On Wednesday, January 12, 2005, at 04:15 PM, macfan wrote:
Consider me one of the big time cheapskates as I have no desire for a Mac Mini at any price. The Mini has one memory slot, a notebook hard-drive, very low end graphics card, only a 400 firewire port, and isn't considered user upgradeable. Give me my processor upgraded 8500s, and 8600s any day. Eight memory slots, tons of drive space, and I can put in any PCI card I want. I even have raids installed in mine, not to mention I am running SCSI which is far superior in speed to > IDE.
ROFL.
Yes. Modern, top end SCSI drives are faster. They're also four or five times the cost for half the disk space.
This is Apple's low end consumer machine, and is selling for about one sixth to one tenth of what your 8600 cost new.
Plus, there is no way in hell you're getting anything remotely approximating that kind of performance in your 8600.
You're deluded if you think hanging a SCSI raid off a 50Mhz bus in an 8600 is going to be as fast as an ATA-133 drive on a system with a 333MHz memory bus and a 1.2Ghz processor, even if it IS a 5400 RPM laptop drive.
(and, by the way, you can indeed put a raid on this system; it'll be external but Firewire raids are quite common, and OS X supports creating raids in software out of any two disks)
You can only just match the Mini's memory (1G) in one slot with your eight; and the Radeon 4X AGP 9200 graphics card in that is hardly 'very low end' especially when you compare it to *anything* you could possibly stick in your 8600.
The absolute best possible card you can put into it, the Radeon 9200 Mac Edition does have more vram, and the same video processor, but its still hobbled by the slow bus in your 8600.
It's only low end compared to other cards and systems that your 8600 is not....
I'll grant you you can put a FW800 card in your machine, and a gigabit ethernet card, and you're still going to be no faster because none of those things are the bottleneck on your computer, the one thing you cannot escape, which is that it's an antique, slow motherboard.
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