Post by Chad IrbyPost by Randy HowardPost by Chad IrbyFor a PC to be equal in performance, you're looking at a much higher
clock rate, much more RAM, more disk space, and the like.
All of which are EASILY available on most current PC hardware
designs, and unobtainable with the Mac Mini.
Not on the cheap ones people insist on using. Sure, you can spec out a
mondo-cool killer PC, but you end up with a machine that's twice the
price,
If you buy a workstation from Dell or HP, yeah. If you build one with
high-end components from Fry's or Newegg, you can build one for the
half the price of a Dell, that will literally run circles around it.
This is especially true today thanks to Dell's insistence upon shipping
only inferior Intel CPUs.
Post by Chad Irbyand should really be compared to a real desktop like the G5, not
a small machine that's 1/10 the volume and half the footprint of those
cheap PCs.
Dual-capable systems have never been called "desktops" very commonly,
as they are typically known as workstations or servers. The G5 is
at worst a "workstation class" computer.
Post by Chad IrbyFunny, most of the comparisons we get from PC folks are with cheap PCs
(evidence Edwin's "Mac Mini Killer" foolishness). Low memory, not-fast
processor speeds in the 2 GHz range (which puts them about even in Mac
Mini speed comparisons),
So what? You're not buying a Mac Mini to beat the price of a PC. You're
buying it because you like OS X and want something cheap to run it on,
or you are very cramped for space. It doesn't matter what the relative
performance is between PCs and Macs, unless you intend to run Linux on
them (or you think that Linux + your favorite WM is the same as OS X).
Post by Chad IrbyThe comparison machines also have XP Home edition, which means they're
*less* capable then even standard XP machines.
Less secure, for sure. Less capable? Mostly with SMP, dual core or
hyperthreaded CPUs and a few networking features. I think XP Home
should be banned in the USA as a national security hazard. :-)
Post by Chad IrbyThen, of course, you have to *build* them in many situations.
Yeah, that's a tough one. Takes about 30 minutes. Less time than
my Mac G5 has been sitting in a Fedex shipping depot in Sacramento,
currently 34 hours and counting. It took Apple less than that much
time to package it up and call them to ship it to me. I could
have built about 50 PCs in the time since I ordered the Mac, and
still had plenty of time for sleeping, eating, hanging out with
the family, etc.
Post by Chad IrbyI work with these computers all of the time. They're *slow*.
I've been working with computers 12 hours a day, 6 days a week
minimum, probably since before you were born. You have no idea
what a slow computer is if you think any currently available PC
is slow.
Post by Chad IrbyOnce you get into the high end, the only two things PCs have any real
numerical advantages in are raw clock speed (with no real performance
advantage)
Depends upon the processor, and especially the cache size, and to
a very large degree the specific working data set employed. As
soon as you start making blanket statements like that, any
credibility you might have had starts fading away. A dual opteron
system, with hypertransport memory will lay waste to most other
PCs on the market, regardless of clock speed, especially for compute
intensive tasks that have working sets larger than cache size.
--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"If the evidence doesn't seem to fit a particular conspiracy theory,
just create a bigger conspiracy theory." --Robert D. Hicks