Mac Mini 2012 or 2014?

Avalon

Avalon

Avalon

Soldato
Joined
29 Dec 2002
Posts
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OK so the mac mini *finally* got a refresh but apple went with soldered ram making the £399 4gb/1.4ghz i5 a bit of a non starter for me. I can buy a 'new' 2012 i5 for £399 which adding an extra drive and 8/16gb of RAM as/when required is simple enough, my question is does a 2012 i5 make more sense at £399 as the clock speed difference and upgrade potential seems to make more sense, if not then surely the 2012 i7 quad make more sense vs a 2014 mid level hassle mini for the same money? The clock/core count should tip the balance surely?

Thanks :)
 
The 2012 quadcore is vastly faster that the current and I would advise getting a pre-owned/refurbished one if you want it over the new 2015 model as you can also upgrade the ram etc.

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Thanks for all the replies :)

DanQ it looks like the performance in general is largely the same i5 vs i5 so the 2012 looks like a better buy as it gives the option to expand at a later date. According to the review Tythus mentions. In single core and dual core terms the difference seems very minimal based on the (assumed) geekbench scores, obviously it's just one benchmark and assumed numbers. I'd just about reconciled myself to a choice between the 2012 mini models and then read DanF's post. Seriously DanF you may have just saved me a lot of agro and frustration, thank you for taking the time to post as i'd forgotten about the 24fps hardware bug.

I'll need to have a think about how I go from here, a NUC may be a better option though I was hoping to avoid windows.
 
I did considered a NUC initially, at entry level it's £95ish + RAM/SSD and you could easily get away with 4GB and OpenElec for media stuff and boot from a small SSD or USB, with a FLIRC added it'd be near perfect (Sky remote controls everything). The problem is I want to do work on this box and running Win7 and a load of IO/CPU heavy stuff on a low rent Celeron/Atom derived chip isn't fun so it's got to be an i3/i5 and that's now bizarrely more expensive than a mini when you add OS/SSD/RAM. The more I think about it, the 2012 i5 at £365 (that's £399 less £30 discount and 1% cash back) seems almost cheap for what it is relative to an i5 Haswell NUC, using the same voucher/cash back combo that makes it £534 for the i7 quad which is only £35 more than the 8Gb Haswell i5. GPU/24p aside for a moment it's going to be a lot quicker and a lot more expandable long term so i'm in :D

SwitchResX is supposed to help with the 24p issue according to Plex forums, but the same guy follows up with this the next day so meh. This also looked promising. I managed to dodge the rainbow effect on DLP's so hopefully i'll not notice the 24p issue or more likely be able to minimize it.
 
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