New (?) Mini mac pics

[the_leander]

It's a great little chip, I have had one in my PC for about a year now, and have yet to find ANY game that really hurts it (admittedly I've not got Doom 3 or Half Life 2, but I suspect that a slightly lower frame rate and medium detail settings would suffice). Halo? No problems, smooth as silk at 1024x768 with all the trimmings. Medal of Honour, again 1024x768 with all the trimmings it kicks out a consistant, smooth output that defies much of the grumbling about this choice of gpu.

Admittedly my 9200 has 256mb of its own ram, but the way many people have slagged off the 9200, you'd think they were talking about an S3-Virge with an axe wound or something!

This system, with 512Mb of ram will fly playing all but the most recent big name games if my own experiences with similarly powerful systems in the x86 world are anything to go by. I can see this being a great portable BattleField 1942 gaming rig :-D

Hopefully if the Insurance company pay out what they should, the missus will be getting one of these for her birthday :-D

[the_leander]

Waccoon wrote:

the_leander:  (admittedly I've not got Doom 3 or Half Life 2, but I suspect that a slightly lower frame rate and medium detail settings would suffice).

Interesting how medium detail will work, and not low.  That's fine for the moms-and-pops Wayne mentioned.  :-)

Are you trying to be funny (if so you're not succeeding) or just trolling? Obviously if a game runs in medium or higher levels of detail then by definition it will  run that same game at low detail, just a damned sight faster. What I was trying to get accross is that the 9200 is no slouch and is more then capable of playing modern games at medium - high levels of detail settings at high resolutions.

the_leander:  This system, with 512Mb of ram will fly playing all but the most recent big name games if my own experiences with similarly powerful systems in the x86 world are anything to go by.

Wow.  512MB in a mom-and-pop machine.  Who knew Macs were so efficient with memory?  ;-)[/quote]

512Mb is pretty much a necessety if you plan on playing modern 3D games on any computer these days, do try to keep up 007  :-P

But you do have a point, the 256Mb's of ram is the absolute minimum you'd want to run OSX with (or windows 2000/XP for that matter) and that is sad. Modern OS's are hogs, even Zeta (BeOS R5.1 derivitive) struggles with "only" 64Mb of Ram. :lol:

[the_leander]

Waccoon wrote:

512Mb is pretty much a necessety if you plan on playing modern 3D games on any computer these days, do try to keep up 007

Now, be nice.  I just get tired of everyone bashing Windows for using so much memory, while all the other Operating Systems out there use the same amount.

Of course, a good OS will always have a high memory usage at idle.  If you've got it, you should use it, and they use it mostly for caching, which is all disposable.  There's no telling how much memory an OS "actually" uses, save for the typical marketting boloney.

Heh, it seemed funnier when I typed it at the time. But whilst you do have a point about caching, you can get a good idea about what the OS in question is comfortable as a bare minimum. Zeta for example will be happy with 64Mb's of ram and whilst will operate at a stretch with 32, it isn't pretty. Windows 2000 likewise is ok for use in office apps with as little as 128Mb's of ram, the moment you want to play games however you'll need 512Mb's of ram, 256Mb's just doesn't cut it (been there, done that).

WindowsXP however to get the same sort of responsiveness as win2k with 128Mb of ram, you need 256Mbs, and for games at the same sort of speed as win2k with 512Mb's you'll need about the same, but will have less ram to spare playing the same game then if you ran win2k. Mostly because of differences in the GUI, extra services and extra bloats.

[the_leander]

Rbby wrote:
Maybe I'm mistaken but isn't this forum, just by it's name, all about the Amiga ? We should all be intereted in what's going on in the Amiga community instead of what's going on with the Mac or Microcrap. I may be in the minority here but I could care less about those other OS's. Being an Amiga owner since the day when I first saw and purchased an Amiga 1000, for me the other systems could never even come close to the multitasking environment of my trusty Amiga.

This is an Amiga community forum, however, given Eyetech's release of the microA1, this new mac could seriously negatively effect sales of hardware to people not interested in the AmigaOS, specifically NetBSD and Linux PPC fans. That fact alone merrits discussion.

As for other OS's comming close to the Amigas multi tasking, I know it'll annoy a lot of people, but BeOS/Zeta does it better. :-P

As with many things, if Amiga are to re enter into the mass market they are going to have to offer the things people have come to expect, if it is to go into a niche as I suspect it will, then it has to be on at least an equal footing with the competition, with the arrival of the mini mac, the microA1 looks decidedly underpowered and overpriced... It's all well and good to say, lets ignore MS or Apple, but the fact is that simply ignoring the market will eventually land you in a possision where companies in our little community will say goodbye and go on to greener pastures. Not unlike today in that regard.

I've loved Amiga, I learned to push the hardware and software well beyond their supposed limitations, but if I had the cash to buy a microA1 now that the new mac is out, I would be hard pushed to justify the additional cost for the Amiga. Computers ultamately are tools, right now Amiga cannot offer me a good enough incentive to buy (back) into the market, especially with the software that comes bundled in with the mini mac no matter how slick the multitasking is in the OS. I suspect the public at large would make a similar decision based on the above train of thought.

[the_leander]

Wow, I mean I knew that the mac mini was small, you could tell that by the pictures, but by the looks its about the same size as early diskmans!

With luck the missus will be getting hers before too long, though hers will only have 512Mb of ram and the smaller cpu/hd setup. (Ok, I admit it, I'm cheep).

Damned impressive stuff is that!