Shush. You're not helping my case w/the wife.
Seriously, though, you DID mention some things that I've actually done, which do justify it:
- running VMs w/guest operating systems
- hard drive intensive stuff (occasional)
- running several apps at one time (i.e., iTunes, Safari, xPad, Quicktime, and some other stuff)
And one thing that I most definitely CAN'T do on a PPC that I can on an Intel is use Boot Camp to run Vista or XP.
So, based on what I've heard, I won't see screaming differences, but enough to justify the purchase, so cool.
Glad to help. If your wife is reading this, then perhaps I've saved you some money
But, yes, as long as you are not expecting a machine that's twice as fast as what you have now, then you should be fine.
Many people expect to see a blazing difference with their new systems, and the fact is, that the G4 was not as big a slouch as you might think.
So, while the G4 was really much slower than the G5 in video encoding, the G4 was really very comparable in most average tasks.
The new Intel processors are not really significantly faster. They are streamlined, and they are dual core. But, unless the task utilizes both cores efficiently, then you are looking at the benefit of only a slightly faster and more efficient processor.
Additionally, I and many others, have observed that the Intel machines seem to need more memory than the PowerPC systems to perform the same task with the same program (even when using Universal / Intel Native programs).
For example, I used to use Virtual PC with Windows XP Pro on my old iMac G5 1.8 GHz with 2 GB of RAM.
I dedicated 1 GB of RAM to the Virtual PC, and the other 1 GB of RAM was left to OS X. And, that worked very, very well. The OS X environment still had a huge chunk of memory available.
With my new system, I've tinkered with a few Virtual Machines, and found that 3 GB in my system is barely adequate to host a Virtual Machine with 1 GB of RAM. In other words, if I give my virtual machine 1 GB of RAM, then I start running out of real memory in OS X (which starts slowing things down). I actually got down to only 30 MB free / available the other day.
As a result, I've scaled my virtual machines back to 512 MB just to keep OS X running (although still low on memory).
This is using Universal programs, and no PowerPC stuff.
Now, in other tasks, I find that 3 GB is enough. But, it still doesn't seem to stretch quite as far as 2 GB does in a PowerPC system.
With the Intel Mac Mini's, you also need to understand that it uses a shared memory architecture. That means that video memory is taken from system memory (as opposed to dedicated video RAM).
So, in the standard configuration, you lose 80 MB of your system's main memory to your video system. 64 MB of memory for video RAM, and the rest for system overhead.
With the base 512 MB of RAM, that leaves a pretty good chunk missing.
That said, you should be sure to pack it with as much memory as you can. And, you should be sure that you install your memory in matched pairs (identical modules). That will ensure that your performance loss (caused by the shared memory system) is minimized.
Note that the performance loss will affect video more than the rest of the system. But, you will see reduced video performance when compared to systems with a dedicated graphics chip and dedicated graphics memory.
Mostly, that will affect video rendering, 3D games, etc. (note that video encoding - like producing videos - is done by the CPU). Video rendering is going to be when your computer is producing a visual effect to be displayed on the screen.
So, basically, having matched memory modules will enable the video on your screen to appear more fluid.
