Home theater PCs have become a popular thing in the last few years. The ability to download and stream media right to a TV is something that I can’t live without. Netflix, Hulu, and Youtube make it easy to live without physical media. Most people don’t want a giant computer tower cluttering up their home theater. The solution to this is the Mac Mini. The Mac Mini might be the best choice for a home theater PC to date. Not only is it compact and powerful, it is green.
The Mac Mini is an all around green machine. It uses only a fraction of the energy that a typical PC uses. A typical desktop PC can use up to around 200 watts; the most power a Mac Mini will ever draw is 85 watts. That’s an energy savings of 57.5 percent. At idle, the Mac Mini only uses 13 watts. Mac OS X’s power management schemes work with the Mac Mini’s hardware to conserve as much power as possible. Mac Mini’s greenness doesn’t just have to do with energy efficiency; it’s built with recyclable materials. Its enclosure is milled from a single piece of aluminum. The Mac Mini’s size means that considerably less aluminum goes into making it compared to a PC of average size.
Let’s talk about the Mac Mini’s powerful hardware. Intel’s new line of processors balances extreme performance with energy efficiency. The Mac Mini can be optioned with the Intel Core i7, which is the most powerful consumer processor at this time. It runs at 2.7GHz most of the time. But when more power is needed, Turbo Boost kicks in and pushes the clock speed up to 3.4GHz. For graphics performance, the Mac Mini relies on AMD’s Radeon HD discrete graphics card. The Mac Mini, despite being tiny, is no slouch. It has plenty of power to play the latest 1080p high definition videos. It is the perfect home theater PC.
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