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Would there be a major speed drop between an older 2.4 Macbook and a 2.26 mini?

Whackintosh

Whackintosh

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 8, 2009
435
14
Montreal, Quebec
Just saw this clip on on YouTube where a guy was showing off the speed of his whitebook, 2.4 ghz with 2gb of ram, and I was amazed at how snappy it was - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Q5VRor6IQ

Presumably a new 2.26mini with 4gb of ram and the faster frontside bus would be at least as fast if not faster?

Also crazy impressed by this clip of a 2.4 alum macbook under serious heavy load with a ton of programs open. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67LsBJWEVOo&feature=related Wow!

Yes, I'm still gong back and forth between getting an Imac or a mini. :)
 
Eidorian said:
If you're going to split hairs over seconds there's a slight drop in raw CPU power.

Why the concern?
Click to expand...

True. It's just that I really want a fast machine and while the Imac's speed options intrigue me, their high failure rate and forced screen setup keeps making me think that a mini would be ideal, if its speed and ability are there (even if the processor's not the fastest out there). I'm switching from a two-year old PC desktop (an up and down HP m8020n c2d machine that runs at 2.13 ghz) and I just don't want to end up with a noticeably slower setup in the end. So, I'm totally splitting hairs, whether rational or not, lol!
 
Whackintosh said:
True. It's just that I really want a fast machine and while the Imac's speed options intrigue me, their high failure rate and forced screen setup keeps making me think that a mini would be ideal, if its speed and ability are there (even if the processor's not the fastest out there). I'm switching from a two-year old PC desktop (an up and down HP m8020n c2d machine that runs at 2.13 ghz) and I just don't want to end up with a noticeably slower setup in the end. So, I'm totally splitting hairs, whether rational or not, lol!
Click to expand...
The hard drive is the bottleneck more than any other piece of hardware.
 
iVeBeenDrinkin' said:
Where do you get the "high failure rate" data?
Click to expand...

From a very unscientific source. :)

After reading endless horror stories about logic boards and graphic cards failing within 2 years, I started a poll just yesterday to see how many people had no-trouble machines and how many had a major failure. Results showed a failure rate at something like 32%. Also, an Apple service center tech here in Montreal told me that the ratio of Imacs to Minis that he sees come in for serious repairs was roughly 5:1.

Granted, I'm sure more Imacs have been sold than mini's, but still. Can't help but assume that a mini, without a screen that can go bonkers or overheat the nearby components, is a safer longterm buy. I've also already got an older Cinema Display that I'm very happy with. An Imac would give me a dual display setup, that would be seriously cool, but at the same time, if that screen ever dies, my whole machine goes with it. If only Apple made a mini Mac Pro!
 
Whackintosh said:
At least the drive can be replaced with a 7200. I'd have though the smaller L2 cache would be a bottleneck, but it doesn't seem to be the case for most apps.
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I have no idea where people get this idea. ~3 MB of L2 Cache is fine unless you're going fine unless you need those few seconds lost in encoding and rendering. It's what you loose on a cheaper processor.

My overclocked E2160 (2.4 GHz) with 1 MB kept up with my friend's E6600 (2.4 GHz) with 4 MB of L2 Cache just fine in gaming.

The slower clocked and cache "starved" Q8200 can keep up and beat my Q6600 in quite a few benchmarks as well.
 
Whackintosh said:
From a very unscientific source. :)

After reading endless horror stories about logic boards and graphic cards failing within 2 years, I started a poll just yesterday to see how many people had no-trouble machines and how many had a major failure. Results showed a failure rate at something like 32%. Also, an Apple service center tech here in Montreal told me that the ratio of Imacs to Minis that he sees come in for serious repairs was roughly 5:1.

Granted, I'm sure more Imacs have been sold than mini's, but still. Can't help but assume that a mini, without a screen that can go bonkers or overheat the nearby components, is a safer longterm buy. I've also already got an older Cinema Display that I'm very happy with. An Imac would give me a dual display setup, that would be seriously cool, but at the same time, if that screen ever dies, my whole machine goes with it. I only Apple made a mini Mac Pro!
Click to expand...

This is so unscientific that I wouldn't take any notice of these stats at all.
 
wetrix said:
This is so unscientific that I wouldn't take any notice of these stats at all.
Click to expand...

Absolutely, there are so many factors that go into producing a quality survey, (e.g. response bias, response error, proper sampling), that you really can't put much weight into these forum polls. The actual failure rate could be much higher or lower.

But there was another reliability survey
http://www.macintouch.com/reliability/

That did show iMac's having a higher failure rate. And there are issues due to the nature of having a display (dead pixels, green lines) that a Mac Mini just wouldn't suffer from.

It sounds like the OP just doesn't want to worry about having screen issues ruining a computer, and screen-less desktop's do logically and statically have much better reliability records.
 
OP-- you've had countless threads going back and forth, hemming and hawing.
I understand that you want the best you can get without being tied to a monitor and while still being affordable. Just go with the mini. You're talking about differences that are essentially negligible. Plus you get the monitor of your choosing.

I am running on my Lenovo S10 hackintosh which has the 1.6ghz Intel Atom processor. Leopard recognizes 2.5 GB of RAM. For the basic tasks such email, internet, photo browsing and basic editing, I notice no difference from it's performance to my Mini. When doing more intense tasks like rendering and encoding, etc, The Lenovo's performance degrades significantly. Partly because of the processor and also because of the Intel GMA graphics.

IMO, this eludes to 2 things. People are not going to notice the difference of 400Mhz for every day tasks. But it also pretty much tells me that the major factor in the Mini doing those more intense functions better is the upgraded video card. While I'm sure most agree that it's not a great card, not even good. But it's leaps and bounds over the previous Gen GMA graphics.

So get the mini, upgrade ram and HDD, and if it seriously doesn't what you want it to then there resale value is very good. Or return it to Apple and suffer the restocking or trade up to a Macbook and have the best of both worlds.
 
Whackintosh said:
At least the drive can be replaced with a 7200. I'd have though the smaller L2 cache would be a bottleneck, but it doesn't seem to be the case for most apps.
Click to expand...

Get a SSD - that will make your Mac really fast.
I think you would feel much more speed difference in going from HDD to SSD instead of going from 2.26GHz to 2.4GHz.
 
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