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New iMac's likely soon - Page 3

post #61 of 64
3/5/09 at 3:21am

Re: New iMac's likely soon

Is there now much difference between the top end Mac Mini and an entry level iMac (apart from the display)? They both now have the newer DDR3 RAM and use the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics. Apart from HD capacity and CPU speed, there's not much between them.

Also, how does the new NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics compare to the ATI Radeon HD2600 graphics (like my iMac currently has)?

Prices on the UK Apple store all appear to have increased across the new range
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post #62 of 64
3/5/09 at 8:19am

Re: New iMac's likely soon

Quote:
Apart from HD capacity and CPU speed, there's not much between them.
One more difference: the Mini uses 5400 RPM HDs, while the iMac uses 7200 RPM HDs. If you do disk-intensive work, you will notice the hit in performance.
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post #63 of 64
3/5/09 at 10:19am

Re: New iMac's likely soon

Much easier to upgrade RAM in iMacs as well. You've got to break warranty and use a putty knife to cut open your Mini (as well as remove a bunch of stuff, check out ifixit.com), whereas the RAM is a user-upgradable function for the iMac.

Remember that the 9400M in the mini I believe shares its memory with the main RAM, whereas I believe your HD2600 has its own dedicated video RAM.

Also, I believe the 2GHz C2D chip the mini is using has more than just the speed difference from the C2D chip the iMacs use. I believe the iMac chips have a larger CPU cache, and probably a bell or whistle that I'm missing.
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post #64 of 64
3/6/09 at 12:27pm

Re: Seagate/Drobo disaster

Back to the Seagate/Drobo disaster: This story just keeps getting worse: 18 hours away from the end of the recovery process the Drobo hung again and subsequent attempts to reboot it led to the Drobo hanging again almost immediately.

Drobo customer support are telling me that a couple of my Seagate 7200.11 drives have bad firmware. Is there a way to update the firmware without nuking the data on the drives?

Meanwhile they are sending me a new Drobo in case that is the problem. I hope it is because it did work flawlessly for over half a year before everything went south this week -- multiple simultaneous drive failures would truly suck.

They also mentioned something about a jumper change being necessary for the Seagates to use their max throughput -- does anyone know anything about that? seagate.com is not very user friendly, to put it mildly.
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