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Which Graphics card is better?

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Pathfinder55

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 18, 2007
365
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I am looking to get my first mac and a saw a nice refurbished Mac Mini in their store. So I got a question about this one. I have a desktop right now running Vista, and it's graphics card is called NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS, and the Mac Mini's graphics card is a Intel GMA 950. So, I just wanted to do a little comparison to see which one is better and by how much. Thanks! :)
 
Most dedicated graphics cards would normally be better than the onboard graphics chip since the onboard one uses shared memory. The dedicated card uses it's own memory leaving your system memory to do what it's supposed to do.


Unless of course it's a really old card.

The Geforce card is much better.
 
Depends what you want to do. In 3D graphics performance, like video games and such, the 8400 is about 10X faster than the GMA950. The Intel chip doesn't have hardware T&L so some games won't even run. On 2D performance, like most photo work, you won't notice much of a diff in the graphics card. That is more CPU/disk related.
 
Pathfinder55 said:
The Intel GMA 950 would be for the Mac Mini, not running Vista.
Click to expand...

Well it depends. If you do something that heavily utilizes a graphics card (such as gaming), then you going to see a difference.

If your the average joe, web surfing, photo editing, chat kinda guy, then you'd never see a difference in performance.
 
Pathfinder55 said:
So I would really notice a big difference?
Click to expand...

The NVIDIA is quite a bit better than the Mac Mini graphics card. Don't expect too much from the Mac Mini's graphics card. Whether you will notice a difference or not really depends on what you're planning on doing with it. As far as day-to-day web/office/email use you won't notice anything at all. Especially because OS X performs quite bit better than Vista as far as resources go (and other things, too...). Don't expect any 3D games to run very well, though. If you do Photoshop-type stuff, you may notice that to be slower, but it'll be adequate. If you're a heavy Photoshop user or work a lot with editing video you may want to go for an iMac instead. Beyond things like that, you won't notice too big a difference. Especially as far as normal, every day performance goes.
 
kuwisdelu said:
The NVIDIA is quite a bit better than the Mac Mini graphics card. Don't expect too much from the Mac Mini's graphics card. Whether you will notice a difference or not really depends on what you're planning on doing with it. As far as day-to-day web/office/email use you won't notice anything at all. Especially because OS X performs quite bit better than Vista as far as resources go (and other things, too...). Don't expect any 3D games to run very well, though. If you do Photoshop-type stuff, you may notice that to be slower, but it'll be adequate. If you're a heavy Photoshop user or work a lot with editing video you may want to go for an iMac instead. Beyond things like that, you won't notice too big a difference. Especially as far as normal, every day performance goes.
Click to expand...

I've got a question... Can I buy a better graphics card and put it into the Mac Mini?
 
One more question, will some more "advanced" games just completely not run or will it just look bad?
 
Is there a chance of a refresh to the Mac Mini? And there might be an upgrade to the graphics card?
 
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