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Apple iMac 3.06GHz unboxing, hands-on, and benchmarking
Look what arrived on our doorstep today! That's right -- the shiny, expensive new iMac that's now equipped with that funky custom and / or overclocked 3.06GHz CPU. Take a look at us wildly unboxing and handling the behemoth in the gallery below, and get a load of its fairly impressive Xbench scores after the break.%Gallery-21755%
Up to 3GB of RAM in the Mac minis
Reader John L kindly dropped us a tip that Other World Computing has upped their Mac mini memory upgrades up to a whopping 3GB of RAM. And in fact, if you really want a Mini that flies, they'll even squeeze 4GB under the hood, even though they say the Mac Mini can't really handle that much.The performance testing they did just completely confounds me, however-- in situations where lots of memory was needed (the "RAM Hog" setup), 4GB clearly beats everything else. In fact, in most of the regular testing-- the Photoshop test and the "Stress Test" the memory runs exactly how you'd expect: more memory means quicker processing. But in the last two tests, the Halo test and the Xbench test, the mini actually ran faster at just 1GB (which is what it ships with) than the 3GB, and almost as fast as the 4GB. The reasons for that are probably technical (too technical for me, although I'm sure our talented commenters have some answers), but it seems that in some situations, extra RAM just doesn't help.Still, in situations that ask for a lot of memory, having more will definitely give you a nice bonus in speed, and it looks like the mini can now hold more than ever. When I buy mine (in October when Leopard drops, assuming Steve lets it live that long), I'll probably just double it to a reasonable 2GB. But if you want that extra power, it's good to know it's there.
Apple TV benchmarked, not a supercomputer in disguise
So it's true after all, Apple has no magical wand for squeezing unrealistic performance out of off-the-shelf components, but they have managed to put together a halfway decent "Mac" for the price. Tipster 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. In most operations it actually managed to score fairly close to its taller cousin, just falling behind significantly in certain operations, specifically 3D graphics. Of course, Xbench scores are user submitted and not all that scientific, but it should at least give you a general idea of how this $299 Mac in disguise stacks up.[Thanks, Matt]
