Joined the Mac Mini club

[donw35]

after allot of thinking and reading I bought the Mid level Mini with the ATI GPU and 4gb Ram, I decided on the mini for my backup PC at home and when I go to our cabin to use it as my main PC and to watch movies (we have no cable and no reseption). I will probably upgrade to a SSD and 8GB later but for now I think this will perform nicely.

 

[shortcut3d]

after allot of thinking and reading I bought the Mid level Mini with the ATI GPU and 4gb Ram, I decided on the mini for my backup PC at home and when I go to our cabin to use it as my main PC and to watch movies (we have no cable and no reseption). I will probably upgrade to a SSD and 8GB later but for now I think this will perform nicely.

Congratulations on your new 2011 Mac Mini!

Based on my experience 8GB of Kingston Hyper X PnP 1866MHz memory is a good upgrade. Only very specific use cases would you benefit more from 16GB. The Kingston Hyper X has also been very stable in the 2011 Mac Mini's.

I am a fan of Sandforce SSDs from OWC and OCZ. I've not experienced the problems with OCZ drives since 2.15 firmware. The support forums have also died down since the introduction of the drives. OWC is always a safe choice for Macintosh users because they specifically test for the platform. I suggest getting a drive with Asynchronous Toggle NAND vs Synchronous NAND because you will get significantly better performance with incompressible data and 4k random writes. The latter have a bigger impact on day to day usage. I'm currently getting 550MB/s through put on the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G and OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS.

 

[donw35]

Thanks for the advice, I already gave a OWC 120GB in my Hack Pro so I will probably be putting one of those in and adding 8GB of ram to run VMware fusion, I will use that to run Windows 7 and do work related stuff. I like the mini for the small foot print and portability. I also have a MBP for more o travel related tasks.

 

[David085]

Congrats on your New Mini