Sam460 V Mac Mini G41.5

[Spectre660]

It will be interesting to see what graphics and video performance  will be achieved on Sam460 machines with MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.1 with Warp3d and the new RadeonHD v2.4 driver and AmigaOS 4.2 .

The Mac Mini is at least 2x as fast, probably more in some circumstances. This becomes very obvious when for example watching videos (under MorphOS the Mini can play most x.264 720p streams without frame skipping) and browsing websites of the heavier kind. MorphOS has pretty solid support for the Mac Mini HW, the GFX is for example completely supported (2D + 3D acceleration, Overlay), even the Airport Extreme WiFi card (if present) is supported.

The Mac Mini is a very cool little machine. It's compact and powerful - in PPC terms of course (which honestly is quite weak by today's standards, but then again, the Sam460 is less than half as powerful, so...)

MorphOS is by far the best Amiga NG OS in existence; compared to OS4 (I have both) it has more features, it has better features, it has all the best Amiga standards built in (like Poseidon, CGX, etc, etc), it has better Amiga compatibility, it supports a lot more HW (both in terms of systems and peripheral HW), yet it costs a lot less, and it even comes with a 30 minutes unlimited "try before you buy" demo mode.

To me it's a no-brainer, go for the Mac Mini (if you can find the 1.5/64MB VRAM model). Or why not a laptop? MorphOS supports plenty of models! But if you still want to go the Sam460 route, then you will probably be pleased to know that MorphOS will soon support that HW as well, perhaps already in the next release even...

Happy Hunting!

[Spectre660]

Anyone want to do a mplayer  benchmark using the following video ?
http://www.amiga-ng.org/resources/Mplayer/Superman.flv

mplayer -quiet -nosound -benchmark Superman.flv

BENCHMARKs: VC: 28.429s VO: 10.055s A: 0.000s Sys: 0.529s = 39.013s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 72.8722% VO: 25.7731% A: 0.0000% Sys: 1.3547% = 100.0000%

Sam460ex results from
http://www.amigans.net/modules/xforum/viewtopic.php?post_id=91172#forumpost91172

[Spectre660]

2.83 times faster than Sam460ex .
Close to X1000 performance below

mplayer-altivec -quiet -nosound -benchmark -ao null -vo comp::argb  Superman.flv

BENCHMARKs: VC: 6.228s VO: 3.852s A: 0.000s Sys: 0.253s = 10.332s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 60.2760% VO: 37.2801% A: 0.0000% Sys: 2.4439% = 100.0000%

With my Mac mini 1.5GHz (I didn't shut down any programs, I had browser, amircs etc running):

BENCHMARKs: VC:  10.910s VO:   2.542s A:   0.000s Sys:   0.354s =   13.806s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 79.0239% VO: 18.4125% A:  0.0000% Sys:  2.5636% = 100.0000%

[Spectre660]

Please guys, don't fight.
I was the one who brought up the mplayer benchmarks.
Before my Sam460ex got fried and before the LiveForit Mplayer,
the Sam460ex was the machine that I watched videos on.
I would just convert them to xvid using a quad core pc
and they played back on the Sam460ex nicely.

[Spectre660]

Not in my case.
a power supply failure burned out a piece of the motherboard and took the video card out too.
 

is there no way to repair 3-4 years old board?