Mac mini review at Tom's: Power draw 28 Watts during DVD playback

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Lifer
Mar 11, 2000
24,054
1,692
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Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
:cookie:

Via C3. Your point? :p

- M4H
Click to expand...
Well, people complain about G4 performance, but AFAIK, the VIA C3 is much worse. Not to mention that there is no VIA C3 machine that is anywhere as nicely built.
 
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Ecgtheow

Member
Jan 9, 2005
131
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So it uses less than half the power of a light bulb. That would be great for the ads; if there were any.
 
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halfadder

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2004
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AFAIK, Apple doesn't really want to advertise the Mini yet. Right now they're having enough problems trying to meet demand, there are many curious folks with $479+ to spend on a Mini for their second or third machine. It's not exactly the switcher special right now, but it's a good deal for a certain segment of the market. I bought one for my grandpa as a drop-in replacement for his old Pentium 2 based system and he's loving it.

Regarding the VIA EPIA boards with the VIA C3 processors... there are some really slick cases, but even the smallest Mini-ITX cases are mugh larger than the Mini. In fact, even the Nanode (a tiny case made for the upcoming Nano-ITX) is still larger than the Mini. And frankly, C3 performance sucks. My little EPIA is an M10000, which means it has the newer faster Nehemiah chip running at 1 GHz. I think the current fastest model is 1.2 GHz, so I'm close. Anyway, it runs no faster than my 500 MHz P3. Seriously. It's great for surfing the web and using MS Office (and even Word takes awhile to launch on that CPU)... but that's about it. There's no way it could handle an app like Garage Band like the Mac Mini can. And heck... all VIA EPIA systems use integrated shared memory "DeltaChrome" onboard suck graphics. This hurts CPU performance and kills the already poor DDR266 memory bus. Even the Mac Mini has a real GPU with real dedicated graphics memory.

This is the case I have for my Mini-ITX system, I think it's pretty sweet:
http://206.14.132.88/products/Travla/c134/C134-Images/sC134-45d-600.jpg
It's the same height as the Mini, but an inch wider and about 4 inches longer. It still requires an external power brick and it requires really expensive low profile DIMMs.

Check out the prices, Mac Mini is cheaper, faster, and comes with a load of software.
http://www.logicsupply.com

What I'd really like would be a Mac OS X compatible G4 ATX board. Even if Apple charged $300 for the board + CPU I would be happy as long as I could use a generic AGP ATI or NVIDIA graphics card. Even better would be a G5 ATX board but I think Apple would be worried about that eating into their G5 tower sales.

I think I'm just kidding myslef with the ATX idea.... I don't think Steve Jobs would ever sell just a board because he knows it would end up in one of my beige Enlight ATX cases! :)
 
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trikster2

Banned
Oct 28, 2000
1,907
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1/2 adder

Funny post. I see your point though about the atx or matx board. Build your own system use your own hard drives etc. Apple has taken the first step with the mini, maybe we'll see that some day.

Regarding the lack of advertising remark above:

Why should apple pay one cent for advertising. Just came from an airport newstand and every mac magazine had the mini on the front cover. Can't get better press than that...
 
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DragonMasterAlex

Banned
Feb 3, 2001
5,156
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Yeah, the mini is definitely the shiz. Think I might just buy one once I get my taxes back :) Plugged into a nice 50" DLP TV's DVI connection this should be great for entry-level video editing with Final Cut ;)

Jason
 
Spicedaddy

Spicedaddy

Platinum Member
Apr 18, 2002
2,305
77
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Not surprising considering it's basically a laptop without an LCD... (and the LCD is what draws the most power in a laptop :p)
 
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TheCanuck

Senior member
Apr 28, 2003
373
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And then read Anand's review and you'll also see that it eats up 40 - 60% of the CPU when playing back DVDs. If I watch a DVD on my laptop it uses even less power and only around 15% CPU.

While it is a decent machine, the mac mini does have a few problems. It's not like Apple is delivering cutting edge technology with this one.
 
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halfadder

Golden Member
Dec 5, 2004
1,190
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The Mac Mini is basiclly an eMac without the CRT. The specs are similar to the iBook G4, but the iBook has a slower FSB and uses the mobile (slower) version of the Radeon 9200.

For some reason Mac OS X has never really used much hardware acceleration for video playback. This can be seen on DVD playback as TheCanuck mentioned. It can also be seen when playing back MPEG2 material from an ElGato EyeTV. Oddlly, though, a 500 MHz iBook G3 has no problem playing back DVD material, even though it only has about 1/3 of the CPU power as the 1.25 GHz Mac Mini (G4). So I'm not quite sure how accurate the CPU usage figures are during DVD playback.

There are some interesting rumors that the next version of Final Cut Pro will require both Quicktime 7 and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for its fully GPU accelerated Core Image features. It'll be interesting to see how this effects DVD and other video playback.
 
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Dennis Travis

Golden Member
Oct 9, 1999
1,076
1
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halfadder, I just did some DVD tests on my 1.25Ghz Mini with 512Megs RAM just like Anands. I ran IPulse and played Shall We Dance DVD, Overall typical CPU usage with the movie going was 28%. There were a few peaks of 35% but mostly it was 30% or under and more like 25-28% CPU. I used Ipulse because it will display right on top of the movie Full Screen so I can watch the DVD and the CPu at the same time. I don't know why Anands figures are that different then what I am getting. I tried changing sceens and it never went anywhere near that high.
 
Wuzup101

Wuzup101

Platinum Member
Feb 20, 2002
2,334
37
91
I never get figures that high on my powerbook (specs in sig) either. I find it hard to believe that usage was that high; however, it's really a moot point because I rarely do anything else on my notebook when watching a DVD anyway...
 
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