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Hello Peeps,
I am considering buying a MacMini for myself , can you help me choose should I go for
1. Standard 2.5 GHZ i5 Dual Core with AMD Radeon HD 6630M
2. Standard 2.7 GHZ i7 Dual Core with AMD RAdeon HD 6630M
3. Server 2.0 Quad Core with Intel HD Graphics 3000 ( I don't care about dual hdd as I have a synology 8tb NAS attached for all my media)
I intend to play Blue Ray rips of 10GB on this , install sickbeard sabnzbd combination for me.
1.does graphic acceleration make a difference
2.does quad core vs dual core make a difference
The only thing I care is I don't want to have any stuttering or video lag when watching movies.
Thank You.
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I have the Standard 2.3 GHZ i5 Dual Core with Intel HD Graphics 3000 i got from the apple referb store, first thing i did was swap out the HDD for an SSD and upped the ram to 4gb,
plays everything i have thrown at it, 10gb 1080P MKVs (AC3 + DTS audio), BBC HD via XBMC - PVR + TVheadend,
with the ssd the system boots into XBMC from cold in about 15 seconds,
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jopie
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2012-07-15, 22:28
(This post was last modified: 2012-07-17, 15:49 by jopie.)
I have the 2012 2.5 Ghz i5 4Gb model and it also plays everything I can throw at it and that includes BR-rips, although I must say I have now switched to 720 Mkv BR-rips of between 2 and 4 Gb, since the 3Tb disc (USB 2) I use for storage filled up too quickly.
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I've got the 2.3GHz i5/Intel graphics Mini as well. It handles everything I throw at it. I'm watching some 7300kbps 1080p video right now, and XBMC is using about 15% of the CPU.
To your actual questions:
1. Graphics acceleration makes some difference, in general. For an exclusive media centre, it probably doesn't make enough difference to matter.
2. GHz is more useful than cores, unless your planning to do some massive rendering project in the background while you watch a movie.
Between your three choices I'd say this above all else: don't get the server. Between the i5 and the i7, there's no reason on earth to get the i5, except to save $100. But if you were looking at the even more expensive server, I guess that's not really an issue.
A RAM upgrade is handy, too. You can get 8GB from Apple (or elsewhere, cheaper, after the fact), but the Mini also suports 16 GB. Apple doesn't offer it, but I know that TigerDirect and NewEgg sell kits that will work in the latest Mini (DDR3, PC3-10600, 1333MHz SO-DIMM). NewEgg sells 16GB kits for the price of Apple's bump from 4 to 8, and you'd still have the 4 leftover to sell on.
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It stops the OS from constantly having to swap data out to the hard drive, which slows things down. This is a fairly significant problem on my baseline Mini, since it only came with 2GB of RAM. Even 4GB, with Lion, seems to overfill fairly easily. With the 8GB I put in, I can leave Chrome, uTorrent, iTunes, Google Drive and XBMC running all the time without stuff swapping out to the hard drive.
And it's also dead easy to replace the RAM in a Mini. Just turn the bottom plate a little bit, pop it off, and the RAM is right there.
