Upgrade now or later for best gaming performance.

[bshandley]

I'm about to upgrade my old 2009 Mac Mini to a newer version. My concern is about gaming.

I don't do a lot of gaming on my Mac, just maybe some TF2 or Civ5. I would like the new system to handle these games a lot better than my current mini which has a Geforce 9400m.

I'm considering waiting to see what the next iteration has, but it's looking like Apple might nix the Nvidia chipset for Intel's onboard Sandybridge video.

Wouldn't I be better off to just buy a new mini now with the Nvidia chipset? How is the Sandybridge chipset for gaming?

Thanks

 

[clyde2801]

I'm about to upgrade my old 2009 Mac Mini to a newer version. My concern is about gaming.

I don't do a lot of gaming on my Mac, just maybe some TF2 or Civ5. I would like the new system to handle these games a lot better than my current mini which has a Geforce 9400m.

I'm considering waiting to see what the next iteration has, but it's looking like Apple might nix the Nvidia chipset for Intel's onboard Sandybridge video.

Wouldn't I be better off to just buy a new mini now with the Nvidia chipset? How is the Sandybridge chipset for gaming?

Thanks

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1101884/

 

[lvlarkkoenen]

Now I don't know about Civ5 or TF2, but there are some games that are CPU-intensive. As the HD3000 performs about equal to the GeForce 320M (atleast under OSX) I'd suggest waiting for the newer mini. On GPU-heavy games, there won't be much of a difference, on CPU-heavy games there will be. Has to be said that the slight difference is in favor of the 320M probably.
On a sidenote, if you're gonna upgrade to Lion anyway, you'd also best get the newer version, because of the horsepower (RAM, but perhaps also CPU) Lion needs. I'm assuming that the new mini will sport 4GB standard, and you'll probably need as much to game reasonably under Lion, so it'll be a tad cheaper.