2012 Mac Mini Paralells Performance Question

[taythecoug]

Hi All,

Been lurking for a while but now I have a question. I have a 2012 base mac mini with 16GB of ram. I am going to be starting my own business (accounting) and I will need to run both Windows and Mac (sometimes simultaneously). I plan on moving to an SSD before I set up bootcamp and paralells. My question is will the i5 provide enough power for that? Thus far I have not had any hiccups and it seems plenty fast even without the SSD, but I imagine that I will start to push it a bunch more. Just wondering if the i7 quad core version would be a safer bet, and if so then I will just sell my base Mac Mini. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

 

[fig]

You should be fine.

Faster is always better and the more horsepower the better when it comes to running in emulation (i.e. Parallels), but unless you're doing some severe high intensity number crunching nothing you're going to do will tax the CPU that much.

Since you've already got the machine go ahead and try it, worst case it feels too slow and you can upgrade.

 

[taythecoug]

Thanks fig I think I'll go that route.

 

[opinio]

Hi All,

Been lurking for a while but now I have a question. I have a 2012 base mac mini with 16GB of ram. I am going to be starting my own business (accounting) and I will need to run both Windows and Mac (sometimes simultaneously). I plan on moving to an SSD before I set up bootcamp and paralells. My question is will the i5 provide enough power for that? Thus far I have not had any hiccups and it seems plenty fast even without the SSD, but I imagine that I will start to push it a bunch more. Just wondering if the i7 quad core version would be a safer bet, and if so then I will just sell my base Mac Mini. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks

I have a 2012 2.6Ghz quad with 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM with a 240GB SSD and 1TB 7200rpm drive in a fusion drive.

I run Parallels 8 with a Windows 8 and 7 VMs and also Linux Mint (i.e. 3 VM's). I have the RAM sharing in parallels set to 8GB and the CPU set to 4 cores out of the 8 virtual, and the GPU set to 256mb.

In running iStat Menus (Mac App) I recal (when running the Windows 8 VM) that the CPU hardly even hits 20% and the RAM is about 1/2 to 2/3 utilised.

I think the RAM is shown as 2/3 because I share half of it via Paralles and iStat picks up that half (8GB) as being fully used (or reseved). You could easily get away with 4GB in windows.

Either way there is still a lot of RAM to spare.

Anyway, running Win 8 in my config does not even come close to stretching the mini.

Hope that helps.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I use Fusion instead of Parallels but with 16GB RAM Windows runs fine for me (substantial MS Access databases). I wouldn't want to game or edit video but otherwise it's terrific.

 

[rivettmj]

I've got a 2010 Mini (with 16gb of ram) and it runs two windows 7 VMs without any problems (and a whole load of native mac applications)

16gb is really the key, I was hitting swap with 8gb, and performance really suffers then!