an  
external decoder (your stereo) it should be great.


Phil