1.6 G5 vs 1.8 Intel based ?

About 150% faster. Keep in mind that the Intel is a dual core.

150% faster , ok yes thats what the officials at apple said ...in reality the gap is not even half that big , faster yes but in reality not as much as some might want to believe , pure benchmarks are misleading of course will a core duo always have better benchmarks , they show what you could expect in speed but the reality depends on software to make a fair comparison both have to run tiger and equal amount of ram, then you will find whatever you throw on the g5 in terms of apps and things to do , the iMac might be a bit behind ,but will keep going if the capacitors dont start leaking , but the mini will not be a hour ahead, both will get into trouble when it comes to streamed hd video 1080p

MacHamster68 said:

150% faster , ok yes thats what the officials at apple said ...in reality the gap is not even half that big , faster yes but not as much as some might want to believe ,

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My calculation was roughly based on the geekbench results from both machines (900 vs 2200). And although that is only a synthetic benchmark, it gives a rough indication about the machines processing capacities.

I had a 2GHz DualCore G5 once and was impressed when I got a 2.4GHz Intel Core2Duo machine. That machine ran circles around the G5.
geekbench says that machine was about twice as fast, and yes, that's what I found in real life usage as well (if not more than that).

yes the core 2 duo's are faster but the early minis only had like the iMac's a core duo , one of which i have and in direct comparison with my eMac 1.42 which achieves 871 geekbench score , there isnt much of a gap between if i run both with tiger , only noticable speed advantage is when it comes to streamed video@1080p really , but general tasks like normal browsing, office work and such not a difference to talk about , even when i use final cut to cut a movie the speed advantage of the core duo was not really something to write home about , ok it is now with a velociraptor 10000rpm drive inside the iMac

I upgraded from a 1.6Ghz G5 Powermac to an early 2009 Mac Mini 2.0Ghz C2D. The difference was night/day. The Mac Mini runs circles around the Powermac.

If you can swing it, try getting a mini that is at least that vintage, as it uses DDR3 and has a real video chipset in it (9400m vs. Intel GMA950).

IMHO, the PowerPCs were highly overrated by Apple. The first Mac I bought, a 1.6 GHz G5 iMac for my wife, felt and benchmarked slightly slower than the (then) three year old 1.6GHz Pentium 4 Dell it replaced. The elegance of OS X and the iMac design made it worth it for her, not the non-existent performance gain. I later bought a 1.2 GHz G4 iBook for traveling that again was slower than a (then) three year old 1.6GHz Pentium 4 Mobile notebook computer.

Programs that I wrote in C ran significantly slower on these Macs than on Windows systems, at least partly caused by the relatively poor quality of the GCC compiler compared to the Microsoft compiler (which had considerable development investment) on the Windows systems.

Any performance loss in going to Intel processors in the Mac mini and iBook -> MacBook can probably be attributed to the low performance Intel integrated graphics in these lines since all the PowerPC products had discrete graphics processors.

I'd try to find a Core 2 Duo model, as those are a bit more robust and will give you better performance than the Core Duos. But yes, there will be a very good performance jump from the G5 to the Intel.

sometimes there is a cheaper option , to get a faster mini , just get a intel single core mini 1.5ghz , they are the least popular ones , throw out the single core cpu and fit in a 2.16ghz core 2 duo T7400 ! ok you still got the GMA 950 graphics , but with the added processor speed you can live with that, because the difference between a new unibody mini 2.4 ghz core 2 duo and a used core 2 duo !one is never big really and if you are lucky to get a apple refurbished one you wont save a lot by choosing a 2008 mini


just for example you can pick up a intel iMac 17 " 2ghz core duo for around £350 , 20" models trade around £450 and mini's of the same age and processor get traded for a bit more (usually about £20-30 ) so by getting a iMac instead you got the cash leftover to upgrade the ram to max and you get the added bonus of a ati x1600 128mb graphics card which does not choke on 1080p streamed videos
and thats exact what i did ,i bought my iMac from a certified apple engineer , even had after buying the core duo iMac enough left over to get 2 gb ram for inside and still saved after getting the ram £30 compare to the cheapest intel core duo 1.83 mini on ebay at that time (couple month ago)

ok there are always the odd bargain to be made , but thats rare ,at least in the uk where the demand for used Mac's is much higher then the supply , you are just so lucky across the pond