[mrt2]

Ok I got a new MacMini yesterday to replace my current Vista machine. Although I'm a total Apple fan I was little skeptical of the performance. The mini's have good RAM and processor specs (well not good but decent0 but also had less cache than my Vista machine. The reason I was replacing my Vista machine was:

1. WAAAAAY too loud. It's a full tower with many fans inside 6+
2. It had a 1000 watt power supply. I'm not sure what my power bill would be without it but I'm sure it would be less; that thing sounds like a jet when it's powered up.


Although the Vista machine was stock 2.4GHZ, I ran it at 3.5GHZ usually and when I did run it over-clocked the performance in XBMC was great... when I ran it at stock, there were stutters (not big ones) in some high bit rate 1080P content.

ANYHOW since the Vista machine had issues being clocked at 2.4 then I figured the MacMini would also have issues at 2.53... BOY was I wrong. This thing is cutting through any content I throw at it... Does this thing really perform this well or am I not throwing high enough quality to make it stutter? LOL as it stands now, it's a very good experience and shaping up to be the ultimate HTPC for me....

[jmarshall]

In general, yes XBMC on the Mac tends to out-perform XBMC on Windows when you're comparing like with like - purely due to differences in the underlying OS.

As a side note, just because your PSU is rated to 1000W doesn't mean it's going to draw that - it'll only draw the amount of power that the components in the PC require at the time (plus overhead due to efficiency of the PSU itself)

My mac mini (1.8GHz Intel) draws about 9W on standby, 35W idle and 50W or so while playing 720p x264, measured at the wall.

Lastly, note that you may get even better performance running Linux on your mac mini as you'll get hardware decoding via VDPAU - you might want to grab XBMC Live and test it out.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[garyi]

Jonathan the live cd is that like including an OS, i.e. if I stick it in my mini and reboot will it load something?

In your opinion is it worth the hassle? I run itunes and a torrent client on the mini as well.

[migueld]

Yea I had a similar experience, I went from custom-made HTPC to mac mini and I'm very happy about the performance. The new Mac mini has even better power consumption, about 2w sleep, 15-20w at idle and I think around 30-40w playback.

Also a big plus for me is the fact that the mac can go to sleep and it can be awaken fast and with the remote. So it's a good 'appliance' experience.