comparing performance of a few computers

[davemchine]

I've mentioned before that my dual core i5 iMac doesn't deliver the performance that I would like. I ordered the SSD startup drive which I'm hoping will make it workable for the next 1-2 years but my mind is on the future.

I see there is a mini with a quad core i7. Would this offer significant speed improvement over my dual core i5 iMac? I'm mostly running handbrake, iTunes, Transmission (torrents), and Parallels. Jacking the memory up and switching to the ssd moves the price to $1500. That's still a grand under the base MacPro. Do you think it would be a significant jump from my iMac? It would be run headless so video performance is of no importance at all.

I'm not going to run out and buy this tomorrow, I'm just trying to learn what my options are for the future. The only other option I can think of would be a mackintosh but I like the form factor of the mini as it would stack with my other two MiniStack's from OWC.

Last, since all of my peripherals are firewire 800 I assume I would need a thunderbolt to firewire converter hub? That's another pretty expensive item but it may be cheaper in the timeframe that I'm considering.

I re-injured my back yesterday so if I'm rambling please give consideration to the medication I have to take.

[clay]

take a look at some numbers here:

http://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

They won't give you a real-world "this machine feels faster than this machine" kind of assertions, but from a purely number-crunching standpoint it will tell you which machine is faster.

[Speedy]

Edit: duplicate link as Clay's.

[GGD]

You need to understand where the bottlenecks are in your system as you currently use it, before trying to throw random solutions at it.

Look at Activity monitor during your typical usage when it seems slow. If there's no Disk I/O going on, then throwing money at drives might not make sense. If the CPUs aren't being fully utilized, then faster/more CPUs might not help. If there is a lot of free RAM and little paging, then more RAM might not help.

One of the first steps in solving a problem is understanding the problem.

[jdc]

I was going to post about activity monitor as well, but I bet that handbrake is probably pegged as high as it will go. Its what it does.

TB to FW800 converters are $29, drop in the bucket.

FWIW, both barefeats and macworld have handbrake tests on various macs with time.

[DRR]

the latest mini has FW800, Thunderbolt, and USB3. That's the one I would suggest. I came from an 8-core MacPro and I don't miss it at all.

I think it would be a significant improvement, however I'd hold off purchasing anything until you install the SSD. The SSD even in your dual core i5 will make it scream. Everything opens faster. Won't make handbrake encode any faster, only more processing power will do that.

Parallels needs processing power and RAM. Every application should benefit somewhat from the SSD, most of all, the operating system.

[davemchine]

Thanks for the link. It looks like the current mac mini score 11,6xx while my iMac scores 7,731 so that is a significant jump. As the next year passes that gap will probably widen even further.

I went back to the apple website and now I see the firewire 800 port on the mini. That's good news for me as long as they keep it for a little while longer.

I have spent extensive time with the activity monitor. My CPU is slammed when using handbrake of course, transmission can be downloading at 3000KB/sec, and I can be rewriting mkv files to m4v at the same time so the drives are also clanging away. I have 16gb of ram and that's usually half unused. It used to be a "family" computer and we utilized multiple logins but everyone has their own laptop now so nobody ever sits at the iMac. It just does it's job.

Thanks everyone. Looking forward to the SSD. I paid for fast shipping but haven't gotten a shipped notice from OWC yet so I may not get to play with it this week as I leave friday for a sailing course and test.

[Black]

davemchine wrote:
Thanks for the link. It looks like the current mac mini score 11,6xx while my iMac scores 7,731 so that is a significant jump. As the next year passes that gap will probably widen even further.

I went back to the apple website and now I see the firewire 800 port on the mini. That's good news for me as long as they keep it for a little while longer.

I have spent extensive time with the activity monitor. My CPU is slammed when using handbrake of course, transmission can be downloading at 3000KB/sec, and I can be rewriting mkv files to m4v at the same time so the drives are also clanging away. I have 16gb of ram and that's usually half unused. It used to be a "family" computer and we utilized multiple logins but everyone has their own laptop now so nobody ever sits at the iMac. It just does it's job.

Thanks everyone. Looking forward to the SSD. I paid for fast shipping but haven't gotten a shipped notice from OWC yet so I may not get to play with it this week as I leave friday for a sailing course and test.

I have always got OWC orders before I even thought to start to look for them, and ahead of shipping notices-- but I'm fairly closeby. Betcha it comes tomorrow if not today still.

[bhaveshp]

davemchine wrote:
My CPU is slammed when using handbrake of course, transmission can be downloading at 3000KB/sec, and I can be rewriting mkv files to m4v

Is there any particular reason you are re-encoding MKV files to m4v?

Can you use iVI or several other apps to repackage the h.264 encoded video into the m4v wrapper?

[davemchine]

HI bhaveshp, I'm using subler to repackage to m4v. I tried to be clear by using the word "rewriting" rather than re-encoding but I could have been even more clear. Anyway, I sometimes have 3-10 going at a time and that's pretty darn disk intensive. Not much is going to fix that part though. :-)

Thanks for your post, it was an excellent suggestion.