Are the mac minis powerful enough?

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

Ol!ver

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I'm contemplating giving macs another go, so looking at a mac mini. My question is, how usable are they? Are they powerful enough? I'm currently using an overclocked E6600 and 2GB of RAM.

Cheers.
 
Well they're powerful in terms of the performance required to run OS X but all relative to what your doing in terms of photo editing, movie editing and so forth. Bear in mind the max of limit of a Mac Mini in terms of RAM is 3Gb where as a MacBook can take 4Gb.

I'm stuck on the Mac Mini vs MacBook debate but that's for a separate thread :)

The amazing thing you'll find is that OS X boots very quick 20 secs or less, once there you can run VMWare/Parallels for Windows and it'll boot that quicker than a normal machine :p

Mac Mini's also use 700% less power than a normal PC so it for 3.5hours or so of using a normal PC equates to a Mac Mini been on for 24 hours. Plus you've got sleep which uses hardly any power 1-2w and allows more or less instant wake. The list goes on...
 
BeatMaster said:
Mac Mini's also use 700% less power than a normal PC so it for 3.5hours or so of using a normal PC equates to a Mac Mini been on for 24 hours. Plus you've got sleep which uses hardly any power 1-2w and allows more or less instant wake. The list goes on...
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Holy ****! I never knew that little gem!

*Adds to shopping list*
 
I have the old generation macbook which has similar specs to the mac mini, and I can run 1080p hd movies easily through a hd-tv if you fancy using it as htpc
 
I use my Mac Mini as a media type machine. Sits under my TV connected by DVI, with a 500gb Firewire HDD attached. HDD is shared for access to files and I've got iTunes sharing it's library. I use it for playing DVDs/downloaded media/music. For that job, it's very very small, very quiet, low power consumption, looks nice and still way more powerful than it needs to be.

I paid around £340 for it from the Apple education store. Upgraded the memory to 2gb for not very much, and bought an external HDD. Makes a cute wee 0.5tb HTPC/file server for ~£500.

Performance wise, it'd be pretty much on par with the MacBook - I use mine daily for normal use and there's no complaints here.
 
Yeah that will be fine, I would go for the 2.0Ghz version though as you will get a SuperDrive as opposed to a Combo drive and a larger HDD, I would probably upgrade the RAM to 2GB also to give you a bit more power and to get the most out of Leopard.
 
Ol!ver said:
Oooh, so with that I could stream HD movies/tv shows etc?
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It seems to be able to do that, aye. And if the wireless adapter on my 360 worked I'd give it a test.

Ol!ver said:
Would the mini be ok for boot camp with Vista too?
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Certainly should be, I've seen laptops with less specs running Home Premium with Aero fine, just seems a bit ram hungry, and with that being so cheap now that's nearly a moot point. :)
 
WotDa said:
It seems to be able to do that, aye. And if the wireless adapter on my 360 worked I'd give it a test.



Certainly should be, I've seen laptops with less specs running Home Premium with Aero fine, just seems a bit ram hungry, and with that being so cheap now that's nearly a moot point. :)
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Cheers. I'm just concerned about moving from a very fast pc to a seamingly inferior spec mac. Suspect OSX helps with that. My old G5 iMac got sold because it was too sluggish though.
 
Ol!ver said:
Cheers. I'm just concerned about moving from a very fast pc to a seamingly inferior spec mac. Suspect OSX helps with that. My old G5 iMac got sold because it was too sluggish though.
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Intel > G5, they're in a different league in terms of performance :) You certainly shouldn't find OS X sluggish unless under serious heavy load :p
 
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