The final score The final scores have been sorted out and counted and have now ended up in easy to read graphics. Lets start... GeekBench 32bit: As expected the GB score kept climbing until it reached it's max of 7.250 points wich is a lot in 32bit as far as I can tell! GeekBench 64bit: Same story goes for the GB 64bit scores wich tops out at 7.939 points! An interesting fact is that the 8GB Kingston 1867MHz kit scores higher than the 16GB Corsair 1600MHz kit. Seems that GB really likes fast RAM and don't care much about the amount. Another interesting detail is how close the SSD scores are, GB don't utilizes the read/write speeds of a RAID0 very well apparently... For short, it's a true synthetic benchmark that only gives a faint hint of how powerful a machine really is.
DiskSpeed read/writes: Aboslute AWESOME read/write speeds this little machine have now when it is in RAID0 = 520MB/s write! Thats half a GB! It's like the usual amount on a a Music CD written in 1 second (if just there was a CD burner that could write that same speed...) 870MB/s read speeds! Thats about the same read speeds as the OCZ Z-Drives have in four way RAID (whatever that is?)! A strange thing here is that the fast Kingston 1867MHz 8GB kit scores the slowest read/write on the stock Apple 5400RPM drive. The 16GB 1600MHz gave it a good overall speed improvement of a few MB/s more. NovaBench: NB looks a lot like GeekBench like a real synthetic benchmark, wich it is. It favors a lot of RAM and a speedy disk compared to a flying speedy RAID0 system and a lot faster set of RAM. If you find the schematics/results I screen dumped to my Flickr you see that the 16GB and 8GB kits have one mayor difference in their scores - the RAM test. CPU test are almost similar with 459 and 467 in favor of the 8GB set, Graphics score similar 116 and 115, hardware test in favor of the speedier 8GB set with 19 compared to 21. But RAM score is 221 and 180 - only because of the amount! The speed it self the 16GB scores 8756MB/s were the 8GB scores 8886MB/s and still gets a smaller total score because the amount is smaller. Not fair! MKBHD scores in his YouTube video of "Fastest Mac Mini in the World" a score of 834: RAM 219 CPU 442 Graphic 115 Hardware 58 Mine would be with the RAID0 and the 16GB 856 points: RAM 221 (taken from 16GB RAM scores) CPU 459 (taken from 16GB RAM scores) Graphic 116 (taken from SSD RAID scores) Hardware 60 (taken from SSD RAID scores)
XBench: XBench is also a synthetic benchmark but it looks like it's more accurate than both GeekBench and NovaBench as it favors speed above anything else. The faster Kingston RAM gets higher score than the Corsair and also the total winner is the RAID0 system. Nice CineBench OpenGL: It is practically identical no matter what configuration I used, except for the old Mac Mini Server C2D machine I started with. I had heard a rumor faster RAM should give higher FPS, don't work that way on the MM with AMD graphics - maybe on the Intel HD graphics edition were it uses a portion of the system RAM? Decided to not test on the SSDs as it didn't seem to change anything. CineBench CPU test: Same story goes for CineBench CPU test, same CPU all trough so no difference what so ever. Didn't test it on the SSD setups. A funny thing though, the stock MM 2011 gave higher scores, maybe because I later on had SMC upgraded and a few OS X updates from Apple? The rest of the tests are made on exactly the same system with only the changes as described.
Handbrake 0.9.5 video encoding test: One of the guys over at Mac Rumors Forum suggested to try his Handbrake video encoding test, so I did... It faired pretty good - quicker than a Mac Pro with dual Xeon quad-core processor (that one scored 24.3 FPS in 9:51 minutes)! Handbrake 0.9.6 video encoding test: But there have been released a new edition of Handbrake since that guys thread started, so decided to give it a go in the new version also. The old version favored more RAM (Corsair 16GB kit) were the new version favors faster RAM (Kingston 8GB kit 1867MHz). None of them however seems to care about read/write speeds on your harddrive.
Digital Lloyd Photoshop Benchmark - Speed1: I found a benchmark for Photoshop performance by someone called Digital Lloyd. Apparently a very well respected Mac Bench test. Their quick test called Speed1 shows that there is a funny fault in Photoshop CS6 - it favors a speedy disc and good RAM more than an even speedier disk with the same RAM. Didn't care much about my RAID0 but liked the single SSD. Their Medium test shows that it's faster than a MacBook Pro Quad Core 2011 2.3GHz using 80% of it's memory (mine was set to use 100% wich apparently was a bad idea, can according to digilloyd get better results with only 70-80% RAM usage?!). It is testing on a 20.000 pixel wide picture wich is 15.7GB in memory size! A pretty demanding bench... Speedier disc or more RAM seems to be favored equally here. Didn't care much about RAID0 and faster RAM.
Clubofone Photoshop Speedtest: Found a more "underground" Photoshop test that shows the same result as DigiLloyds Speed1 test. Faster RAM and faster disc is good, RAID0 no difference. Duke Nukem FPS Game Test: I tested the same theory that faster RAM would give more FPS in a real game, using a screen recording app that shows the average amount of FPS over a given time, in my case 5 minutes 15 seconds. Didn't do any real difference so didn't test it on the SSDs. The SMC and Apple OS X upgrades have might had an impact on the scores here because the original MM 2011 config scored higher?!?
How fast can you copy/move 1GB data from Desktop to Documents: A real world test of how fast I can now move/copy 1GB of data from my Desktop to my Documents folder. Answer is really speedy!!!! Boot time: A few of the benchs will come as videos on YouTube whenever I get time to edit it. This one is a really amazing real world task - booting the computer in just 16 seconds to login screen and just below 18 with auto login!
Final TOTAL Scores The final total score is that in 16 tests the final build is the fastest I could do with these building blocks in a Mac Mini. Intel 520 Series SSD drives and Kingston HyperX PnP 1867MHz DDR3 SODIMM is an EPIC combination!!!! Remember you can always see pictures of the whole build over at Flickr. There are A LOT of pics I didn't show in the thread. There is no doubt I beat MKBHD wich claims to have made the worlds fastest mac mini. Mine have better CineBench scores, NovaBench boss scores was within reach if I wanted and my read/write DiskSpeed scores blows his machine away - so stop lying. Btw, I chose the Kingston RAM because they in the tests that matters most for real world performance looks quickest and best performing. I have very little reason to utilize 16GB of RAM, it's at the moment still a waste of money. If there ever come a 16GB 1867 or higher kit - for a reasonable price - then I though might buy it What do you say, have I assembled the worlds fastests Mac Mini 2011/2012 dualcore i7 monster machine? //btw there is an error in the text on the pic, HIGHER is better!
Better question, why have you been using pornographic ram and advertising the fact, when everyone knows it's illegal. I normaly stop at xxx porn, but xxxx! You crazy germans!
I have one comment: You're restricting yourself a lot by saying that it's the "fastest dual core i7 Mac Mini." That's like saying my MacBook Pro is the worlds fastest MacBook Pro missing all but one screw and has several dents and scratches in it and belongs to me.
So you suggest I call it what? I don't get your point, have you seen a faster Mac Mini with dualcore i7 processor anywhere?
Sorry mate I was talkin to a german as i wrote that and got a bit mixed up. lol i was referring to the 'xxgb ddr xxxx ram' spec on your graphs, and x's are often used as a sign of the severity of porn. Xx you see boobs, xxxxxxx you see things that will haunt you forever. Lol
Ahh now it makes much more sense! Yeah I see that I forgot to change the title on those two rows of data Nicely spotted!
While I don't understand why you've put so much time and money into a mac mini only to have a system that scores below a 3/4 year old PC*, it's always nice to see such comprehensive benchmarks. *Running geekbench 32bit on my system (i7 920 (stock), ATI 4870, SSD) gave a result of 7751
Fastest storage mac mini? Biggest Ram mac mini? Congrats though on getting that stuff in there and SSDs are fast!!!
But think about you have a real proper desktop system and mine is actually build from laptop parts. You have MUCH better graphics, double amount of CPU cores, more CPU cache and an almost endless list of BIOS/driver related things to tweak for extra performance. I am quite proud that I have a machine that on paper out-performs yours, even if yours is 3/4years old EDIT: look at this CPU comparison benchmark how far up the list yours is, 5.514 points, mine only gets 4.007
