Mac Mini in hand, anyone need a test or demo ran? Help me try this beast out!

sorry to "crash the party" so to speak, but mac mini is nothing new inside. it should compare more or less with an iBook.

what would be useful is information on noise, heat, etc...

Beside iLife do you find any of the other apps useful? How's does it run when your using iTunes, Surfing the Net, and email?

jxyama said:

sorry to "crash the party" so to speak, but mac mini is nothing new inside. it should compare more or less with an iBook.

what would be useful is information on noise, heat, etc...

Click to expand...

My understanding is that compares pretty well with an iBook as well.

jxyama said:

sorry to "crash the party" so to speak, but mac mini is nothing new inside. it should compare more or less with an iBook.

what would be useful is information on noise, heat, etc...

Click to expand...

Sorry to "crash Your party" but the mini is closer to the eMac than the iBook.

jxyama said:

sorry to "crash the party" so to speak, but mac mini is nothing new inside. it should compare more or less with an iBook.

what would be useful is information on noise, heat, etc...

Click to expand...

Actually more in common with the eMac with its faster frontside bus.

BillHarrison said:

I have a new Mac Mini Base model, 1.25ghz, 256mb ram, 40gb hd. So far so good, everything seems snappy and useable. Networked to my PC with nary an issue. So far a couple culture shock things coming from the PC world - IE, closing a program window does not CLOSE the program.... Except in some cases... lol. Some what confusing to me, i guess it just takes getting used too. Also had some issues with my color profile, getting it to work correctly on my monitor, I had purple icons and stuff, but got that licked too.

Well, if anyone has any questions about the power of a stock mac mini, send em here, and we will bench this puppy till it cries!

Here is your chance to find out just how useable a base mac mini really is!

Bill

Click to expand...

Be interesting to see how well it copes with the CPU running at 100% the whole time (ie. fan etc.). Maybe try running Folding@home on it?

I picked up my mini on Saturday. I've been able to kick in the fan on 3 occasions, once while playing chess, once while converting a MPEG-4 video stream from the iSight into a DV stream for iMovie, and once on a webpage that had a significant number of animated smileys on it. The fan is variable speed, and when it gets up to full blast, it does make some noise. And it moves quite a bit of air, too.

I would have installed iLife '05, but my Combo drive won't mount disks. Apple is having me send the whole unit back to them, and they'll drop ship me a new Mini. Hopefully they've stashed a few aside and won't make me wait 3-4 weeks.

hmmm, 256 isnt much when it comes to OSX. For some unknown reason to me OSX requires more RAM than XP. I run my XP machine on 256 just fine.

But with more RAM you should see it run much much nicer.

Out of interest, on first impressions what features are better and worse between the two OS? Just trying to see the OSX from another perspective.

I think youll find OSX come into its own when you begin to use peripherals with the machine. Digital cameras, ipods, etc.
Thats the biggest difference i found when i got a PC, drivers were always a bitch, and it wasnt as seamless.

Best way to max it out that mini is throw a decent FPS on it. Try UT2003,2004 Demo or something like Call of duty,Medal of Honor whatever. See if you can run stuff at say 800 x600 resolutions and report your settings. If you dont have the titles the demo's are easy to get.

BillHarrison said:

I have a new Mac Mini Base model, 1.25ghz, 256mb ram, 40gb hd. So far so good, everything seems snappy and useable. Networked to my PC with nary an issue. So far a couple culture shock things coming from the PC world - IE, closing a program window does not CLOSE the program.... Except in some cases... lol. Some what confusing to me, i guess it just takes getting used too. Also had some issues with my color profile, getting it to work correctly on my monitor, I had purple icons and stuff, but got that licked too.

Well, if anyone has any questions about the power of a stock mac mini, send em here, and we will bench this puppy till it cries!

Here is your chance to find out just how useable a base mac mini really is!

Bill

Click to expand...

This isn't a performance related question, but how tall is the gap that allows air in along the bottom edge? There should be a gap between the aluminum and the desk surface.


I know some will criticize me for it, but I don't really care...there's a product called "Glowire" that's an illuminated tube of sorts, that puts out a good amount of light. Once my mini arrives, I plan on installing the glowire inside, along the area between the mini's internals, and the outer shell. Hopefully light will spill out through the vent holes and onto the desk surface. The Glowire plugs into a molex connector, but I'm sure there's a way to easily adapt it to draw power from any of the components...maybe split the molex connector on the superdrive if it has one. The glowire has a small switchbox that it comes with, but there should be room for that somewhere since I'm not having BT or AE installed.

I'll take photos in a month when I get it and perform the mod...but I'm sure someone else will have done it by then.

Spock said:

Sorry to "crash Your party" but the mini is closer to the eMac than the iBook.

Click to expand...

yep, sure, you (and others) are right but that wasn't really my point.

my point was, mini has nothing new in it. "benchmarking" a hardware that's already been in circulation for quite some time sounded redundant to me. that's all.

info about the heat, fan, etc. is very much appreciated as can only be described by someone owning the new machine.

Chip NoVaMac said:

Actually more in common with the eMac with its faster frontside bus.

Click to expand...

It's also half-iBook with it's 2.5" 4200 RPM Hard Disk.

Yvan256 said:

It's also half-iBook with it's 2.5" 4200 RPM Hard Disk.

Click to expand...

Maybe or maybe not according to this site:

http://www.applelegal.com/other_comments.php?id=205_0_7_0_C

Some users maybe getting the 4200rpm, and some getting the 5400rpm. And according to Barefeets, there may be little difference in performance in the 2.5" drives between the 5400 and 7200 HDDs.

Confirmed...

I've called Seagate and confirmed that the model number "ST940110A" is an OEM version of their "ST94011A" drive, which is a 5400RPM drive w/2MB cache.

Chip NoVaMac said:

Maybe or maybe not according to this site:

http://www.applelegal.com/other_comments.php?id=205_0_7_0_C

Some users maybe getting the 4200rpm, and some getting the 5400rpm. And according to Barefeets, there may be little difference in performance in the 2.5" drives between the 5400 and 7200 HDDs.

Click to expand...

BillHarrison said:

Well, so far using iChat, iTunes, and browsing the web have been perfectly responsive. I can feel SOME lag due to the low ram. Mainly when loading large web pages (graphically intensive) and then switching back and forth to other programs. BUT, I am coming from a DUAL processor 2.3ghz Athlon System, so part of this is probably just me.

Certainly nothing bad... I have noticed a few of what I would call "switcher" issues, but nothing of a terrible sort. Minor inconvienences, and a few things that are less than immediately intuititive. The Mini came with Ilife 04 installed, I immediately installed Ilife '05 on it. So far only app I have used is garage band. And not well at that, i have no idea how to use it, as I am far less than musically talented. But it does work.

So far, i give it a 7 out of 10, especially due to some driver issues with my monitor which made all of my colors out of whack (icons were a crazy purple color!).

Thanks

Bill

Click to expand...

iLife04? On Apple's website it says the Mac Mini comes with iLife 05.

Chip NoVaMac said:

Maybe or maybe not according to this site:

http://www.applelegal.com/other_comments.php?id=205_0_7_0_C

Some users maybe getting the 4200rpm, and some getting the 5400rpm. And according to Barefeets, there may be little difference in performance in the 2.5" drives between the 5400 and 7200 HDDs.

Click to expand...

Wow, if this is true, this is stunning! Should be front page news. And all those complaining of a "crippled" hard drive should have to eat crow.