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Mac mini now good enough for design work?

G

gravitysrainbow

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 16, 2006
2
0
Yo! Maybe you knowledgable guys can help me...

I was considering switching from my noisy grey box pc to a nice silent mac mini duo upgraded with one gig ram. My uses are high end photo editing (photoshop), along with some illustrator, indesign and web design. I was not going to bother because of the delays with CS3, but now that I could dual boot with XP, this does not seem too much of a problem. I would like to know if the specs of the mac mini are up to the job of reasonably professional design work, or whether I would get frustrated with the machine struggling to keep up?

thanks again...

gravitysrainbow.
 
Thanks for the reply. This would be a home computer for home projects. At work I have a 3.2ghz P4 with 1.5gigs ram and integrated graphics. I kind of thought this mini's new dual processers would be nearly as good, and the motherboard would be as good, I'm not too bothered about 3d performance and I could get away with 1 gig ram. I didn't think the lack of graphics card would be a problem because I'm not doing any 3D work. So why would this mini be struggling compared to say an imac or a new pc?
 
Where it would be stuggling is in the rendering. There are many differnent levels of photoshop use, but in general if you were doing anything in the advanced category, then your going to be sitting around for a while. The mini is fast, but were not talking 3.6ghz p4 fast. Were talking at most 2.8ghz HT P4. So I would say that you will be set if you get the mac mini, and pump the ram up to 1.5GB. You will use the RAM no matter what you think. Mac use RAM more effeciently than windows, and tend to take advantage of extra RAM if it's there. And, on a mini, you could use that extra little bit of performance. And, you are right about the graphics card thing, you shouldn't notice a difference if you arn't doing anything that is 3D.
 
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