If you haven’t noticed, the most recent update to the Mac mini (July 2011) was quite a huge one. It’s a great injustice that the mini is pushed aside by so many Apple shoppers.
A customer recently brought in an Xserve that required quite a bit of work. This customer ended up paying twice the cost of the current Mac mini Server to repair the Xserve, simply because they couldn’t believe a Mac mini could compete with a machine like the Xserve. Well, it can.
A website I visit very often for simple Mac performance comparisons is Primate Labs’ Geekbench. They have tested most Mac models and are fairly immediate at testing newer ones as they are released. The best part about Geekbench is that they score each and every Mac. So, for someone who isn’t very tech-savvy but needs some kind of simple performance comparison, this is it.
The current generation of Mac mini Server received a performance score of 9456 from Geekbench. That’s higher than an Xserve (Early 2009) with Intel Xeon E5520 2.27GHz (4 cores), and very close to a Mac Pro (Mid 2010) with Intel Xeon W3530 2.8GHz (4 cores). Both of these machines are about 10 times the physical size of the Mac mini Server. Granted there are a few limitations to the Mac mini, such as the lack of both graphics card expandability that comes with the Mac Pro and the multiple hard drive bays standard on both the Xserve and the Mac Pro. However, Thunderbolt is a very up-and-coming technology that’s included on the Mac mini Server and could eliminate these shortcomings. There are already a few options for daisy chain-able external hard drives that utilize Thunderbolt.
With all this said, the Mac mini is not the best choice for all server-type applications, but you have to admit that given its physical size, very low cost and low energy consumption, it really is a magnificent machine.