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kusanagi

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 18, 2007
106
0
Hello,

Havn't posted in a while, but i'm just about to upgrade my media server for our HT room from a overclocked 1.67ghz g4 Mac mini to a 1.83ghz C2D Mac mini (new mini being delivered on Monday! ^_^) Now, my old G4 mini was struggling playing h.264 movies, fans spinning up to almost full, and when it was serving files to any other machine on the network it would start to choke and stop playing movies.

I have a spare CD 2.33ghz chip, but being the Core Duo and not Core 2 Duo, it doesn't have the 2mb cache per processor and is 32 bit.

I plan to run leopard on this mini, aswell as serving 6tb of movies, all on external firewire/usb drives. (6x 500gb on USB, 3x 1tb on firewire).

What do you guys think i should do? Stick with the slower (by 500mhz) core 2 chip w/64bit, or "upgrade" it to a 2.33ghz CD 32bit chip?

Thanks.
 
Wow! Thats a LOT of data! O_O

Stick with the core 2. Not worth it to "break in" the mini case and to swap the processor. Core 2 even at 1.83 ghz is more than capable of playing H.264 1080p.
 
Wow! Thats a LOT of data! O_O

Stick with the core 2. Not worth it to "break in" the mini case and to swap the processor. Core 2 even at 1.83 ghz is more than capable of playing H.264 1080p.

LoL.. yes it is.. we decided that having all these damn dvds stacked up was taking too much space (especially tv show box sets) so for the past 8 months ive had 3 poor macs all encoding our movies at 1500kbps on h.264. Not to mention all our of family movies! And we're still not done yet!

I'm going to have to crack it open anyway (putting 3gig ram in it) so voiding the warranty isn't a biggie :) But if the C2D can handle 1080p then I think i'm set! Thanks!
 
LoL.. yes it is.. we decided that having all these damn dvds stacked up was taking too much space (especially tv show box sets) so for the past 8 months ive had 3 poor macs all encoding our movies at 1500kbps on h.264. Not to mention all our of family movies! And we're still not done yet!

I'm going to have to crack it open anyway (putting 3gig ram in it) so voiding the warranty isn't a biggie :) But if the C2D can handle 1080p then I think i'm set! Thanks!

I played 1080p h.264 in Core Duo 1.66 GHZ and it took quite a bit % of CPU to play and sometimes was choppy. On my MacBook Core 2 Duo 2 GHz playing these videos takes about 50-55% of CPU, so 1.83 GHz C2D in mini shouldn't have any problems either. The only difference between my C2D and mini's is that mine has 4 MB cache vs 2 MB in mini and 2 GHz clock speed vs 1.83.
 
Wow! Thats a LOT of data! O_O

Stick with the core 2. Not worth it to "break in" the mini case and to swap the processor. Core 2 even at 1.83 ghz is more than capable of playing H.264 1080p.

Serious Question....
Are you saying that the mac mini processors are upgradeable?
 
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