So, it’s been almost 2 weeks since I got my Mac Mini Core Duo. All I can say is, I don’t regret having replaced my beloved Cube with this mean little machine @ 30 Watt. It’s definitely faster than the Cube and for most stuff it’s almost faster than my Windows development workbeast Athlon MP 2600 which runs at roughly 300 Watt. Quite impressive. The faster FSB, bigger cache and faster memory definitely play a big role here.
And yes, I tried Windows on my Mini. It’s nice and all, but there is still a lot left to finish for the guys over at onmac.net. Suspending doesn’t really work and shutting down the machine crashes it hard. I can only assume this being due to the incomplete BIOS implementation.
Anyway, I couldn’t resist benchmarking the machine against my Athlon, so here are the results from SiSoftware Sandra 2005 SR2:

Machine		Dual Athlon MP 2600+ 	Mac Mini Core Duo
Clock			2.13 GHz		1.66 GHz

Arithmetics 		17248			15147
(higher is better)	 6657			 6085

Multimedia		39921			31699
(higher is better)	42412			35177

Memory Bandwidth MB/s	 1449			 3588
(higher is better)	 1481			 3559

Power consumption	 295-302 Watts		 28-30 Watts

If you keep in mind, that I’m comparing an upgraded year 2001 workstation with a new system running a mobile CPU, those results are still quite impressive.
However, what I’m missing on the Mini is dual monitor support and a decent graphics card. Also there is one major point keeping me from getting rid of that power-sucking box under my desk: hard drive performance. I don’t think we’ll be seeing 15k rpm U320 drives in a Mac mini compatible form factor any time soon. ;)