brianm

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brianm
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  • Tested: Will the new i7 Mac mini run faster with new thermal paste?

    I just finished testing the i3, i5 and i7 versions of the Mac mini with a variety of tests including power & heat generation. These were all tested stock 8 GB ram, all with 256 GB storage - not opened, no change in thermal paste.

     I found that with the i7 during a first test, or beginning of a long CPU intensive task starts off fast and got a result of about 1200 in Cinebench, then with additional tests (or continued long run) it scales down power usage from peaks up to around 150 watts to in the 90 watt range when Cinebench scores dropped as low as 1173 - but after 30-60 seconds the fan ramps up, and the performance goes back up - along with electricity usage where it climbs back up to 110-120 watt range and performance to match. I actually had the highest Cinebench score after the CPU was hot, and the fun was running at high speed when it hit reliably in the 1200 range with a peak of 1228. It does pump out quite a bit of heat.
    The i3 in the testing I was doing did not seem to have much of a change at all between tests, and even after running for a while I could barely hear the fan with barely warm air coming out.
    The i5 had a little bit of a variance, more than the i3, but not nearly as much as the i7 - it did generate more heat than the i3, no where near as much as the i7 - fan also barely audible. Running the same tests with the old 2012 quad-i7 it's fans were for sure the loudest - even the base 2018 i3 is faster than the 2012 quad-i7 in all tests, with the GPU scores being over 4x faster in CineBench & GeekBench.

     The Cinebench GPU test was also faster on the i7 where it reliably gets 44fps while the i3 & i5 were only getting around 41 fps. It is strange with all of them having the same integrated video, I even went back and re-tested to verify when I noticed it. (running a more advanced 3D app like Unigine Heaven or Valley it was only around 4fps so useless for gaming without an eGPU - I did test the BlackMagic eGPU with Radeon Pro 580 it jumped the same Heaven & Valley tests to around 36 fps with Ultra or Extreme settings - over 60fps with medium settings. while using around 130 watts of total power for Mac mini plus eGPU. Heaven in particular did get a slightly higher frame rate with Ultra settings on the i7 with eGPU than the i3 or i5 models which were only getting 29 fps)
    A better eGPU with an Nvidia card like 1080Ti or newer should be very usable not only for games, but things like video rendering with Premiere.
    lorin schultzradarthekatcgWerks
  • Researcher demos new macOS Keychain exploit, holds data from Apple in protest

    benji888 said:
    This is bogus:

    1) the person trying to steal your passwords has to first have access to your Mac.
    2) he then ran some app to get your passwords...I’m guessing all this app does is enter your Mac’s password for the keychain items automatically and then extracts them and displays them all in a list, so, again, back to 1).
    3) you can also lock keychain so that it has to be opened with a password, so they’d need not only your Mac’s password, but keychain’s password...this is not the default for keychain.
    1&2) It can be chained with other exploits - zero-day, or known for older MacOS versions which this exploit affects. 3) try this, and see how long you can run with keychain staying locked, especially while browsing sites that require logins, apps during startup, etc...
    apple_badgermagman1979
  • Does Apple have any premium buyers left for the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max?

    Some of us only update once every 3-4 years - in my case I've been on a 4 year path - iPhone 4 to iPhone 6 to having ordered the iPhone XS (hopefully .5 to 1.5 weeks to arrive now after pre-ordering it last Friday morning)
    equality72521jbdragonlolliverbageljoeyDeelronwlymwatto_cobrajony0
  • Apple & ARM's iPhone & Mac chip partnership will continue for decades

    dk49 said:
    Apple will have to switch to RISC before it becomes mainstream if it has to retain it's leadership in CPUs. And that's likely to happen before "decades". 
    ARM is RISC - Apple Silicon (A series and the M series) are licensed ARM based designs... so they are RISC.
    spock1234chiawilliamlondonwatto_cobrajony0
  • Stop us if you've heard this before: There's a new Apple Silicon killer in town

    To me it looks like if you compare on TDP that the new AMD processor should be compared against the M2 Pro rather than the plain M2 (at least a couple sources I found put the M2 Pro at about the same 28 Watts maximum) - and then the performance is more comparable as well.
    chasm9secondkox2watto_cobrabaconstang
  • No, Apple's new Mac Pro isn't overpriced

    HP Pricing on 1.5 TB of ram is $46,080 USD for the HP Z8 - Apple looks downright cheap at $25,000 for 1.5 TB - and had to configure it with 2 "M" model processors to get any ram options over 384GB - so that increases the price of the HP unit. (either 2x10 core or 2x24 core appear to be the only ones that allow the over 384GB of ram options to appear)
    With a couple of high-end video cards, 8 TB of NVMe storage (that appear to rate slightly under the single GPU Radeon Pro Vega II) - was able to hit around $90,000 USD with holiday "sales" bringing it down from $111,000 or so. And that wasn't even all of the options that could be installed that would bring the price to it's maximum.
    radarthekatwatto_cobrawilliamlondon
  • iOS 17 is getting some giant new accessibility features

    These are some nice additions - I know several people with low-vision that will like the larger icons and larger text for sure.
    lolliverwatto_cobra
  • Infiray P2 Pro thermal camera review: See infrared with your iPhone

    HBCan said:
    Quality products like these have been around for years for iOS (Lightning) and Android devices.  Made in the USA and good, easy to use apps.
    https://www.thermal.com/compact-series.html
    It was only a matter of time before they were copied...

    I've used the Seek before with iPhones, works well. (This was several years ago - they were a fair bit cheaper than the FLIR models at the time)
    watto_cobra