A quick question - how well can the Mac Mini graphics card able to display 20 inch monitor? Also is it possible to upgrade this graphics card.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Mini Graphics Card
- Thread starter macbaseball
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The Mini can drive the 20" ACD at full reso, but I've heard it's a bit laggy when doing the cool graphic thingos
As for upgrading, nope cant be done.
As for upgrading, nope cant be done.
No you cant upgrade the chip. driving a display with email is one thing,driving a display with doom3 is another. Apples biggest problem is poor graphics. They use it to seperate model lines which is stupid and has cost them market share over the years. As long as you dont want to play games the mini is fine. you could say that about any machine made the past 10 years though. Its sad that no one is at home over at apple in their gpu dept the past few years.
Its a Mac (meaning generally a weak graphics card) and its a 500 dollar computer (also meaning a generally weak graphics card). Cant expect much.
As far as your question, Ive seen it on a 20 inch monitor, Ive seen it with a 17 inch. It gets the job done, but dont expect to play many games (given with a Mac also). Your DVD's will be fine.
As far as your question, Ive seen it on a 20 inch monitor, Ive seen it with a 17 inch. It gets the job done, but dont expect to play many games (given with a Mac also). Your DVD's will be fine.
macbaseball said:
Don't worry. Your DVDs will be fine. And they won't blur-- they would just get choppy. But that won't happen.
It is a display card. It will display your graphics. It will not game, but it will manage fairly well. Don't expect to play Doom 3 on it but then again, its a card that was placed in there so that you didn't have to share your system RAM with the video display.
Not to mention DVD blurring is the cause of the display, not the graphic card. If your LCD blows, you'll see blurring, no matter if you're using a Radeon 9200 or a nVidia 6800 Ultra. And even further, the burden of encoding, processing and displaying of the DVD movie is placed on the CPU, not the graphics card (well, until Tiger comes out that is), so your graphic card barely makes any difference. And the 1.25/1.42 GHz G4 are damn good chips for the price. So your mini will do damn nigh anything you want it to - edit movies, encode DVDs, rip music, whatever you ask it to do... except gaming. And yeah, 3D rendering is probably not the best idea on the mini either.
eXan said:Who playes games on 32 MB VRAM @ 1280x768+ resolution?
I dont agree that mini cant play games. It can and very well compared to my eMac. I still play UT2004 though and its playable. I imagine how well it would run on 1.42 G4
I'm playing World of Wacraft at 800x600, all details low/off and I usually get around 15-25 FPS (depends on what's on the screen).
Sure it looks crappy that way, but it still runs enough to keep playing it.
Just waiting for that iMac G5 rev.B (hoping they'll at least upgrade the thing to a Radeon 9700 Mobility/128MB).
I'm running my Mac mini on a 23" Sony LCD at 1920 x 1200, and it handles everything quite well... DVD playback is just fine.