I put a 128GB SSD drive. Unfortunately, 2GB of RAM is the highest amount of ram you can put on it. But it's doing it's new job fantastically well. I am just waiting till the Mac Mini arrives.
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Upgrading from Mac Book Pro (Intel Core Duo) to Mac Mini 2011
- Thread starter Vulkan
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I put a 128GB SSD drive. Unfortunately, 2GB of RAM is the highest amount of ram you can put on it. But it's doing it's new job fantastically well. I am just waiting till the Mac Mini arrives.
Update:
My Mac Mini Base Edition ($562 from Amazon) has arrived. I took out the flimsy 2GB of Ram it came with and put in 8GB of RAM. I also applied the iFixit 2nd HDD kit and I currently have 2x500GB HDD.
I am really impressed with how well this little thing is running. The Intel HD 3000 with the 8GB of RAM works really well. It works so well, I have been bold enough to install my Diablo III Beta and I can play it with almost no lag on moderate settings. Again, not going to use this mac for gaming but I wanted to see how far I could push it. Not disappointed at all.
I loaded my Wordpress Development IDE (I use serverpress.com Desktop Server 3.3.1) and all works phenomenally. I also loaded Xcode, Flux and my other development tools and its just great. Love Lion... Can't wait til ML launches. I even installed a VM of ML just to see how the emulation runs, and while its a itsy-bitsy choppy it doesnt bother me since its just for testing.
All in all I am very satisfied with the performance the machine has and how well I can work on it without lag or issues or the crap windows gives me sometimes.
Love how well Multitouch works and I already have a good amount of "multitouch expressions" to launch apps and take care of shortcuts.
For the time being, this solution is going to work excellently well. I wanted to thank everyone who helped me with my choice. Don't be too hard on this solution. With a fast HDD and a ton of ram it works great.
This is how much I spent overall:
Amazon: Mac Mini Base: $562.00
Amazon: 8GB DDR3 Crucial RAM: $36.00
iFixit: 2nd HDD Kit: $74.95 (Including tax + Shipping)
-----------------------------------------------------
Total: $672.95
Total time spent adding the 2nd HDD: 35 minutes
The workload performance increase between the i7 and the i5 multithreading (both show as hyperthreading to 4 cores) is about 3.78% increase between i5 and i7. Is that worth the extra $327.04 ........................ No.
The only way I would justify that amount of money on a Mac Mini is if it brought an i7 Sandy Bridge + Nvidia 460M (or ATI) Video Card. Otherwise you are just being too foolish spending that type of money.
Considering the cheapest iMac with 21" screen runs about $1199. I'd rather put $200 into it and get the iMac rather than the Mac Mini Server.
But thats just my opinion.
My Mac Mini Base Edition ($562 from Amazon) has arrived. I took out the flimsy 2GB of Ram it came with and put in 8GB of RAM. I also applied the iFixit 2nd HDD kit and I currently have 2x500GB HDD.
I am really impressed with how well this little thing is running. The Intel HD 3000 with the 8GB of RAM works really well. It works so well, I have been bold enough to install my Diablo III Beta and I can play it with almost no lag on moderate settings. Again, not going to use this mac for gaming but I wanted to see how far I could push it. Not disappointed at all.
I loaded my Wordpress Development IDE (I use serverpress.com Desktop Server 3.3.1) and all works phenomenally. I also loaded Xcode, Flux and my other development tools and its just great. Love Lion... Can't wait til ML launches. I even installed a VM of ML just to see how the emulation runs, and while its a itsy-bitsy choppy it doesnt bother me since its just for testing.
All in all I am very satisfied with the performance the machine has and how well I can work on it without lag or issues or the crap windows gives me sometimes.
Love how well Multitouch works and I already have a good amount of "multitouch expressions" to launch apps and take care of shortcuts.
For the time being, this solution is going to work excellently well. I wanted to thank everyone who helped me with my choice. Don't be too hard on this solution. With a fast HDD and a ton of ram it works great.
This is how much I spent overall:
Amazon: Mac Mini Base: $562.00
Amazon: 8GB DDR3 Crucial RAM: $36.00
iFixit: 2nd HDD Kit: $74.95 (Including tax + Shipping)
-----------------------------------------------------
Total: $672.95
Total time spent adding the 2nd HDD: 35 minutes
The workload performance increase between the i7 and the i5 multithreading (both show as hyperthreading to 4 cores) is about 3.78% increase between i5 and i7. Is that worth the extra $327.04 ........................ No.
The only way I would justify that amount of money on a Mac Mini is if it brought an i7 Sandy Bridge + Nvidia 460M (or ATI) Video Card. Otherwise you are just being too foolish spending that type of money.
Considering the cheapest iMac with 21" screen runs about $1199. I'd rather put $200 into it and get the iMac rather than the Mac Mini Server.
But thats just my opinion.