Respect Sakura

…or I’d update the site as promised all about the wonderful things I’ve waste^H^H^H^H^Hspent money on, lately.. but I’ve been too busy sleeping and watching magical girl anime.

I really do promise to tell you all about the latest addition in my family of binary digit calculators, but I figured that as she is right now, Arturia Mini is a little too underpowered. Being a 1.66GHz dual core Mac mini with only 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB 5400 RPM 2.5″ SATA drive, you can’t expect magical things.. especially when somewhere between 64MB and 80MB of that system RAM is being sucked away for video memory. Hopefully, this will be rectified by the end of the week, along with the purchase of more RAM.. and.. something else to make it just a little faster.

But just for a quick idea of how she runs: On an app-per-app basis, I’d hazard to guess that the new Intel Mac mini is on par with my old 1.6GHz PowerMac G5 in terms of universal binary performance. A quick play around with Quake III in 640×480 shows only a few frames more on the G5, and that’s probably helped along by the 3GB of RAM, and a video card that doesn’t suck. In 1024×768, the difference between the two is drastic, which is due to the fact that the video card plays more of a role in higher resolutions. To sum it up? AGP based 9800 Pro /w 256MB of RAM absolutely clobbers the i945G video. This is to be expected.

Of course, for the modders.. there’s a few other interesting gems, too. The notebook sized hard drive is SATA based, which means space considerations aside, there’s no technical reason why you couldn’t go out and buy a desktop sized SATA drive and somehow jerry rig it up to the Mac mini. With gigabit ethernet, and a single/dual core processor that supports virtualization, there exists the possibility to run some crazy kind of Mac based clustering. Considering the low power usage and small size of the mini, this notion isn’t as far fetched as some would have you believe.

Of course, I’m just going to stick with the boring old use-it-as-a-desktop-system-just-like-go^H^Hjobs-intended paradigm, but I will be making a few little.. modifications. More on that this weekend, hopefully.