Apple Mac Mini 2GHz small form factor PC

Apple’s latest ultra-compact Mac Mini is rather disappointing. The processor in the £499 model has the same 2GHz clock speed as its predecessor, the same miserly 1GB of memory and a 120GB hard disk.

Even our £649 review unit only uses a 2GHz processor, although it does at least boost the memory to 2GB and the hard disk to 320GB. As always, those prices just cover the machine itself, and don’t include a keyboard, mouse or monitor.

A closer look at the spec sheet reveals some worthwhile changes in the new Mini though. There are now five USB ports on the back, rather than four, as well as a Firewire 800 port, and both DVI and Display Port connectors.

The front-side bus and memory (now DDR3) both run at 1,066MHz, giving the new Mac Mini a 10-15 per cent performance boost from those changes alone. However, the Mini’s biggest weakness has always been its underpowered Intel GMA950 integrated graphics processor. This has been replaced with a more capable Nvidia Geforce 9400M, which shares its video memory with the system. The allocated graphics is 128MB if you have the 1GB Mac Mini while 256MB is used on the 2GB model.

Apple claims the 9400M provides up to five times greater performance than the GMA950, and our tests confirmed this, with frame rates in Quake Four leaping from just under 10fps for the previous version of the Mini to almost 50fps in our review unit. It’s hardly a games machine, but the Mac Mini can produce some decent frame rates and, probably more important for most Mac users, will be more efficient when running software such as the bundled iMovie video editor.

Even so, £649 is expensive for this specification. It’s nice to see the Mini receive a decent graphics chip at last, but not including a faster-clocked processor suggests Apple is becoming somewhat complacent.