New Technology Reviews!.: value

Buying Guide: Mac mini vs iMac: which is the best value?

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20228/MAC228.news_feat.mini_opener2_1-200-200.jpg"> The price difference between the cheapest and most expensive Macs Apple is huge. The cost mini Mac £ 649, but if you have a lot to spend and set the Mac of your choice at the online store of Apple, you could spend tens of thousands. It is not that crazy here. For this technological take on David versus Goliath, we're pitching the <a href="">Mac mini</A> against the <a href="">iMac</A>, the top-of-the- range 27-inch model with a 256GB solid-state drive alongside its off-the-shelf 1TB hard drive. It's an intriguing battle. Both machines are consumer-oriented, unlike the Mac Pro which is more of a business computer. And although the iMac is obviously far more powerful, at £2,249, it's also a lot more expensive. If money was no object it would demolish the far cheaper Mac mini, but as it stands, it must work really hard to justify the £1,600 price difference. So which Mac offers better value for money? The mini Mac, with a (relatively) low price and a performance that is ok for day to day computing, or the powerful iMac top-of-the-range, offering incredible strength, a gorgeous screen and a solid state drive ? invented a series of tests to put them through their paces. full range of Apple iMac has now moved to the new series of chips Intel Core-i. One test has been around for a very powerful quad-core 2.8GHz Core i5 processors with some important performance enhancing features. Turbo Boost, which is lacking on the chip Core i3 used by the rest of the range iMac, closes inactive cells and enhances the power of acting on increased clock speed. Also, an integrated memory controller that reduces the time the CPU spends waiting for data to arrive. Unfortunately for the Mac mini, a legal dispute prevents Nvidia graphics chipsets from being integrated into Core-i processors, and the mini's small form factor makes it impossible to include discrete graphics. As a Core i3 processor without a discrete GPU would be a backwards step in graphics power, Apple was forced to stick with the older Core 2 Duo processor in the Mac mini, opting for a 2.4GHz version with the mid-2010 release. For our first test, we used the popular benchmarking utility Xbench to see how the processors compared. Xbench can test a wide range of Mac ecosystems such as hard drives, memory, threads and OpenGL, but here we restricted it to benchmarking the processor. Taking the average of three tests, the iMac scored 225.36, with the Mac mini coming in at 170.9. A convincing win for the iMac, but considering the price difference, the mini was far from disgraced. <img alt="Handbrake" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20228/MAC228.news_feat.handbrake1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Raw benchmarks can be a little nebulous, so we next tried a real-world test. After downloading the popular – and extremely processor-intensive – video conversion utility Handbrake, we encoded a five-minute test video using its Apple TV output settings. The iMac managed it in 175.5 seconds, whereas the Mac mini took 520 seconds, almost three times as long. But given the iMac costs almost three and a half times as much as the mini, Apple's small form factor Mac once again held its own. Glorious graphics <DIV class=almost_half_cell id=gt-res-content> <DIV dir=ltr>On paper, graphic capabilities of the iMac is the mini round spank the MAC. The ATI Radeon 5750 with 1GB GDDR5 SDRAM onboard memory is an important step, the HD 4850 with 512MB used by the previous generation of top-of-the-range iMac. Since the mini has no room in table logic for discrete graphics card, which uses an integrated Nvidia GeForce 320M chipset. This is not so weak selection. The 320M is today the fastest integrated graphics solution available, and it is up to twice as fast as the Nvidia GeForce 9400M used in the past. We tested with Cinebench 11,5, a tool that gives similar ratings for 3D rendering. Again the best of three trials to focus on the graphics card OpenGL recorded the score and not on the CPU we use for our charts Mac comments. This test makes it a complex 3D scene with nearly one million polygons and a set of advanced visual effects. </DIV></DIV> The Mac mini achieved an average running speed of 11.57 frames per second, which is pretty good considering the complexity of the scene being rendered. The iMac, however, scored a smooth 32.07FPS – almost three times the rate offered by the mini. <img alt="Doom 3" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20228/MAC228.news_feat.doom3-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> It's a similar story with our test game, Doom 3. After setting the screen resolution to 1024x768 pixels and cranking graphical effects to Ultra Quality, the Mac mini ran it at an average of 54.2FPS, which is far from shabby. But the iMac managed a scorching 185.3FPS, almost three and a half times as quick as the mini. This figure is on a par with their comparative costs, but hard-core gamers will appreciate the super-speedy frame rates offered by the iMac. Everything feels snappier and more responsive. So the Mac mini is no slouch in the graphics department, but for high-intensity tasks such as gaming and rendering, you likely want an iMac. A study in storage The Mac mini has a standard 320GB hard drive, with the iMac offering a 1TB hard drive and an extra 256GB solid-state drive used as the boot volume. This SSD is the main reason our test iMac costs so much, adding £600 to the price of the off-the-shelf, 2.8GHz Core i5 machine. Clearly it's not cheap, but is it worth it? We fired up a copy of QuickBench to test the speeds of the two Mac's boot volumes – in other words, the Mac mini's 320GB, 5400rpm hard drive, and the iMac's 256GB solid-state drive. Unsurprisingly, the iMac's SSD proved faster, but the degree by which it outpaced its rival was aggravated by the Mac mini's relatively slow hard drive. At 5400rpm, it's substantially slower than the secondary 1TB 7200rpm HDD used in the iMac. <img alt="QuickBench" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20228/MAC228.news_feat.quickbench-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> The iMac's solid-state drive outpaced the Mac mini's hard drive by over 250% in the sequential read and write tests. In the random read/write tests, which are more relevant to the real world, it was 830% and 628% faster respectively. Naturally, applications launched a lot faster on the iMac, with the iWork apps bouncing only once in the Dock before opening. On the mini, they took between two bounces (Pages) and 10 (Numbers). To test the iMac further, we tried opening iPhoto, iCal, Address Book, Safari and all three iWorks apps simultaneously. They opened just as quickly. Watching seven icons bounce once as the screen fills with windows is surreal. You see a lot less of the dreaded beach ball when using the iMac, especially if you regularly have lots of applications open at the same time. On display When comparing monitors, you might expect a clear win for the iMac, as the mini doesn't have one. But could this be an advantage? The 27-inch iMac's screen is a gorgeous IPS display, with excellent viewing angles and a 16:9 aspect ratio. Its pixel resolution of 2560x1440 is beyond HD, and its LED backlighting brings it to full brightness as soon as you switch it on. But the mini has a HDMI port, and is supplied with an adapter so you can connect it through DVI instead if you wish. This means it can be connected to pretty much any modern display. It can be any size – as cheap or as expensive as you like – and if you don't like glossy screens, you can opt for a matte display. The iMac is only supplied with a glossy screen; there isn't even a custom option for matte, which is especially galling considering every MacBook Pro except the 13-inch model has an anti-glare option. There's nothing wrong with the iMac's screen; quite the opposite, in fact. But if it isn't to your personal tastes, or if you already have a monitor going unused, the Mac mini's lack of a supplied display could work in its favour. Wired for sound? Both of our machines have built-in audio, but they're both pretty bad. Using iTunes on the iMac, our test music sounded tinny and lacking in bass and depth. There was no great stereo separation, and it did nothing to shape the sound. It was the same story on the Mac mini, just with no stereo separation at all. Naturally, if you're only going to use your computer for web surfing, email and basic computing tasks, the internal audio might be sufficient for your needs. But if you plan to put your machine to any sort of multimedia use such as music or video, you should invest in external speakers. A host of extras? The iMac offers everything you need to get your computer up and running, but the mini only gives you a base Mac – you must add any required peripherals yourself. And some of them are definitely required. You won't get far without a keyboard and mouse, and unlike the iMac, the mini has no built-in iSight webcam. Yet what we said about monitors also applies here, perhaps even more so. You might well have a spare mouse or keyboard lying around unused, and even if you do need to go out and buy something, with the Mac mini, you get to choose what you use. Apple keyboards and the Magic Mouse are, of course, available from your local Apple store, but you don't have to go down the Apple route – not everyone likes the Magic Mouse. If you'd prefer a more traditional design with two buttons and a scroll wheel, chances are you can find one for less than half the price of the mouse that's bundled with the iMac. You could even forego the mouse altogether and opt for an alternative navigation device, such as a trackball, Magic Trackpad, or even a graphics tablet and stylus! <img alt="Mac mini" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/MacFormat/MAC%20228/MAC228.news_feat.macmini02-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> So is a Mac mini better value than an iMac? Ultimately, yes. As our tests showed, on a price-to- performance ratio, Apple's small form-factor machine certainly holds its own against a high-end iMac with a costly solid-state drive. It's very capable for its size, and more than powerful enough for day-to-day computing tasks such as email, web surfing and word processing. The mini enjoys a couple of key advantages over the iMac too. It has a HDMI-out port, making it ideal as a living-room media centre Mac, and its size means it's extremely portable, especially now the power supply is built into the casing. If you really wanted you could set up a monitor and keyboard at home and at work, and carry the mini between them with ease. You certainly wouldn't want to do this with a 27-inch iMac! Yet if you crave that all-in-one experience, or you really want to play the latest 3D games then the iMac is clearly the machine of choice - the mini just can't complete as a games machine. Whether you buy a Mac mini or a top-of-the-range iMac or something in between is entirely up to you. We hope we've gone some way towards making up your mind. Don't discount the mini just because it's small. And don't forget the MacBook range, too! All Macs have their strengths and weaknesses, and their own role to play in Apple's Mac line-up.

Buying Guide: Mac mini vs iMac: which is the best value?

The price difference between the cheapest and most expensive Macs Apple is huge. The cost mini Mac £ 649, but if you have a lot to spend an...

Buying Guide: Best value CrossFire and SLI DX11 graphics cards

<img src="http://cdn.mos.techradar.com//Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/PCF246.feature2.image01_1-200-200.jpg"> CrossFire and SLI have finally come of age. Just a couple of years ago, you were hard-pushed to squeeze an extra 50 per cent more gaming power out of your system by adding an identical card to the mix. And even then, the setup was often impossibly fiddly. It worked perfectly with some games, and just, well, not at all with others. You'd see diminishing returns on your frame rate investment to the point where you may as well plump for a big, fat, flagship card. But ATI and Nvidia have both honed the tech to a point where we're now seeing major benefits to the polygon punt – in some cases, close to twice the power for two cards – and it's been a learning process for both outfits. Architectural innovation and API-leveraging aside, they've had to work their driver releases to really get two cards on-song. And just as crucially, they've had to invest more heavily than ever before in close working relationships with game developers. That sort of commitment doesn't come cheap, especially when you consider the tight milestones that both hardware, driver, and game-development teams have to work to. But both Nvidia and ATI have grasped the nettle and built these relationships, their engineers jetting off to work on-site with game studios to ensure this stuff actually works. The result is a process of fine-tuning that enables dual-card setups, finally, to fly like they should with the games we all play. And yet, each company seeks to differentiate, offering a slightly different proposition. Elegant ATI looks to court the multimedia market with EyeFinity and power-efficiency, while the poke-focussed Nvidia, as ever, seeks to shift more pixels at a greater speed than the competition, and attempts to make 3D vision a household technology. Our remit for the following shootout, as ever, is to ascertain which twin GPU setup offers the greater value proposition. Both companies have their mid-range DX11 cards on the table now, so let the games commence… <img alt="The ultimate upgrade – dual dx11 set-ups " src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/PCF246.feature2.spread_1_1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> Life with SLI and CrossFire has never been easier. Provided you have a supporting motherboard and you're not limiting the capabilities of these fine DX11-capable GPUs with something more archaic than a decent Core 2 Duo, you'll see some serious gains for having a dual-card setup. And we really don't mean to sound glib when we say that CPUs prior to Core 2 Duo will hold back your graphics card. Not only will an older CPU limit the speed capabilities of a new graphics card, but there's DX11 to take into account. DX11 doesn't just make standards of tessellation and stream-processor leverage. It aims to make your CPU work harder for the game engine, with multi-threaded rendering. The more cores, and the more threads per core in your CPU, the better gaming performance will be. A fancy Phenom or Core i7 will really take the load off your GPU, and let it do its thing unhindered. But before we go anywhere near the benchmarks of our stable of cards, and what they mean in terms of a buying decision, let's pause to examine your motivations. Why a dual-card setup? In the great flow-chart of whether-or-not-you-want-two-graphics cards, you should first ask yourself why. There are two good reasons to plump for a pair of cards, which depend entirely on your financial situation. The first is the prospect of an inexpensive future upgrade, which requires that you have already bought a motherboard with dual-card capabilities, with future-proofing in mind, you clever thing. If one card is good for the price, why not save up for a couple of months and add another card to your system for a major increase in frame rates? It's a compelling proposition, especially when retailers are constantly and incrementally driving down the prices of cards to keep up with the competition. And now that SLI and CrossFire offer really solid benefits for doubling up, it's become a more valid motivation than ever before. The second reason to invest in two cards comes down to overall value in a single purchase. Can you really get more performance from a twin-card setup than from a more expensive single card? That's largely down to your budget, which we'll come to in a while. The purpose of our tests is to find the current best mid-range dual-card setup, so let's examine what the cards offer. The cards on test We're looking at paired sets of four distinct cards: ATI's HD 5750 and HD 5770, and Nvidia's GTS 450 and GTX 460. All four of these cards differ in price, performance and capabilities. In a sense, there's never been a richer crop of mid-range cards – and a more confusing series of choices to make. And by mid-range, we mean cards that drive mid-range resolutions – between 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,080 – 22-24-inch monitors, basically. Regardless of every other feature a graphics card may possess, we're primarily interested in gaming performance, and when that's your key metric, the native resolution of your monitor is a major deciding factor. Your price/performance sweet spot lies with the cards that run games happily at your native resolution. The cheap seats At the budget end of our scale are the HD 5750 and the GTS 450 – both pared-down versions of the GPUs boasted by their bigger DX11 stablemates. Traditionally, this means fewer cores/stream processors and a lower memory bandwidth than higher-end cards in the series, and this is true of these budget barnstormers as well. They just can't shift as much data as their freer-breathing bigger brothers, which means lower frame rates. The compensating factor, as ever, is price. 1GB examples of both the HD 5750 and the GTS 450 (these are the ones we tested, over their 768MB counterparts) can be found for less than a hundred quid. The middle brothers to the HD 5750 and GTS 450 are the HD 5770 and GTX 460. Specs-wise, they have exactly what you'd expect: a bigger memory interface with considerably more memory bandwidth, and greater power consumption to boot. Here's where the prices really start to differ as well, with the 1GB version of the HD 5770 coming in around £60 cheaper, on average, than the similarly-equipped GTX 460. So while competition is as tight as can be at the budget end, the upper-midrangers start to pull away, and a different story begins to emerge. Just what is it that makes these graphics cards so different? We ought to look at some benchmarks. But first, a word on compatibility. Driver issues The games we used to run our benchmarks were: DiRT 2, Far Cry 2, Just Cause 2 and the synthetic DX11 benchmark, Heaven 2.0 Benchmark. <img alt="FarCry 2" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/PCF246.feature2.jump_1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> The only game in which we saw some curious results from a dual-card setup was DiRT 2 on CrossFire. The difference between ATI's and Nvidia's dual-card setups is that CrossFire often requires Application Profile packages to be installed alongside the driver (although why the two can't be combined into a single package seems odd). The result, if you haven't downloaded and installed the latest Application Profiles from the AMD website, is a drop in performance in those games that require them. Our benchmarks were performed using the latest Catalyst and Forceware drivers, and in all other tests with all our other games, everything was ticketyboo. Catalyst 10.9, it appears, doesn't yet have an Application Profile for DiRT 2, which meant we actually saw a dip in performance with two cards, as the game struggled to leverage the hardware. We take these results with a pinch of salt, however. The cards are perfectly capable of running the game in CrossFire mode, and the catalyst 9.X packages had their own hotfix. One just hasn't been introduced for 10.9 yet, and when it does, we'll see that rise in performance. It's just a little irksome that we need discrete Application Profiles at all with CrossFire, seeing as SLI just works out of the box with commensurate performance gains over one card, and no requirement to download extra software. So let's start with the humble HD 5750. Alone, the card runs games at a respectable rate at middling resolutions. But at nearly 40fps in Far Cry 2 at 1,920 x 1,080 with high AA and AF, and all the effects turned on? That's great DX10 performance for under a hundred pounds. The card is also whisper-quiet, and while the fan speed scales to cool when the pressure is on, it never really becomes audible. Whack two together in CrossFire, however, and you'll see a 65-90% increase in frame rates across the board, depending on the game, and scores that outperform any single card on test here bar the GTX 460. That high-resolution Far Cry 2 test jumps to 54fps, just shy of the holy-grail that is 60fps. And if you're running at 1,680 x 1,050, the setup nearly cracks the 100fps mark. Impressive indeed. Price-wise, the 5750 sits in direct competition with Nvidia's GTS 450, and here's where the real battle lies. Alone, the 450 offers extremely competent performance at middling resolutions – close on 60fps in Far Cry 2 and 30fps in the considerably more demanding Just Cause 2. As you'd expect for a budget card, it runs out of puff at higher resolutions, but not as quickly as the 5750. Pair it with a twin, however, and the whole game changes. The performance of the 450 in SLI mode at 1,680 x 1,050 is nothing less than stellar: 70fps in DiRT 2, 125fps in Far Cry 2, 57fps in Just Cause 2 and 40fps in the massively demanding Heaven 2.0 Benchmark. It not only pushes the HD 5750 CF setup into the shade, it outperforms a single GTX 460 by a very tangible margin. The setup is even capable of driving healthy performance at 1,920 x 1,200, with 98fps in Far Cry 2 and a still-playable 29fps in Just Cause 2. Like any lower memory-bandwidth budget card, it's always going to run out of juice before its bigger stablemates, especially as more demanding games appear. But in terms of mid-range poke, we're frankly astounded. This means sad things for the HD 5770, which in CrossFire mode, can barely keep up with the GTS 450 pairing at 1,680 x 1,050. The 5770 handles Just Cause 2's engine more adroitly than the Nvidia equivalent, but only just. What's more, a pair of 5770s will set you back around £50-£70 more than a pair of 450s, which clock in at around £198, and outperform a single 460 at 1,680 x 1,050. Do you feel a conclusion coming on? Well, stop right there. There's more to ATI's 5770 – and indeed its whole HD lineup – than just gaming performance. It's incredibly quiet, power-efficient and it allows you to use ATI EyeFinity for multi-screen setups. The only downside to the latter being that as far as gaming goes, you need a much fatter GPU to drive multiple panels at decent frame rates. For gaming on mid-range cards then, EyeFinity is a bit of a pipe-dream. But if you want a quiet, efficient, cool system that's capable of wholly competent frame rates at mid-range resolutions, then an HD 5770 CF setup is still a serious consideration. <img alt="Eyefinity" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/PCF246.feature2.main_1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> And what of the GTX 460, the most expensive single card on test? The Zotac models we benchmarked clocked in at just a shade cheaper than a pair of GTS 450s, and while a single 460's frame rates at all resolutions couldn't quite compete, it's pairing them up that makes the difference for high-resolution gaming. At £380, you get a properly high-end setup, with serious high-end results. So high, in fact, that a pair of 460s will comfortably outperform a single GTX 480, which will set you back the same price. The price-performance ratio prize, however, has to go to the pair of GTS 450's in SLI mode. Great mid-range performance for under £200? We'll take two. Benchmarks <img alt="Benchmarks 1" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/Bench2GPU-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG> <img alt="Benchmarks 2" src="http://mos.futurenet.com/techradar/Review%20images/PC%20Format/PCF%20246/BenchGPU1-420-90.jpg" width="420"></IMG>

Buying Guide: Best value CrossFire and SLI DX11 graphics cards

CrossFire and SLI have finally come of age. Just a couple of years ago, you were hard-pushed to squeeze an extra 50 per cent more gaming pow...