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Agent69 · Mar 1, 2006, 09:58 AM

Originally Posted by rcleland2

Quote

"I know perfectly well what the Centrino is. First and foremost a laptop processor.

cheers

W-Y"

The Centrino is not a processor. Its only a name used to decribe a combo of processor (Pentium M usually), motherboard chipset, and the wireless card.

Truth. The Core processor was previously known as the Pentium M.

Eug Wanker · Mar 1, 2006, 10:34 AM

Here are Apple's recommended QT H.264 specs:

For 1280x720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:

QuickTime 7 for Mac OS X:
1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer; 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster
At least 256MB of RAM
64 MB or greater video card

QuickTime 7 for Windows:
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 or faster processor
At least 512MB of RAM
64MB or greater video card
Windows 2000 or XP

For 1920x1080 (1080p) video at 24 frames per second:

QuickTime 7 for Mac OS X:
Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer; 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo or faster
At least 512MB of RAM
128MB or greater video card

QuickTime 7 for Windows:
3.0 Ghz Intel Pentium D (dual-core) or faster processor
At least 1GB of RAM
64MB or greater video card
Windows 2000 or XP

I look forward to the H.264 benches of the Core Duo 1.66 Mac mini, because unless there is some other bottleneck, I would have expected it to do most 24 fps 1080p video OK.

JKT · Mar 1, 2006, 11:18 AM

More than likely those specs didn't refer to any other CD chips as none were shipping at the time they wrote them, and if they had included 1.5GHz Core solo, then the rumour mill would have gone into speculation overdrive...

Weyland-Yutani · Mar 1, 2006, 11:20 AM

Originally Posted by rcleland2

The Centrino is not a processor. Its only a name used to decribe a combo of processor (Pentium M usually), motherboard chipset, and the wireless card.

True, but splitting hairs. Centrino is the trademark used up to this moment by Intel to designate a machine with a polished mobile chip technology.

A Pentium M is a Centrino processor but a Pentium EE is not.

cheers

W-Y

rcleland2 · Mar 1, 2006, 11:39 AM

Yeah you're right, W-Y. Didn't think of that.

betasp · Mar 1, 2006, 11:47 AM

New new GMA950 is spec'ed out higher than the 9200. WTF is the problem? The 950 was designed to handle all of Vista's new interface and should run fine on OSX.

Don't let the truth get in the way of your over-reaction.

exca1ibur · Mar 1, 2006, 12:06 PM

Originally Posted by betasp

New new GMA950 is spec'ed out higher than the 9200. WTF is the problem? The 950 was designed to handle all of Vista's new interface and should run fine on OSX.

Don't let the truth get in the way of your over-reaction.

Ouch! Gaming

I think this is their problem. HD might be fine, but gaming is a step back and you pay $100 more. However most Macs are a joke for gaming so this is no surprise. I think if the price were the same most wouldn't have as big an issue. Just feels like to some that you are getting less for more.

Not to mention you are giving up system ram at that and 1GB really is a must with shared memory now as well.

Eug Wanker · Mar 1, 2006, 12:09 PM

Originally Posted by exca1ibur

Ouch! Gaming

I think this is their problem. HD might be fine, but gaming is a step back and you pay $100 more. However most Macs are a joke for gaming so this is no surprise. I think if the price were the same most wouldn't have as big an issue. Just feels like to some that you are getting less for more.

Well, to be fair, the base model now includes wireless LAN and Bluetooth in that price, whereas the $499 G4 model did not. That said, I know lots of people who have zero use for wireless LAN (in a desktop) and Bluetooth, so they'd just rather save the bux.

MovieCutter · Mar 1, 2006, 12:18 PM

Who in their right mind would buy this...for gaming??? I have a Quad and a MBP for that. This little baby is going straight into my home theater with my HDTV and stream my 300 DVDs I have stored among the 3TB attached to my Quad thanks to Gigabit Ethernet. Not to mention all my other media. This truly will be the media hub.

Cheers...

Weyland-Yutani · Mar 1, 2006, 12:58 PM

Originally Posted by MovieCutter

Who in their right mind would buy this...for gaming???

Comprehend that a 9550 or a 9600 driven mini, while not even close to being cutting edge of anything, would still be able to *run* contemporary games.

Who is talking about a dedicated gaming machine? Hey that would be great too, but this is the mini. If it could run WoW fine then that's all it should be able to do today. There would be no dealbreaking obsticle for people. This is the introductionary Mac and it can't play games.

This new Mac mini is mediocre to above mediocre in almost ever aspect except GPU, where it is simply sub-standard. A machine that can run Halo or WoW acceptably isn't a gaming machine. It is just what is expected from a new Mac bought today.

cheers

W-Y

MovieCutter · Mar 1, 2006, 01:25 PM

I should have been more clear...I never said anyone was buying this as a dedicated gaming machine, though I don't see the target market for this machine using this to play games that most of us play. Like I said, I have a Quad for my games. I guess the people buying these machines aren't expecting to play WOW or Halo, the target market for these machines is the simple/average consumer and those of us with a ton of media they want to stream into their television...or cars...he he he.

Eug Wanker · Mar 1, 2006, 01:27 PM

Originally Posted by Weyland-Yutani

Comprehend that a 9550 or a 9600 driven mini, while not even close to being cutting edge of anything, would still be able to *run* contemporary games.

Who is talking about a dedicated gaming machine? Hey that would be great too, but this is the mini. If it could run WoW fine then that's all it should be able to do today. There would be no dealbreaking obsticle for people. This is the introductionary Mac and it can't play games.

This new Mac mini is mediocre to above mediocre in almost ever aspect except GPU, where it is simply sub-standard. A machine that can run Halo or WoW acceptably isn't a gaming machine. It is just what is expected from a new Mac bought today.

While I wasn't expecting the 9600, I was expecting something like the 9550 or the X300.

Anyways, I started a GMA 950 gaming thread if anyone's interested. There are some PC GMA 950 benches in there. The GMA 950 gets absolutely slaughtered by even the already relatively slow X300. It also gets beaten by ATI's integrated Radeon Xpress 200 chipset.

Originally Posted by MovieCutter

I should have been more clear...I never said anyone was buying this as a dedicated gaming machine, though I don't see the target market for this machine using this to play games that most of us play. Like I said, I have a Quad for my games. I guess the people buying these machines aren't expecting to play WOW or Halo, the target market for these machines is the simple/average consumer and those of us with a ton of media they want to stream into their television...or cars...he he he.

WoW is quite a commonly played game amongst Mac mini and iBook users.

JKT · Mar 1, 2006, 01:27 PM

Even the 1.25GHz G4 mini with the 9200 runs Halo acceptably. If the Blizzard people themselves are anything to go by, then the new Mac Mini will also run WoW acceptably well too:

After some examination of the Intel-based Mini's specs, it's my opinion that the ideal config for WoW will be to have a minimum of 1GB RAM installed, as a matched pair of DIMMs.

The CPU (either Core Solo or Core Duo) can use up to about 5GB/sec of memory bandwidth maximum; by having matched pairs of DIMMs installed, thhe machine has around 10GB/sec of total memory bandwidth to share between CPU and GPU tasks. At times when the CPU is executing out of its L2 cache (which is fairly large in the Core Solo and Duo), the GPU will have a larger percentage of that RAM throughput available.

A 1024x768 screen, refreshing at 60Hz and 24-bit color depth, will consume about 0.13 GB/second of bandwidth just for the pixel refresh, this is not too big of a deal.

At 5GB/sec, that should be enough fillrate to hit every pixel at 1024x768 res (assuming 24 bit color and 24 bit Z or a total of 6 bytes per pixel) over 1000 times in a second. Oh, but texture fetch bandwidth will eat into that too, so that is a very loose back-of-the-envelope number or "upper bound". Real games have more work to do than just sitting in a loop repeatedly erasing the frame buffer etc; they also tend to hit each pixel in the scene more than once.

(*) assuming the RAM "dual channel" mode is active and the DIMMs are 64-bits wide each, yielding a 128-bit wide memory system at 667MHz peak throughput.

Bottom line is that the new Mini is probably at its best for GPU speed when you have matched DIMMs installed. The base config has matched DIMMs but only 512MB total; we'd recommend 1GB minimum due to the shared RAM configuration.

Until people start benchmarking these things can you please switch off your FUD-spreading machine?

Altair · Mar 1, 2006, 01:34 PM

Originally Posted by MovieCutter

Who in their right mind would buy this...for gaming??? I have a Quad and a MBP for that.

I have a feeling that 90% (including me) of the people that are complaining about this card do not play the newest FPS for several hours a day. I play a good strategy game every now and then and the intel card does not have hardware T & L support which means that it won't be able to even run civilization 4 or age of empires 3. If they had gone with the Radeon 9500, then we would have been able to at least play these games.

I personally don't have the money to go up to a 20" imac which is what I would have had with a mini (dell 20" + mini is a lot less than an imac and can be done in stages). I am going to have to instead upgrade my 4 year old pc (for about $300) to play these games and stick to my 3 year old powerbook for everything else.

Basically the point is that Apple is going to really miss out by not having a relatively cheap system for the casual gamers. And before people say it, I have tons of consoles but none have good strategy games that are like civ and age of empires.

mavherzog · Mar 1, 2006, 01:47 PM

Originally Posted by Lateralus

64MB Radeon 9200.

Which the GMA950 should out perform.