Mac Pro :: Mac Pro Quad 2.0GHz A Good Deal? (Or New Mini?)
Apr 17, 2009
Hi guys
I have been looking at the new mac minis (self upgrading the HDD and RAM), but for not too much more it looks like I could get a 12-18 month old mac pro.
Is it worth getting the older machine with better specs or will the new mini actually be more capable?
I will use it for photography (lightroom, PSE6, iphoto) word processing (MS Office 08) and obviously email/safari.
I have done quite a bit of searching around but can't seem to find much info on this topic, plenty about G5 powermacs vs mini but nothing on the dual xeon dual core 2.0ghz pros.
Just curious as to how much of an improvement in performance I would see upgrading my system as it states above, since my 2006 machine is 3 years old and getting close to the end of my apple care, figured I would trade it in and upgrade.
I'm eyeing the mini right now because os x >>> windows for music (inherent midi drivers instead of 3rd party, stability, etc etc).amittedly I currently run a hackintosh on a previously windows pc. It is stable with the exception of gfx crashes every few hours and its inability to use the gfx card to its full extent. This gets to me though and is kind of a bitch. So I'm thinking about getting a mini when I have the money for one. I would get the standard with the 4gb ram option. How well does it deal with heat under stress? and is the HDD 7200 rpm for the non server edition?(edit: roarrrr just read that its 5400, so lame)
How�s the performance of the 2.53ghz mac mini vs the 2008 macbook aluminium? My macbook has 4GB RAM, and is mostly decent but performance drops when running some photoshop plugins (which I use frequently). I�m looking for a desktop upgrade, and since I�m already using an external monitor and keyboard the mac mini seems more suitable than the imac.
But is 2.53ghz a significant upgrade from 2.0ghz on the macbook?
Our old powermac died recently (G5 2.5ghz x2), the cost to repair was quoted at 850$, which is roughly the same price as a new Mac-Mini 2.0ghz. Just wondering how the performance of new mini compares to the 4 year old powermac? A new powermac is out of the question right now.
For the CPU of the new minis, I can choose between 2.0GHz (intel Core 2 Duo P7350) and 2.26GHz (P8400). I wonder if I can replace the CPU myself (now or later) e.g. by the P8700 which runs at 2.53 GHz. I heard that this is impossible. Even upgrading from 2.0GHz to 2.26GHz is said to be impossible. I was told that if I want the 2.26 GHz CPU, I have to decide so before I buy, as it is not possible to upgrade later.
I've been given the Blu-ray set of season 1 of the classic 70s sci-fi series Space:1999, but I don't have a BD player. What I am thinking about doing is buying an external BD drive for my Mac mini HTPC, ripping the episodes with MakeMKV and playing them in Plex.
I want to maximise the quality so I don't want to recompress the video in any way. At the risk of asking a really dumb question, will I get reliable playback from a truly "raw" 1080p24 BD rip played off a Firewire 400 drive, or will the data rate be too high?
The old Mini worked fine with my Westinghouse 24" LCD monitor (HDMI input -connected to Mini via DVI->HDMI cable).The new Mini Server 2010 has HDMI out, so I used a straight-through HDMI cable. The display looks terrible! All of the fonts appear to have a 'shadow' next to them - almost like an old analog VGA with 'interference'.Thinking it could be the cable, I went back to my old Mini's DVI->HDMI cable (and used the new Mini's HDMI->DVI adapter to connect to it). Same results.The Westinghouse monitor's native resolution is 1920x1200. The Mac says that it's configured for 1920x1200.
I recently moved to a MacMini Server Quad i7 to give my studio a boost. From what I was reading it was giving other post-audio pro's a **** of a boost in performance for obvious reasons.Been pretty good the last couple of weeks, but today, during a large session, it started choking.I opened up the Activity Monitor and, aside from obviously needing more RAM, my CPU was going pretty hard. An odd thing I noticed though: In both the CPU tab, and the Dock "Show CPU Usage" only CPU/Bar shows up. On my previous Mini (a 2.66 Core 2 Duo) 2 CPUs/Bars are present. This seems very strange to me that a Quad core shows up as 1, but am I wrong in my assumption? It seems to get VERY taxed vs. my old system, and given the fact that they have the same amount of RAM this seems very wrong to me.
Can the Mac mini with 4GB of RAM run VMFusion 2.02 with Windows XP Home properly without any problems? Is 2.0GHz fast enough, or even 2.26GHz fast enough for VMFusion? Does the Mac mini have enough horse power to run Windows XP?
I have been looking for a really good 22-24" monitor for my Mac Mini.
I was looking at the Apple 27" Display and although it is really nice I just can not justify $999 for a 27" Display when I can get almost 3 of another brand.
I was looking at either going with another 22" LCD or maybe a good LED?
The only gripe so far with my 2011 Mac Mini is the power button on the BACK of the computer. Really? Everything else I can turn on while sitting in my chair, but I have to get up and reach around the mini to turn it on. I guess I'll have to get an under desk mount and put it close to the front of the desk so I can reach it.
Was Apple worried LaCie was going to sue them over design issues if they had a single power button on the front?
Info: Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.2), 8GB RAM, 750 GB HDD, i7
I'm thinking of migrating over finally to a Mac via Mac Mini 2.66Ghz/500Gb driveWould it be a good idea to also purcahse a Time Capsule at the same time. Also would the Time Capsule replace my Linksys wireless router ?
when I connect my macbook unibody with dvi to my dell monitor the quality of the screen is not as "good" as when I connect my windows pc to it. Is this only a problem on macbook, or is the mac mini the same?
It seems that everytime I visit a tech site like anandtech and stumble on CPU articles or discussions, they talk about overclocking. On the latest i3 CPU, the author overclocked the 2.93GHz to a stable 4GHz wihtout even needing additional cooling. Why is overclocking such a big deal on the PC side, but not on the Mac side even though we're using the same family of chips?
I have a strange problem with my SyncServer, every time I use any application that has anything to do with syncing information such as iSync or even iTunes with my iPhone or even mobileme sync, the syncserver crashes and nothing gets synced.
I haven't been able to sync anything for a while because of that problem and I do not know what to do.
Most of my educational DVD are in ISO format. As Handbrake sees it, each lecture on the disk is one title, and it converts one title to a destinationfile at a time.
How do I convert the entire disk (iso file) to one file in Handbrake?chris650
I am in market to upgrade RAM from 4GB to 16 GB on my refurb iMac which i bought early this year , not too good with finding correct ram and a good price..
I've just done a video on my Canon stills camera and it imported into iPhoto. But the video doesn't then appear to sync with my iPad. So I found the file in Finder and dragged it into iTunes. Problem there is that it isn't really a Movie or a TV show - I don't want a short clip of my cat in amongst feature films.
I was just wondering what other iPhoto users are doing when importing some random shots into iPhoto, that doesn't belong to any particular event? Having all those unnamed events in the Events folder is cluttering it all up.
I went through some fairly difficult procedures to rid my computer of Flashback and quickly got in over my head. So I called tech support, and they told me, if I have OS X 10.7 and do software updates regularly, that I have nothing to worry about. They said Safari is not compromised, and there's no reason not to enable Java. They said software updates is more important than any third party anti-virus or anti-malware software that I could run. I would like to know what some of you in the forum think about these issues.
