A Mac Mini for a PC User?

I've been looking at the Mac Mini and think about whether it would be woth getting. Keep in mind I'm currently a PC user and currently only use macs at School.

I'm looking for reviews from people who already have them.
A few specific questions:
How well does it handle Adobe Photoshop and Carrara Studio?
How well does linux run on it. (Yello Dog, Ubuntu, etc.)

No..No..No You do not want the mac mini if your goign to be doing photoshop filters. I have the Top spec powerbook and its dog slow. I would receomend lookin at the powermac or the imac. g4's are too slow for todays use and should be only used for basic applications. I am wiating for apple to intorduce new powerbooks cause the one they have right now is a total joke I can get a top spec dothan 2.1 ghz 15.4inch screen 5 hours battery life way better reslotion for under 2 grand and ould get linix for free. Mac mini is great but its still very old tech... I mean I see better buy's like for a pc for jut 100 bucks more and u get amd 64 and a way better grpahics card. I would like for apple to put a better grahics card and a g5 in their. You maybe like im crazy look at what other people are offering...I would not by the mac mini unless if your despreate for a mac! Like I said The refrub imac g5 is excellent!

I run Photoshop just fine on a G4 iMac. You should have no problem running Photoshop on a mini.

schweb said:

I run Photoshop just fine on a G4 iMac. You should have no problem running Photoshop on a mini.

Click to expand...

Yes you are right It will run it fine but not great compared to pentium 4's our their that are similarly priced! The g4 is a slow chip and it it annoying that i have to wait for such a long time after I liquify sometihng

nm: schweb beat me to it.

Sexyboy said:

Yes you are right It will run it fine but not great compared to pentium 4's our their that are similarly priced! The g4 is a slow chip and it it annoying that i have to wait for such a long time after I liquify sometihng

Click to expand...

Define slow!

It definitely beats the living **** out of an entry level AMD or Intel offering.

The entry level Intel CPU everyone is raving about at the moment is the Pentium M due to it's low power use and high speed, it is really a P3 core with the P4 pipelining so it is almost directly comparable to a similar speed G4 (allowing for the fact that the PPC core is around 1.6 times faster than a P3 for a particular raw clock speed for technical reasons) i.e a 1.5 Ghz G4 would be about equal to a 2.4 Ghz Pentium M chip.

I bought one of this months PC mags devoted to overclocking and modding and they had a run down of all the current CPU offerings (AMD and Intel at least) . They tested all of them with various levels of overclocking and as standard and printed a huge table of results and the most marked thing I noticed was that the top CPU (AMD 64bit) was only a little over twice as fast as the M which they tested and all the P4 offerings slotted in between.

Most of the hype at present is just that, hype, CPU advances have been tiny in the last few years as manufacturers have hit a wall in current production techniques (why do you think we haven't seen 3Ghz G5s yet?), the difference in performance between different PCs nowadays really comes down to bus speed/width and RAM controller speeds (it is absolutely no use having 400Mhz RAM if the motherboard controller can only operate at 300Mhz!) and to get good figures you still need expensive motherboards.

If you see any PC advertised at budget prices it is not going to be a high performance machine until you replace half of it with decent components which pretty much defeats the purpose of buying one.

Personally I use Photoshop on my 1Ghz G4 iMac and it is slightly faster than my XP2000 (which is really clocked at 1.6 Ghz) system doing the same task. (my twin 2G G5 PowerMac of course makes them both look like they are standing still )

Amen-Moses

JohnVbs said:

How well does it handle Adobe Photoshop and Carrara Studio?
How well does linux run on it. (Yello Dog, Ubuntu, etc.)

Click to expand...

1) I should imagine it is a bit faster than my iMac (or my eMac, both are 1Ghz G4s and the Mini is 1.25Ghz in it's lower spec version) which is very usable for Photoshop, can't comment on CS as I don't have it.

2) Why on earth would you want to run Linux on it? It already is running one of the best unix cores available which is optimised for the PPC and the GUI is great although if you want you can use it in command line mode and X11 is available for it (free download unless they've started including it with the OS) so you can theoretically run any Xwindows apps.

The developer tools from Apple are some of the best I've ever seen btw so if you are going to use the machine for software development it is more than up to the job.

Amen-Moses

HAHAHAHAH a 1.5ghz g4 is no where near a 2.4ghz pentium 4 i suggest u looking at real benchmarks not apples. omg this is too funny yes the 167mhz bus is way faster than the 800mhz in the pentium 4. The g4 can not compete agianst penitum 4 it has to be a dual g4 is comparable to a single pentium 4. I tried to give u the link to the famous page Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again but it seems like too many mac fans were upset. Idk but all as I know I really dont care becuase apple is smart and they are not stupid. I glad ur not marketing apples prodcts. What the 2ghz g5 runs as fast a 4ghz now. lol

Sexyboy said:

HAHAHAHAH a 1.5ghz g4 is no where near a 2.4ghz pentium 4 i suggest u looking at real benchmarks not apples. omg this is too funny yes the 167mhz bus is way faster than the 800mhz in the pentium 4. The g4 can not compete agianst penitum 4 it has to be a dual g4 is comparable to a single pentium 4. I tried to give u the link to the famous page Mac vs. PC III: Mac Slaughtered Again but it seems like too many mac fans were upset. Idk but all as I know I really dont care becuase apple is smart and they are not stupid. I glad ur not marketing apples prodcts. What the 2ghz g5 runs as fast a 4ghz now. lol

Click to expand...

Ummm, the Pentium M is not a Pentium 4 and I was using benchmarks from a PC magazine allied with my own knowledge of systems that I own.

I suppose you also deny that the AMD chips are faster than the equivelently clocked Intel offerings?

btw, 167Mhz is the ACTUAL clock speed of the frontside bus which is 4 times the width of the original Pentium bus, 800Mhz is the EFFECTIVE speed of the frontside bus i.e taking into account the fact that the P4 bus is 4 times the size of the original. The G5 figures use the same trick, i.e the bus in my G5 is clocked at 500Mhz but the bus is double the width so Apple quotes 1Ghz FSB. The fastest ACTUAL clock speed you can run the Intel Pentium or AMD chips at is 266Mhz (if you have a motherboard that allows it) which not only represents the limit of overclocking and really requires some hefty cooling. To get to the 625Mhz of the new G5 systems Apple had to go the liquid cooling route, very few of the major PC box shifters have gone that far yet.

As I said on another thread, I currently work on the worlds largest air traffic control system and we (or rather "the management") have chosen PPCs as the upgrade path NOT anything from Intel or AMD, why do you think they would do that? (hint: It aint cos they're cheaper!)

Amen-Moses

Sexyboy said:

HAHAHAHAH a 1.5ghz g4 is no where near a 2.4ghz pentium 4

Click to expand...

If you look at Photoshop benchmarks that might be true, but overall I think saying a 1.5Ghz G4 is equal to a 2.4Ghz P4 isn't a fair statement.

Sexyboy said:

I glad ur not marketing apples prodcts. What the 2ghz g5 runs as fast a 4ghz now. lol

Click to expand...

The 2Ghz G5 is faster than a 3.2 Ghz Pentium, in fact it is also faster than the XEON, and has only just been beaten by the latest Athlon 64s.

The 2.5Ghz TWIN G5 PowerMac can only be beaten by a twin Athlon 64 which is overclocked. If you can source one of those at the same price as the PowerMac please let me know as I'll buy one in a heartbeat.

Amen-Moses

mynameis said:

If you look at Photoshop benchmarks that might be true, but overall I think saying a 1.5Ghz G4 is equal to a 2.4Ghz P4 isn't a fair statement.

Click to expand...

And neither do I, I was making the comparison with the Pentium M which is the recently released chip from Intel to compete in the same niche, i.e small PCs that can be silent. This chip is a Pentium 3 core with the Pentium 4 front end pipelining. It is around 30% slower than a similarly clocked Pentium 4.

(btw, a bit pedantic but "P4" is ambiguous because the Power 4 chip from IBM was the super wide bus PPC that came out a year or two before the G4)

(btw2 the Pentium M is the chip earmarked for new Xboxs)

Amen-Moses

One last point before I head off to bed.

The claim was "a similarly priced", most low end PCs do not use Pentium 4 chips but instead Celerons or the by now familiar Pentium M.

A top end Pentium 4 chip (i.e 3Ghz+) alone is actually around the same price as the whole Mac Mini!

Amen-Moses

Amen-Moses said:

twin Athlon 64 which is overclocked.

Click to expand...

There is no such thing, its like Dual Pentium 4s, it doesn't exist.

Amen-Moses said:

And neither do I, I was making the comparison with the Pentium M which is the recently released chip from Intel to compete in the same niche, i.e small PCs that can be silent. This chip is a Pentium 3 core with the Pentium 4 front end pipelining. It is around 30% slower than a similarly clocked Pentium 4.

Click to expand...

Where are you getting this information? Intel's Pentium-M has been around for years now, I have one. Clock for clock they are faster than Pentium 4s. As far as I have heard they are in no way based on a Pentium 3.

Amen-Moses said:

A top end Pentium 4 chip (i.e 3Ghz+) alone is actually around the same price as the whole Mac Mini!

Click to expand...

Click this link

Select 3Ghz Pentium 4
Select 512mb of ram

You'll get a complete system with Pentium 4 at 3.0 Ghz, 512mb or DDR2 ram, 40gb HD, and keyboard/mouse, for $669 or $569 if you bother to send in the rebate. A mac mini 1.25ghz with 512mb of ram and a keyboard/mouse is $632.

edit: almost forgot, that P4 system comes with a 17in LCD.

witeshark said:

Access to a Mac in a similar way would need admin or root user permissions.

Click to expand...

Access to the registry on a Windows machine requires Administrator login, a regular user cannot access the registry. I don't have any anti-virus or spyware monitoring software on my windows machine.

Sexyboy got banned?

witeshark said:

Rediculous! See the Norton site, not only are registry keys edited, but can be deleted and added by worms without any user or admin prompts!

Click to expand...

Provide an actual link to an article on the site that says that.

Mac OS X is an awesome operating system, the UI is great, I love using it over Windows XP for just normal computer stuff: IM, web browsing, and office applications. It isn't necessary to exaggerate the problems with Windows XP to make OS X look great.