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Not saying your wrong but...
This was not my experience in owning an 2012 i7 2.6 with apple SSD. Period. Above 35% load - full speed fan and clearly audible from upstairs... That fan at 6000 rpm is brutal -- again - IMO...

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Are you talking about the 2012 i5??? As far as the 2012 i7 goes - this is 100% NOT my experience. Owned it for a year...

I tend to agree. I have two 2011 minis and a 2.6Ghz 2012. Yes the 2012's fan is more efficient (in exhaust capacity) and quieter than the 2011 fan, but only slightly. I have heard someone refer to the 2012 2.6 quad's fan like it is a jumbo jet which I think is a little exagerated, but definately it is not quiet or inaudible. The 2012's fan base level rpm is at 1800 so it is quieter on idle (yeas, inaudible I would say), but when the CPU ramps up to 100 percent and the temps hit 100'C the fan is wooshing along. The sound is fairly similar to a PC tower.
 
I tend to agree. I have two 2011 minis and a 2.6Ghz 2012. Yes the 2012's fan is more efficient (in exhaust capacity) and quieter than the 2011 fan, but only slightly. I have heard someone refer to the 2012 2.6 quad's fan like it is a jumbo jet which I think is a little exagerated, but definately it is not quiet or inaudible. The 2012's fan base level rpm is at 1800 so it is quieter on idle (yeas, inaudible I would say), but when the CPU ramps up to 100 percent and the temps hit 100'C the fan is wooshing along. The sound is fairly similar to a PC tower.

Yeah, but on my 2012 mac mini that almost never happens....I use it for music production, and the noise is NOT an issue.
 
I've had a 2012 2.5GHz i5 mini since last December and now also have a 2012 2.6GHz i7 mini.

The i5 mini was pretty much dead silent, even at max load (e.g. running Handbrake on an H.264 encode).

The i7 is usually either silent (most of the time) or roaring (at max load). It doesn't sound like a jumbo jet, but it's louder than any PC I've ever owned. Just owning the i5, I would not have believed how loud the fan could be.

That is with the bottom cover on, though. If I take the bottom cover off, the CPU temp drops and the fan soon falls back into 1800 rpm silence. (My i7 rests on its left side, with the power supply on top and the bottom facing right.) I've gotten to the point that if I'm running Handbrake, encoding in iMovie, or doing something comparable, I just take the bottom cover off the mini for the duration. At max load, with the cover off, the CPU temps hovers around 90*C at 1800 rpm. With the cover on, at max load, it hits 100*C at nearly 6000 rpm. More than the sound, I prefer not to bake the internals for the hours that a queued up set of Handbrake encodes takes.

John
 
I've had a 2012 2.5GHz i5 mini since last December and now also have a 2012 2.6GHz i7 mini.

The i5 mini was pretty much dead silent, even at max load (e.g. running Handbrake on an H.264 encode).

The i7 is usually either silent (most of the time) or roaring (at max load). It doesn't sound like a jumbo jet, but it's louder than any PC I've ever owned. Just owning the i5, I would not have believed how loud the fan could be.

That is with the bottom cover on, though. If I take the bottom cover off, the CPU temp drops and the fan soon falls back into 1800 rpm silence. (My i7 rests on its left side, with the power supply on top and the bottom facing right.) I've gotten to the point that if I'm running Handbrake, encoding in iMovie, or doing something comparable, I just take the bottom cover off the mini for the duration. At max load, with the cover off, the CPU temps hovers around 90*C at 1800 rpm. With the cover on, at max load, it hits 100*C at nearly 6000 rpm. More than the sound, I prefer not to bake the internals for the hours that a queued up set of Handbrake encodes takes.

John

Awesome info, thank you. So it does seem, i7 i5 have significant differences as with MBP's too.

Benchmarks aside, does the i7 Mini feel really noticeably more zippy as a everyday desktop than the i5 version?

For me (and I'm probably not representative of most) it's the less often quantified factors like noise pollution, jank, stuttering and laggy UX all tend to diminish the overall experience.

OTOH I don't really care if encoding takes 70s or 90s and wish designers would focus on the other issues more.
 
Benchmarks aside, does the i7 Mini feel really noticeably more zippy as a everyday desktop than the i5 version?
Both machines have 16GB RAM and Fusion Drives--a homegrown 180GB SSD+500GB HDD on the i5 and a stock 128GB + 1TB HDD on the i7--so on normal daily tasks both feel very snappy. The i7 is only slightly faster on routine single-core tasks, and you won't really notice a difference. It's with intensive multi-core-optimized programs and operations that I see a nearly 2x speed increase. It's not a question of 90s versus 70s, it's often more like 8 hours versus 15 hours. That's the reason I bought the i7--that and the fact that I found it used for a price I couldn't resist.
 
Both machines have 16GB RAM and Fusion Drives--a homegrown 180GB SSD+500GB HDD on the i5 and a stock 128GB + 1TB HDD on the i7--so on normal daily tasks both feel very snappy. The i7 is only slightly faster on routine single-core tasks, and you won't really notice a difference. It's with intensive multi-core-optimized programs and operations that I see a nearly 2x speed increase. It's not a question of 90s versus 70s, it's often more like 8 hours versus 15 hours. That's the reason I bought the i7--that and the fact that I found it used for a price I couldn't resist.

Got it, yeah the i7 makes sense then, that's a big difference.

So I just bit the bullet and bought an i5 about 20 minutes ago. Setting it up now.

If it's not fast enough, I guess I can wait for Haswell mini's and then use this i5 as a media center.

Will report back, once I've upgraded to 16GB and 240gb ssd as to everyday performance compared to my MBP.
 
Hit a bit of a snag. Plugged in the Thunderbolt display to the new Mini, powered her up and... Nada.

The fans are running, and after plugging a mouse in an clicking randomly the OS setup started asking me (via audio), what language I wanted, but the display remains completely off.

Double checked again. TB works fine with the MBP. Weird.

EDIT. Scratch that. Plugging it in a few more times got it working.
 
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