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knarzie

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 5, 2008
218
3
I am in the market for a Mac mini, please help me decide! The purpose of my mini will be our media centre. I will have it in the living room with the tv, mostly for pictures in iphoto, my lossless music collection in itunes (1TB), movies and tv shows in itunes, and ripped dvd/tv series library (about 3TB), as well as a bit of browsing email and light office work. Currently my late 2008 unibody Macbook does all these jobs, but it is struggling at times.

I have discounted the lowest spec mini (for no particular reason other than that I can afford to spend more), so should I get the dual core, or the quad core server. I'm assuming RAM upgrade can be done easily and cheaply rather than order it straight from Apple. I do like the 2x750 GB of the server version, it would probably be enough for iphoto and music collection, but as I will have to attach external drives anyway, i am not sure if that alone is reason enough, so I guess it's all down to the processors. Presumably the mid-range will be sufficient as I am not editing movies etc.

Thank you for reading.

So, mid-range, and spend the extra cash on fancy hard drives, or server version? Opinions most welcome!
 
The low end mini only comes with 2gb of ram, with Lion that's just too low. So I'd go with the higher end with a better GPU and maybe increase the HD space.

Maxing out the ram may be a good idea as well.
 
get the 799 model DIY the ram to 8gb. as for hdds depends on what you want to do. if you are like diy you can put your own 1tb hdd in it. the samsung 1tb is a good choice I put one into a 2.3 model works great.

If you don't like diy just get the 750gb hdd put in by apple but do the ram yourself. The ram is easy.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231341

you could buy these.. as an aside I have tested these minis enough to say;
2gb is a joke far too little.
4gb is okay.
6gb is good.
8gb is low cost enough if you diy.


for snow you could get away with 2gb. not lion.
 
IMHO
- Dual Core i7
- DIY 8GB
- DIY Seagate Momentus XT
- AMD Graphics

Well that's what I have planned.
 
I will use the 2.5 or the 2.7 with a 1tb samsung and 8gb ram. I will hope that t-bolt comes out and I can add a small flat ssd via t-bolt. I plan to have a 3 piece system mini /dvd/ t-bolt

plus a nas as my packmule to link the mini /imac /mac pro
 
IMHO
- Dual Core i7
- DIY 8GB
- DIY Seagate Momentus XT
- AMD Graphics

Well that's what I have planned.

I've upgraded RAM on my macbook but I am not much of a DIY enthusiast I am afraid. How hard is it to put the Seagate in myself?
 
The low end Mini is MORE computer than necessary for your needs. Add some RAM and you're done. Anything more is wasteful.
 
I am thinking of getting the quad core server version.

I want to run Adobe Lightroom on it which can be CPU & RAM hungry.
Currently using it on an old Pentium 4 Pc with windows XP - lightroom sometimes uses 95% of the available CPU
It is recommended by Adobe that a 7200rpm HD is used with Lightroom - slower disc speeds can make Lightroom run slowly.
the dual core mac minis come with a 5400rpm HD as default & it is £120 extra to upgrade this. Therefore the difference in price to the quad core which comes with the 7200rpm HD as standard isn't that much extra.
It will also help future proof it for a while as I would want it to last for maybe the next 5 years or so.

I will upgrade the RAM to 8GB myself but do not want to do the HD.
 
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