The $499 imac mini

[peppe]

Test 2:
With a 17" screen and a 400FW disc (LaCie extreme) it can play (express)
2 layers fine (24-25fps) rocksteady!!
800x600

This is cool, seems to work for small installations.

[Spam Butterfly]

You could get 10 of them for $5000 odd and build a render farm for Cinema 4D...

Hugh

[samsc]

Test 2:
With a 17" screen and a 400FW disc (LaCie extreme) it can play (express)
2 layers fine (24-25fps) rocksteady!!
800x600

This is cool, seems to work for small installations.

cool - thats great.

[peppe]

You could get 10 of them for $5000 odd and build a render farm for Cinema 4D...

Hugh

That would be handy for C4, but the G4 is about 8 times slower then a G5 2x2Ghz
in render times and have more problems with some plugins.
We made some serious test with mixed renderfarm G4,G5´s and we see a major improvement with the G5,and for the release9 of C4.
I had Minimac´s in my mind for Kiev gigg, but I will go for that with G5´s.

[samsc]

the best playback would be putting a sata raptor drive in a fw400 case.
i think thats just about possible.

[samsc]

these guys replaced the slow internal laptop drive in side the mac mini, with a faster 7200rpm laptop drive.
resulting in 55% greater disc performance over the standard 4200rpm model

this might still not help catalyst playback much, because running media from a separate drive helps virtual memory disc hits.

http://www.macsonly.com/index.html#71

[samsc]

My mac mini arrived.

No problems. Everything seems to work.
Dont have time to run any benchmarks