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Apple shook the world when they signed on with Intel as their new source for desktop and laptop processors. This union, while coming a bit from left field, created a new line of x86 based Macs with a serious jump in performance over the previous PowerPC based Macs. The lowest end of these new computers was also the best deal in my eyes, the Mac Mini. This little computer featured either a Core Solo or Duo processor with support for 2 GB of DDR2. This cute package weighed in around $650 for the baseline model which still packed a punch. With this new budget computer to play with, the modding community dove headfirst into tearing this thing apart and within a few days Fugger over at XtremeSystems.org was the first recorded person to transplant a Core Duo processor into the Core Solo machines. With this, you could buy the cheap Mac Mini, and when you needed a boost in performance, shell out a few hundred dollars and buy yourself a sleek 2.0GHz or higher Core Duo.

With this upgrade path possible, you can go out, drop your $650 and walk home with your Mac Mini, get comfortable playing with it, and when you feel the need for more speed, sell your Core Solo chip and buy a Core Duo when prices come down to reasonable numbers. With this upgrade possible, new doors were opened. Now here comes the real kicker, this isn’t the end of the upgrade line for the Mac Mini. Conroe and Merom, Intel’s next generation chips based on an entirely new micro-architecture, feature the most powerful cores yet while running at cooler, slower clock speeds than the 3.2+GHz Pentium 4 that they will be replacing. The important part of these new chips is that they will seamlessly fit into Intel’s current processor lineup. Conroe and Merom will both be supported by the current chipsets that Intel operates the Pentium D and Core Solo/Duo processors on, meaning that it would be possible to stash a Merom processor into a Mac Mini.

Well, there has been enough speculation, plenty of arguments, but now there is proof that the Mac Mini truly is a Frankenstein. Once again, Fugger has done it slapping a Merom processor into his Mac Mini. There was no need for any updates, no soldering, no gruesome hacks, it was a simple act of plug and play. So for all of you that bought the Core Solo Mini, hold out, don’t spend your precious money on a Core Duo, wait out the 4 months till Conroe and Merom are unleashed and see what your Mini can truly do. Now we just need someone to put a Merom into a MacBook Pro and I will be sold on buying one.

One last tidbit of news, unofficial benchmarks will be available very soon so check back in a few days. The gentlemen over at XS.org got hold of a Conroe and a 975x motherboard and plan on beating on it a bit to see what this new chip is capable of.

The rumor mill has been at it again over the last couple of days and what has come out is very good news for the consumer. Rumor has it that Intel will be slashing prices on their Pentium M successor, Yonah. Across the product range, prices are being cut by up to 33%, making Yonah a very good platform to base a computer around, especially a laptop or HTPC. While the highest price cuts occur in the more expensive components, the mid-range T2400 will drop from $294 to 241, but current street price is up above $320 so look for the T2400 coming in around 260 or so, but still a $60 cut.

This exciting tidbit of news comes from the ChannelRegister so I don’t know how much truth lies in this document, but this would be a smart move by Intel, especially with Conroe and Merom coming out, Yonah may already be on it’s way out. Goodbye old slow architecture, make way for the newer, flashier circuits.

So I’ve been gone for the last week, I went back home to Augusta to spend a calm week doing absolutely nothing and it was great. Time to get back to the grind and back on this website, along with all the other side projects that I’m trying to handle. More new stuff coming up, including a 2nd article on computer cooling.

Combine geeks with robots and a street full of traffic and entertaining situations naturally arise. Earlier this week, during the South by Southwest conference held in Austin, Texas, Make Magazine’s associate editor Phillip Torrone and Eyebeam’s R&D fellow Limor Fried converted a Roomba vacuum into a modern version of Frogger. This game attracted many viewers as the litle green robot scurried across the four-lane road multiple times till being hit twice, and pronounced dead after the second collision. Here is the cnet article that showcases a few pictures of the Froggerbot in action.

Steam, the distribution program for CounterStrike, Half-life and all the spin-off programs apparently tracks the hardware setups of it’s users, and the results are very surprising. Within Steam, AMD has surpassed Intel (53% vs 47%), Nvidia is the card of choice (53%), and CRT monitors dominate (89%). This survey records every piece of hardware in your computer, from system RAM, to video RAM, to hard drive space, and how much is free. I would like to see Microsoft implement something similar and publish the results, this survey only covers about 230,000 users. What can I say; I’m just a sucker for large numbers and spreadsheet data.

Steam Survey

Today Nvidia hard launched their 7900 and 7600 series cards featuring a die shrink from 110nm to 90nm. For those that don’t know, this means the cards will consume less power, run faster, and cost less, all a plus for the consumer. (more…)

When Intel started off the Intel Developer Forum on March 7th, they announced an entire new line of processors based on their new micro-architecture, so say good bye to NetBurst. Initially Anandtech was given an hour to review a Conroe 2.66GHz system and compare it to a 2.8GHz FX-60 system and Conroe cleaned house with a minimum of a 20% performance increase. (more…)

In the previous article in this series I covered the basics of overclocking, what it means, and what it does to your processor. In this installment I will be covering all aspects of the computer memory subsystem. Let’s start with some definitions, they are always fun.

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