5 ms·

It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its smaller size. No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

by cake 16y ago

Andys 16y ago
Yeah, a G6950 (core i3 2.8ghz 32nm) would have been ideal for this form factor.
cstross 16y ago
Why do you need an SSD in a machine targeted at the media player/home hub market? SSDs are good for boxes that are latency-bound or subject to vibration. For a box that sits under a TV set and spends most of its active life throwing 1Gb mpeg4 files down an HDMI cable, not so much.
- cake 16y ago
  Several reasons at random : - Less noise - Less heat - Smaller - Faster boot time - More bandwidth
  - potatolicious 16y ago
    Cost/benefit doesn't work out in this use case: - Less noise true, but peg a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro's hard drive to max and see if you can hear it from, oh, 5 feet away. - This isn't a mobile device, so heat with regards to user comfort is not an issue. Until it presents a reliability problem, heat is a non-factor for a desktop. - Smaller, and much more expensive per GB. Much more. Shaving another quarter inch off the enclosure also seems like a paltry gain for a much more expensive storage device. - For a machine that reboots very rarely, this is moot. This is clearly meant as an always-on device (hence the low power usage to begin with) sucking down torrents all day or some such. - It's a media-centric device. It will download stuff, listen to music, stream video... what kind of bandwidth does it need? SSDs in a Mac Mini would be a Ferrari in a school zone - cool, and done purely for the sake of style, but let's not pretend that there are significant practical reasons for doing this.
    - azim 16y ago
      For an always-on device you would actually fare better with an SSD than a 2.5" laptop hard drive. Laptop hard drives are not meant to be always-on. The bearings tend to wear out very fast unless they spend a fair amount of time spun-down. 3.5" desktop hard drives, 2.5" server drives, and SSDs have much better mechanical reliability in that respect.
masklinn 16y ago
> No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing. Intel's fault, no license for NVidia and no OpenCL support in the i3/i5's GPU (and it's still a very, very crappy GPU indeed) means it'd need a dedicated GPU. Reason why the entry-level 15" got one, by the way, and the 13" macbook pro is still using a Core 2.

It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its smaller size. No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

by cake 16y ago

It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its smaller size. No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

Andys 16y ago

Yeah, a G6950 (core i3 2.8ghz 32nm) would have been ideal for this form factor.

cstross 16y ago

Why do you need an SSD in a machine targeted at the media player/home hub market? SSDs are good for boxes that are latency-bound or subject to vibration. For a box that sits under a TV set and spends most of its active life throwing 1Gb mpeg4 files down an HDMI cable, not so much.

cake 16y ago
Several reasons at random : - Less noise - Less heat - Smaller - Faster boot time - More bandwidth
- potatolicious 16y ago
  Cost/benefit doesn't work out in this use case: - Less noise true, but peg a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro's hard drive to max and see if you can hear it from, oh, 5 feet away. - This isn't a mobile device, so heat with regards to user comfort is not an issue. Until it presents a reliability problem, heat is a non-factor for a desktop. - Smaller, and much more expensive per GB. Much more. Shaving another quarter inch off the enclosure also seems like a paltry gain for a much more expensive storage device. - For a machine that reboots very rarely, this is moot. This is clearly meant as an always-on device (hence the low power usage to begin with) sucking down torrents all day or some such. - It's a media-centric device. It will download stuff, listen to music, stream video... what kind of bandwidth does it need? SSDs in a Mac Mini would be a Ferrari in a school zone - cool, and done purely for the sake of style, but let's not pretend that there are significant practical reasons for doing this.
  - azim 16y ago
    For an always-on device you would actually fare better with an SSD than a 2.5" laptop hard drive. Laptop hard drives are not meant to be always-on. The bearings tend to wear out very fast unless they spend a fair amount of time spun-down. 3.5" desktop hard drives, 2.5" server drives, and SSDs have much better mechanical reliability in that respect.

masklinn 16y ago

> No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing. Intel's fault, no license for NVidia and no OpenCL support in the i3/i5's GPU (and it's still a very, very crappy GPU indeed) means it'd need a dedicated GPU. Reason why the entry-level 15" got one, by the way, and the 13" macbook pro is still using a Core 2.