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Regular-John

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 3, 2006
68
0
Sheffield, England
Hey All

I'm new to this forum, but I've been reading in for about a week.

As my sigature states, I'm new to Macs and OS-X.

I bought a mini 2 weeks ago and I got hungry for more, so yesterday I bought an iMac :D

I've just ran X-bench 3 times and got an average of 48 [is this about right?]. I then installed an extra stick of 512MB of ram, taking to total to 1GB. Ran X-Bench again and got an average of 47.84 :confused: How can the average go down??

Cheers guys in advance.

RJ
 

Regular-John

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 3, 2006
68
0
Sheffield, England
I think I may agree actually, I just saw on 123macmini.com, the the new Intel mini scored 66 overall!!

That's way more than my iMac!

Which program is a better alternative??

Cheers :D
 

mmmcheese

macrumors 6502a
Feb 17, 2006
948
0
Regular-John said:
I think I may agree actually, I just saw on 123macmini.com, the the new Intel mini scored 66 overall!!

That's way more than my iMac!

Which program is a better alternative??

Cheers :D

Why worry about synthetic benchmarks? They really don't mean anything. What should be important to you is the applications you run. Do they run well enough for you? If yes, great. If not, then maybe you need a faster machine (if available).
 

risc

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2004
2,756
0
Melbourne, Australia
mmmcheese said:
Do they run well enough for you? If yes, great. If not, then maybe you need a faster machine (if available).

Well said.

Xbench is completely useless imo. A while back I replaced the ATI 9800 XT in my Power Mac G5 with a nVidia 6800 Ultra DDL and my OpenGL scores went down. :rolleyes:

I also don't like the way Xbenchs baseline score changes so often.
 

plinden

macrumors 601
Apr 8, 2004
4,029
142
There's been a lot of talk recently about low xbench scores on the new Intel Macs. You can learn how to improve your xbench score here. You should get your score up into the 80s using this.

Basically xbench is fatally flawed and cannot be used to compare different Mac architectures.

By the way, your sig is bigger than your posts. I think it'll be modified by a Mod if you don't do it yourself.
 

mmmcheese

macrumors 6502a
Feb 17, 2006
948
0
risc said:
Well said.

Xbench is completely useless imo. A while back I replaced the ATI 9800 XT in my Power Mac G5 with a nVidia 6800 Ultra DDL and my OpenGL scores went down. :rolleyes:

I also don't like the way Xbenchs baseline score changes so often.

Well, I wouldn't say COMPLETELY useless, but pretty close. They can be handy when upgrading a single component of your system. Tests before and after a video card upgrade for example. When compared to other machines though, they are completely useless.
 
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