New Mac minis

OllyM

OllyM

OllyM

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Joined
16 Aug 2004
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Location
New Jersey, USA
Just thought I'd post to say how impressed I am with the new 2009 Mac mini - we got one in the office today to replace an ageing Powermac G5.

Went for the base model but bought 4GB of RAM for it and it seems plenty quick enough for generic office tasks.

The main thing that shocked me was the power consumption. The G5 would idle around ~150 watts, this thing sits at 12 watts! That's using less than 10% of the power :eek: - how on earth do they make it so efficient? :p
 
Yeah, they use an awful lot of electricity - very inefficient. Might work out cost effective to change it for something newer and Intel based!
 
I'll be looking to get a Mac Mini for the next house PC.

The fact that it sips 12W idle is another factor. You'd be silly NOT to consider one for a server.
 
EVH said:
I'll be looking to get a Mac Mini for the next house PC.

The fact that it sips 12W idle is another factor. You'd be silly NOT to consider one for a server.
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Well apart from the price. My Asus eee box consumes about 15W at idle and came in at under £200, is much easier to upgrade and is running my webserver (apache/php/mysql), mail (exim), hellanzb, PS3 media server, samba, nfs, netatalk etc. I've never seen it consume over 20W even at full load. It's also MUCH quieter than my Intel Mac Mini was.

My Macbook is on 24/7 as well though so I guess I'm not saving much on electricity. :)
 
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I've had one since launch day. Brilliant bit of kit.

Runs most stuff on the base 1GB RAM, I've shoved 4GB in mine and it flies. Runs as a server so it's on 24x7. Utterly silent and uses next to no power.
 
But the eee box isn't anywhere near the same spec - it's an Atom CPU isn't it? And doesn't run OS X :p

This Mini is totally silent too!
 
OllyM said:
But the eee box isn't anywhere near the same spec - it's an Atom CPU isn't it? And doesn't run OS X :p

This Mini is totally silent too!
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The spec isn't really relevant, we were talking about suitability for home server use and I probably run more than most people would. If my eeebox can transcode live HD video to my PS3 without issues then it's doing more than 95% of most home servers.

With regards to the noise, try pushing the Mac Mini a bit, mine used to get pretty loud when it had some load. It was the previous generation Mac Mini though (bought November 07).

Anyway, I'll end there on a pleasant note before the usual people turn up with steam pouring out of their ears. :)
 
Wicksta said:
If my eeebox can transcode live HD video to my PS3 without issues then it's doing more than 95% of most home servers.
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Are you sure about that... full 1080p HD video? Even 720p? I'm not saying it isn't but Nvidia wouldn't be bigging up IONs capabilities of full HD decoding if current netbooks could handle it. Or does yours have a Radeon in it?

With regards to the noise, try pushing the Mac Mini a bit, mine used to get pretty loud when it had some load. It was the previous generation Mac Mini though (bought November 07).
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My 2009 mini is dead silent. Even under Windows 7 playing things like Counter-Strike Source (at 1680x1050 with pretty high graphics) the fan doesn't go above 1500RPM. Of course there is a nice amount of heat coming from the back vents though :D I dread to think what the temps are on the Core 2 Duo/9400m :(
 
Plex is great, once I got used to how to name my files, how to organise them (it's different from Boxee in that respect, somewhat) and got the hang of it, I loved it. iPlayer is wicked through it as well, really clean and slick interface throughout.

I just got a Plex remote on my iPod Touch as well which is very slick, cost £2.39 for Snatch which runs it.
 
Really tempted by one of these as a main desktop, only being firewire.

I've got a FW400 MBox2 Pro sound card, and I'm about to buy a FW800 Drobo, what's the best way to connect the two without dropping the drobo down to FW400 speed?

I want the MBox to be permenantly attached, but the Drobo might travel with me.
 
Say if i was going to buy a Mac Mini, would that end up being faster than my Macbook (its the uni body 2ghz base model - aluminum though)?

Or does the spec/features round up to about the same, in which case i could use my macbook with my desktop. ;)
 
The Mac mini is a laptop without a screen - it has a laptop hard drive, motherboard, optical drive etc. so I'd expect it to perform virtually identically.
 
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