Intel Mac Mini vs. PowerMac G4 Dual?

I tested both single and dual core Intel minis a couple of weeks ago, and they both outperformed my Dual 867, and the dual core model got very close to the performance of my Rev A G5 dual 2.0 running iMovie 6.

In terms of performance in native software, I'd expect both Intel minis to outperform a dual 1.25 G4 on almost all tasks - the only exception might be between the G4 and single core mini in tasks which are highly processor intensive, where the dual G4s might still win out, or on disc-intensive work (meaning opening or saving something like very large photoshop files rather than streaming DV in iMovie) where the mini's drive speed would still represent a bit of a possible bottleneck.

I was quite impressed by the Intel units, particularly in iMovie where my G4 minis tend to be a bit laggy as projects grow, but even the single core mini was much more responsive.

Laptop optical drives have always been slower than desktop ones, probably because they are thinner and smaller. Nowadays any drive will read discs at 32x speed or more, and therefore drive speed doesn't have much influence on actual ripping speed. But a few years ago, when you bought your PowerBook, drives were much slower, especially in laptops. Your Dual G4's drive is probably faster than your PowerBook's, which in this case seems to be the bottleneck. Have you checked its specs, and compared them to your G4's drive ?

While I have not ran any scientific tests or real world benchmarks my G5 "feels" and acts faster. I have a G5 2.0GHz 2.5 gig of ram and a ATI X800XT. I think there's sufficient horse power under the hood of the powermac to smoke my little mini.

For me my PM is my production machine that handles all of my photography and photoshop. The mini will be a sandbox, toy, file server. So the horse power disparity is not an issue for me.

Let me say however I love working with my Mini, the design and usage is a joy. Hats off to apple for this engineering work of art. Of course I'm an old G4 cube user so the nice lines of the cube carried over to the mini 🙂

This is a great post. I think the processor in the core duo mini is very fast but the fact that it has an integrated graphics card and a slow HD really handicap it in apps like photoshop that need a very fast scratch disk or in games that eat alot of ram or need a strong gpu.

I think the GPU is the weakest link. Its possible to upgrade the drive to a faster unit but you cannot upgrade the graphics. All in all I'm happy with my mini, but my needs probably a little different then your typical mini user.

Mike