mac mini as desktop replacement?

Oxy said:
is it silent m8?
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It is absolutely silent, unless you put your ear to the back of the machine, you can't hear it; it's the first machine that the power light is actually needed! :D

Its silent and powerful attributes tempted my flatmate to also buy one! :D Fire any more questions you have, I'll be happy to answer all of em about the mini!
 
It's interesting tracking Oxy's threads. As I had the same problem a month or two back.... do I get an Mini Mac or a Atom based mini ITX based machine. And like Oxy I have a macbook that's not doing much. My reasoning was that the mini mac is over priced by the tune of about £200. I managed to spec a equivalent spec in a "not much bigger" shuttle case for £280, albeit not quite as power efficient.

The only reason to buy a mini mac is if you love macs and can't afford an iMac or want something smaller. Economically mini macs (even more so that iMacs IMHO) are terrible value. For the £500 or damn near too it, I'd be expecting either a Q9550 or i5 as the CPU, a C2D for £500 seems wayyy to expensive.

For the people buying an mini mac as a HTPC I can understand it's appeal, decent GPU, CPU and memory. But as a desktop replacement for £500, I'm not so sure.

Ultimately my decision was to be a little smarter. And analyzing how I was using my main machine and how I could achieve similar performance / functionality at less cost. I bought £200 ION 330 based mini ITX machine, and leave my macbook on 24/7 in "sleep mode" and have my ION etherwake the macbook when I need a little more kick and run apps like Eclipse (for Java dev) remotely. The ION runs 1080p HD movies fine (with power to spare in fact) so it meets it's objective as a HTPC and using the macbook remotely is ideal as it saves power whilst offering "near" imac performance when and if I need it, all the while drawing minimal amounts of power when it's sleeping. The added benefit is whenever I'm away from home and using a low powered netbook, I can remotely wake the macbook and hey presto I have a relative powerhouse of machine to use.
 
hehe yehy I know.... guess what just happened though!!!!

My mainboard, the x38-DS4 has become alive again!!!! I now have my overclock of 3.5ghz back!!! I dunno what is up with this board....

I still will buy an ion or a mac mini, tbh I can't really afford £450 as a student atm.

I can afford a £150-£200 atom ion build. I already own enough ram, HDD's and the xbox 360 HD-DVD rom drive can act as my DVD-Rom for now!

I also have a spare XP MCE 2005 disk laying around, as well 2 spare sealed windows 7 disks lol.

I'm going to make a new post in general hardware as I can't afford a mac mini having had 24 hours to cool off lol
 
I just set up my Mac Mini on my 60" TV for a media centre.

It's a lot more capable than I imagined! Plays full 1080p bluray rips with no issues. Very happy :)
 
The difference between a cheap Atom/ION based setup and a Mac Min is one looks dead sexy and runs OSX the other doesn't!

Get the Mac Mini!
 
mchrisober said:
i am interested because i want to buy mac mini.
Can you make a review and tell us more things about it?
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I never saw the point of a Mac Mini before, but since getting one recently it's changed my mind completely.

I'd say it totally depends on the applications you intend on using but for word processing / iTunes / Media centre it works flawlessly. First thing I would do is check out some benchmarks and go from there..

Mine is used as a media centre primarily, but I still loaded it up with Adobe Master Collection CS4 for some light photo editing and it copes well.

As said before.. think of it as a MacBook in a small form factor shell.

How to: Mac Mini Media Centre (link)
 
Would you say that a 2.26 CPU in a Mac is a fast Processor? More than capable to run things smoothly / efficiently etc? Coming from a 3.2 AMD cpu, would i see a big drop in performance?
 
raptormonkey said:
Would you say that a 2.26 CPU in a Mac is a fast Processor? More than capable to run things smoothly / efficiently etc? Coming from a 3.2 AMD cpu, would i see a big drop in performance?
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my macbook has coped perfectly fine with everything I have thrown at it!

Unless your cartoon making or extreme photo editing I can't see you taxing it too much.
 
EVH said:
I never saw the point of a Mac Mini before, but since getting one recently it's changed my mind completely.

I'd say it totally depends on the applications you intend on using but for word processing / iTunes / Media centre it works flawlessly. First thing I would do is check out some benchmarks and go from there..

Mine is used as a media centre primarily, but I still loaded it up with Adobe Master Collection CS4 for some light photo editing and it copes well.

As said before.. think of it as a MacBook in a small form factor shell.

How to: Mac Mini Media Centre (link)
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thanks my friend
 
Interesting thread guys, thanks for all the info, keep it coming as Im looking at one so I can publish apps (needs the apple hardware certs I believe) for work stuff.

Something tells me I may use it rather often!
 
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