Is the current Mini good for light gaming?

[APlotdevice]

I want to buy a mini so I could play basic games like Minecraft, WoT, and light Steam games. I seen in other reviews that it can't handle good games, however, I plan to upgrade the memory and use an external 1 TB hard drive. Since my budget is limited, I can't buy a iMac or MacBook, suggestions?

I play Minecraft and various (admittedly older) Steam games just fine on my MacBook Air, so I'm pretty sure they'd work on a Mac Mini!

 

[bhonder]

Don't have any personal experience playing it, but a cursory look at Google (HD4000 + Day of Defeat Source) seems to indicate that people are playing it on systems with the integrated HD4000 without any major complaints. I've played Counter-Strike: Source on laptops with HD4000 chips and it played fine, so if DoD:S isn't much more taxing than that you should be fine. I can play WoW on my Mac Mini on medium settings without any issues.

Thank you for the tip, Pete.
I'm speaking of Steam client running natively os Mac. My macbook pro 15" with nvidia 330m does not like it: the fan goes up to 5500 rpm, which is a speed I never seen before, even with Virtualbox running another OS X.

I hope that some mac mini owner will stumble over this thread and give me a first hand advice.

 

[crsh1976]

Thank you for the tip, Pete.
I'm speaking of Steam client running natively os Mac. My macbook pro 15" with nvidia 330m does not like it: the fan goes up to 5500 rpm, which is a speed I never seen before, even with Virtualbox running another OS X.

I hope that some mac mini owner will stumble over this thread and give me a first hand advice.

Notebookcheck puts the HD4000 20% ahead of the old 330M in benchmarks, but perhaps the fan activity is also due to the very tight airflow of your MBP - the Mini isn't big, but the airflow is definitely better than any notebook.

I also think DoD:S should run fine on the HD4000, it's fairly old despite the higher-end additions they made to it over the years - just one question tho, what screen resolution would you play it at?

 

[bhonder]

Notebookcheck puts the HD4000 20% ahead of the old 330M in benchmarks, but perhaps the fan activity is also due to the very tight airflow of your MBP - the Mini isn't big, but the airflow is definitely better than any notebook.

I also think DoD:S should run fine on the HD4000, it's fairly old despite the higher-end additions they made to it over the years - just one question tho, what screen resolution would you play it at?

Thank you for your help. I will consider Mac mini. Now the point is "To wait or not to wait..." For the iris pro mini

 

[EmlynDewar]

I certainly wouldn't recommend buying the current Mac Mini at the current new prices.
Unless you get a good deal on a used one, you'd be better off waiting.

Personally I'd be building a small form factor AMD APU set-up if it was for light gaming with limited budget.

 

[DesertSurfer]

Has anyone tried x-plane on the current HD4000 mini? If so, what settings can you use? I find it is actually playable at low settings on my HD3000 MacBook Pro (8g ram), and wonder if HD4000 would be noticeably better.