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#Mac mini quad core i7 performance pro
Cinebench Open GL tests on the 15-inch 2.6GHz Core i7 Retina MacBook Pro with 500GB flash storage and 8GB of RAM were 70 percent faster than the BTO Mac mini. And the Mac mini’s GPU was totally overwhelmed by the graphics performance of the 15-inch Retina display MacBook Pros and their discreet nVidia GeForce GT 650M graphics with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory. The BTO Mac mini failed to beat the 2011 high-end Mac mini in Portal 2 and Cinebench Open GL tests.
#Mac mini quad core i7 performance upgrade
The scores would’ve been even higher had Apple offered a discreet graphics upgrade alternative to the capable-if somewhat lackluster-Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics. That makes sense, seeing how the high-end 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has the same 2.6GHz quad-core Core i7 processor as the BTO Mac mini and uses flash storage instead of standard rotational hard drives. We plan to add some other examples of Quad-Core desktop Macs (including a faster Mac mini) to these graphs in the days ahead but the point is made. The BTO Mac mini’s combination of extra RAM, a speedy SSD, and a quad-core Core i7 processor was so good, its performance earned a Speedmark 8 score just below the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros. The 2012 Quad-Core i7 Mac mini is a real contender when it comes to CPU power compared to our examples of a Quad-Core Mac Pro and Quad-Core iMac. As you can see, our benchmark tests bear that out. (A Fusion Drive is not Apple’s special implementation of a hybrid drive, which houses a SSD and a hard drive in one mechanism.) Data is written to the SSD first, so the idea is that you get SSD speeds but with the capacity of standard hard drives. As you’d expect, in processor-intensive tasks that use all of a system’s processing cores, the 799 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 Mac mini was much faster than the 599 2.5GHz dual-core Core i5 Mac. Fusion Drive gives you the best of both worlds by bringing together a separate 120GB SSD and 1TB hard drive and presenting them to both the user and applications as a single drive. SSDs are fast as all get out, but they have very limited capacity and they cost a lot more than traditional drives. I’ll dig deeper into the Fusion Drive in my next article, but in brief, Fusion Drive is Apple’s answer to the high-price-per-gigabyte problem of solid-state drives. The BTO Mac mini’s PCMark productivity test score (using VMWare Fusion) was three times higher than the high-end standard configuration’s score. The standard configuration $799 Mac mini with its 5400-rpm hard drive took more than three times as long to complete our copy file and uncompress file tests as the Fusion Drive did in the BTO Mac mini. Storage 2.5 GHz 500GB (5400-rpm) hard drive 2 2.3GHz 1TB (5400-rpm) hard drive 2 Configurable to a 256GB solid-state drive or 1TB Fusion Drive. But it was the Fusion Drive that really kicked the BTO Mac mini into overdrive. The Apple Mac mini Core i7 2.3 (Late 2012/Aluminum Unibody) features a 22-nm Quad Core Ivy Bridge 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 (3615QM) processor with four independent processor cores on a single chip, a 6 MB shared level 3 cache, 4 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 SDRAM (PC3-12800) memory, a 1 TB hard drive, and Intel HD Graphics 4000. 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz) with 6MB 元 cache Configurable to 2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz).