With
Apple joining BAPCo, its almost a foregone conclusion that Apple will have Windows running on MacTels one way or another.
Our
bet (What does Apple have in store for us on April 1?) is on OS X Leopard taking advantage of
Intel's Virtualization Technology.
The guys at
Gearlog have already benchmarked the whole crop of MacTels, but skipped on the video tests since none of them had video drivers
at the time.
Since then, the
Mac Mini video driver workaround has been found. With that obstacle out of the way, MTC endeavored to benchmark how fast this little baby was.
And baby, its faaast!!! (ahem... comparatively speaking)
After installing all the drivers found so far at onmac.net and disabling the problem devices in Device Manager, the MTC crew got FutureMark's PCMark05 Advanced and ran the Mini through its paces.
The Mac Mini Core Duo came in at
2950 PCMarks. That's a respectable score, considering how it fared against Sony's and Dell's current Intel Core Duo offerings.
The
Sony VAIO VGN-FE550G clocked in at
2833 and the
Dell Inspiron 6400 came in at
2827. Notice that both contenders were laptops - Core Duos having been primarily targeted at the mobile market.
The two laptops were selected primarily because they have similar specs to the Mac Mini Core Duo. They are both 1.66 Ghz systems using
Intel's i945GM video chipsets. The
laptops actually had quite a bit of an edge, with 1GB of memory and unlocked video memory. The stock Mac Mini we used only had 512 mb and Apple locked down its i945GM implementation to only 91 mb, as opposed to the 220mb the laptops had access to.
Quote:
|
(Correction: Apple locked down video memory on OS X. Once in Windows, the 945GM behaved as usual. Also, the 91 mb figure cited was the reported video memory by PCMark05. This number varies as video memory is dynamically reallocated by the chipset as necessary.)
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Interestingly, even with its' memory limitations, the Mini was still able to eke out some wins in the Graphics Suite.
It topped the Physics & 3D test with
67.55 fps against Sony's
62.2 and Dell's
67.49.
The Mini ran away with the 3D Pixel Shader test with
18.83 fps against Sony's
12.75 and Dell's
12.93, about 30 percent faster! (Well, "ran away" might be a bit too much. At these frame rates, "crawl away" might be more like it
)
It did get soundly beaten though on the 2D Transparent Windows test coming in at second with
128.14 windows/sec, with Sony taking top honors at
172.63 but still 50 percent faster than Dell's
81.31.
Conclusion
Some might say that the difference in the score is negligible, and we tend to agree with the Mini only
4% faster PCMark-wise - well within the margin of error. To us, what's more important is that the Mac Mini was not only able to hold its own against commercial Windows XP systems, it was able to do so with a slight margin even with the memory handicap!!!
Remember, PCMark05 is not just a benchmarking program. It fully exercises all the major subsystems in the OS. And for the Mac Mini to come up with the top score is further testament that XP on MacTels is just about ready for the "rest of us" just three weeks after blanka and narf2006 won $13,854 for pioneering the feat.
Lastly, the Mini is not exactly a gaming machine. Preliminary testing suggests that the Intel 945gm integrated video chip is not exactly a barnburner.
In the next installment, we will look at how the Mini fares with popular gaming titles.
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