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Mac Mini the 3rd.
By Wolf Paulus <wolf@wolfpaulus.com>

Posted Saturday, November 24th, 2007

A couple weeks ago we had bid fare well to the Power Mac G5 and while I was considering replacing it with a MacBook Pro, I eventually went with a Mac Mini, making it the 3rd one in the house (there were already Tom's G4 based mini, and the Media Center Core Solo based mini).
The newest addition is a 2 GHz Core-2-Duo based mini, upgraded to 2 GB RAM; and having all the other minis around, makes it easy to compare things like speed, runtime temperature, etc. and since I did the memory upgrade myself, we also looked inside, comparing the internals.


Like expected, the new mini looks not only externally,but also internally just like the older and long discontinued Core-Solo. The wire connecting the Airport-card with the antenna got routed differently - but not by much. The new Core-Duo has a Hitachi harddisk (2.5" SATA, 120 GB, 5400 RPM), while the Core-Solo came with the Fujitsu (2.5" SATA, 60 GB, 5400 RPM).


The Core-Solo run 1.5GHz, the Core-2-Due at 2.0 GHz and that really shows in the temperature measurements we did at what we though are comparable loads.
Core-Solo Temp Core-2-Duo Temp

But enough with boring comparisons and temperature statistics. The new Mac Mini is performing well, much faster and also much quieter than the already almost silent G5. Moreover, combined with a cinema screen and the new Apple keyboard, it looks nice and less intimidating than the G5, at least in a home-office environment.

BTW, check out Tom's new PodCast The Tech Weekly Podcast on iTunes. 




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Published on: Saturday, November 24th, 2007  •  Category: [hardware]
Article URL : http://wolfpaulus.com/journal/hardware/MacMini3.html