01-30-2007, 10:51 AM

If a chap were going to look for a late G4 or early core-Solo mini with the Radeon 9200 V-card sporting 32MB ram, would it perform better or worse than a newer Core Duo with an intel GMA950 with 64MB virtual (shared) VRAM?

I'm not talking about CPU horsepower here, I'm more interested in being able to run the basic UB games like Lego StarWars, World of Warcraft, and to stream video to an HDTV.

I'm starting to get tired of waiting for a new Mini with a decent video card to suplement my Macbook C2D and I don't like the iMac with integral screen (ie, you get screen problems and you loose your whole machine to AppleCare for "X" weeks, plus I also already have a rather nice widescreen 19" LCD Monitor on my aging (and soon to be tossed with any luck) PC.

I know someone's going to plug the MacPro here, but I don't need quad processors & terabytes of memory and I frankly think 3K+ is far too much money for a home user to spend just to get a decent video card in his/her mac.

Now granted, CivIV and WoW run great on my maxed out Macbook (2G ram), but I'm getting sick of the stupid "you don't meet Sys Reqs" messages that companies like Aspyr code into their software in their games detect you have a Macbook. Guess they just don't want annoying phonecalls from users with 512MB complaining about performance...

My understanding is the Radeon equipped Minis won't generate that annoying message?

01-30-2007, 11:55 AM

To be honest, they're both crummy. The Mini is a cheap machine, which is great for everything apart from games really.

If games are important, have a look at the iMac.

01-30-2007, 12:03 PM

iMac - Blah. I really do NOT like integrated monitors and won't buy one EVER, except in a latop.

So I guess it may be back to waiting to see if Apple (ever) releases a mini with a graphics processor worth owning.

I definitely won't shell out for a MacPro. If apple thinks that is how they will grow their market - making gaming-capable machines that cost 3X or more the cost of the equivalent PC - then they won't be getting any more of my hardware money, though I do LOVE my Macbook.