“I’ve seen a ton of articles around the web lately comparing the Mac mini to the near full size desktop PC. What they fail to compare is the amount of computing power per square inch you get with the mini. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create the fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the mini’s small form factor,” Kevin Rose writes for KevinRose.com.
“The Mac mini is a mere 6.5”x6.5”, so I had to find the smallest (and most powerful) motherboard possible. I decided on VIA’s yet to be released Nano-ITX based boards. Luckily VIA liked the project idea, and were able to ship us a pre-production version for testing,” Rose writes. “Feature-wise, the mobo is pretty impressive. It has the VIA 1GHz “Nehimiah” [sic] Processor, SATA, Ethernet, integrated audio/video, two SODIMM slots, and most importantly it’s only 4.7 x4.7 inches.”
“Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard. Luckily, this motherboard supports pretty much every external bootable device, including bootable CD-ROM and USB thumb drives,” Rose writes.
Full article, complete with nightmarish pictures, here.
MacDailyNews Take: Kevin Rose currently hosts “The Screen Savers” on G4TechTV. There’s no word in his article about whether this thing actually works, but if it does, one thing’s for sure, it’s the only way to get viruses, adware, spyware, and worms into a Mac mini’s case. Ugggh!
Rumor does have it, though, that on initial boot up, instead of a chime, one can clearly hear this hideous Brundlefly-like device croak,”I am not a Frankenstein. I’m a Fronkensteen.”
Also of note, the VIA 1GHz “Nehemiah” gets beaten pretty badly by Intel’s Celeron (Tualatin) 1.3 GHz which, according to this comparison, is about half the speed of the Mac mini’s G4 1.25 GHz processor, to say nothing of the Mac mini’s available 1.42GHz G4. Also, this “FrankenMac mini” seems to have lost FireWire and it’s ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM with AGP 4X support with DVI output (traded for Integrated VIA Unichrome 2D/3D graphics!) along with it’s optical drive in the process. Yuck, what a mess!
We’ve emailed Mr. Rose a short message: “IT’S GOT A ROTTEN BRAIN! IT’S ROTTEN, I TELL YA! ROTTEN!” If this FrankenMac mini is capable of receiving our email, we fully expect Rose’s reply to be even shorter: “Ixnay on the ottenray.”
