db.xbench.com— Matt wiped his Apple TV's drive and ran a clean install of 10.4.9, just to throw it to the Xbench dogs. It came out surprisingly well, with a 55.75 score, about half that of a medium-range Intel Mac mini.
Apr 2, 2007View in Crawl 4
Not really. It would be, as its very power efficient and its CPU is adequate for low-demand web apps at medium user load, but it only has 256 MB of RAM. Wordpress-esque apps plus a few users would make that machine very miserable quick even with very good optimizations with that little RAM. The RAM limitation gets even worse for using this for different types of servers, like file servers. As good of a design choice as it was, its a shame to hackers that the RAM was direct soldered, or this thing might just be the ideal home server/router/network appliance thing.
Exactly. I can throw a faster hard drive and graphics card into my PowerMac and crush another machine with a faster processor and more memory in a benchmark; that doesn't mean that it will be faster for typical use than the aforementioned machine. A great example of that was when I had both a G4 PowerMac and a Core Solo Mini; because my PowerMac has a 10k hard drive and much better graphics card, it had little trouble trumping the Mini in benchmarks. Is the MIni faster at encoding a DVD? Definitely. Could I play a FPS on the MIni comfortably? Nope. It's really all dependent on what you're trying to accomplish with your machine.I own both a 2ghz MacBook and my 1.4ghz PowerMac; I spend the majority of my time using the PowerMac still. It gets the job done.
I need a setup where I can take content 'off' my computer, not harbor more photo's and movies as hard disk space is a growing issue (iTMS movies, Music, EyeTV shows). So in this circumstance a Mac Mini although more expensive is a better solution for people wanting the have a digital 'hub' not just a receiving devise.
The OpenGL tests would blow the Mini out of the water (due to it being an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 Go with a dedicated 64MB block of Video RAM) *if* it wasn't for the fact that they had to remove all the NVIDIA KEXTs (i.e. the graphics chip drivers) to get the graphics working. If someone can work out how to patch in the AppleTV's native video KEXT/driver that'll smack it's XBench score up into the early 60s at least.
kibibytebrainApr 3, 2007
Not really. It would be, as its very power efficient and its CPU is adequate for low-demand web apps at medium user load, but it only has 256 MB of RAM. Wordpress-esque apps plus a few users would make that machine very miserable quick even with very good optimizations with that little RAM. The RAM limitation gets even worse for using this for different types of servers, like file servers. As good of a design choice as it was, its a shame to hackers that the RAM was direct soldered, or this thing might just be the ideal home server/router/network appliance thing.
easy4lifApr 3, 2007
wow, half the speed of a mac mini and at half the cost
Closed AccountApr 3, 2007
Exactly. I can throw a faster hard drive and graphics card into my PowerMac and crush another machine with a faster processor and more memory in a benchmark; that doesn't mean that it will be faster for typical use than the aforementioned machine. A great example of that was when I had both a G4 PowerMac and a Core Solo Mini; because my PowerMac has a 10k hard drive and much better graphics card, it had little trouble trumping the Mini in benchmarks. Is the MIni faster at encoding a DVD? Definitely. Could I play a FPS on the MIni comfortably? Nope. It's really all dependent on what you're trying to accomplish with your machine.I own both a 2ghz MacBook and my 1.4ghz PowerMac; I spend the majority of my time using the PowerMac still. It gets the job done.
jeff303Apr 3, 2007
@kibibytebrainWho said anything about Wordpress-esque? It would be sufficient for serving plain HTML+CSS.
blangleyApr 3, 2007
I need a setup where I can take content 'off' my computer, not harbor more photo's and movies as hard disk space is a growing issue (iTMS movies, Music, EyeTV shows). So in this circumstance a Mac Mini although more expensive is a better solution for people wanting the have a digital 'hub' not just a receiving devise.
statusquorulesApr 3, 2007
go away
svpirateApr 3, 2007
The OpenGL tests would blow the Mini out of the water (due to it being an NVIDIA GeForce 7300 Go with a dedicated 64MB block of Video RAM) *if* it wasn't for the fact that they had to remove all the NVIDIA KEXTs (i.e. the graphics chip drivers) to get the graphics working. If someone can work out how to patch in the AppleTV's native video KEXT/driver that'll smack it's XBench score up into the early 60s at least.
ecclesApr 3, 2007
Mac Minis don't have particularly large hard drives. Wouldn't you just plug a 500GB+ USB drive into either?
noctum17Apr 3, 2007
The only great product Apple makes is the Ipod. Since every other post on digg is about Apple TV it can't be that good. Digg me down Apple lovers!