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Is there a Mac for me?
- Thread starter Sagnet
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Performance is fine. It is a 24/7 Elgato TV/iTunes Server. Rip CD's on it, surf the Internet and is perfectly fine.
Whilst I dare say it isn't as fast as a Quad 2012 model then it is fast enough.
What are you actually using the computer for?
Your irrelevant opinion….
OX S is what makes a Mac. It is why the OP and most others here prefer Mac.
To the OP - get a shiny new Mac Mini if that's what your heart desires, but methinks your needs would be well satisfied with an SSD and 8 GB of RAM upgrade in what you have. That has been the experience of many.
Sure, the 2009's specs and test scores may be lower than the latest models, but for most day to day use they offer little advantage beyond bragging rights.
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I would like it to have at least the same specs as the MacBook Pro mentioned in my opening post.
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Do you know where I can find a good guide on how to do this myself?
Most of the time it's just regular Internet surfing. I also do some light photo editing, and Pixelmator is close to impossible to use. It hangs and crashes a lot. More RAM might help. On some rare occasions I will edit a video or two in iMovie.
If I were to buy a new computer, I would want it to be powerful enough to play some first person shooter games on it. And it should have specs that were solid enough that I wouldn't have to worry about upgrading again for the next 5 years or so.
Whenever I invest in new hardware, I prefer that it lasts for a while. I might be happy for another year with my current Mac Mini, if I give it the RAM and SSD treatment. I'm going to check some guides, and the prices.
Case closed! You should sell your mini on Ebay it will still bring in a nice cash deposit for your next computer. Had you lived in Sweden I'd even given you an offer for it.
I would say that you should find that the upgrade should last you at least 1 more year, possibly 2. This should allow to get through to the next mini refresh.
One of the idea's behind the dropping of the Quad is that the design was made for Broadwell with the lower TDP, but Intel delays in launching the chip meant that had to modify for Haswell.
The upgrade should allow to wait through for the actual Broadwell mini, possibly even Skylake mini's which hopefully for the more power hungry mini users will re-introduce the Quad into the mini.
There are enough guides out there for upgrading the 2009 mini, just be patient and take your time doing so, make sure get the tools suggested in the guides.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Model+A1283+Hard+Drive+Replacement/1063
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Model+A1283+RAM+Replacement/1058
Are what I followed.
On the other hand if you want something with the same specs as the notebook using then suggest you look at buying an mbpro.
I'm sure they meant Mac OS X is not worth it if you're thinking of building a Hackintosh.
They can't be easily updated and these days it's simply not worth building some flaky K-series i7 PC and trying to run Mac OS X on it when it's cheaper to pick up any used quad 4,1 Mac Pro on eBay, update it to the 5,1 firmware and add a 3.46Ghz Hex-core. That's something I'm considering myself because the used prices on the 2012 quad i7 Mac Mini are within the price range of a used 4,1 Mac Pro (Privately at least. There's a few companies on eBay pre-assembling used Mac Pros for a mark up and making bold claims about their technical prowess).
Apple really dropped the ball with the 2014 model, they literally don't sell a Mac I want anymore apart from the 15" Retina Macbook Pro but that's out of my price range.
I'm looking for a desktop, not a laptop. And as far as I can tell there is no Mac Mini that can match the specs of said MacBook Pro.
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How much would you have been willing to pay for it, in SEK or EUR?
I had the same dilemma a while back, and whilst I wouldn't say it was exactly easy, in the end I ended up building myself a nice Hackintosh.
Whilst I wouldn't say it was quite as easy as it had been made out to be, it was on the whole straightforward and I could quite easily do it again now if I needed to.
My specs:
Gigabyte GA-Z97N-WIFI motherboard
Intel Core i7-4790k @ 4.0Ghz (4.4Ghz Turbo Boost)
16GB DDR3 RAM @ 2133Mhz
1TB Samsung 840 Evo SSD
4TB Western Digital HDD
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 with 2GB VRAM
As you can tell, my graphics card is the weak point here, although it's not something I feel particularly inclined to upgrade.
It's certainly worth a shot if you're technically inclined, but it's certainly quite time consuming to get up and running. Once it's running though it'll generally behave so long as your components are compatible.
Whilst I wouldn't say it was quite as easy as it had been made out to be, it was on the whole straightforward and I could quite easily do it again now if I needed to.
My specs:
Gigabyte GA-Z97N-WIFI motherboard
Intel Core i7-4790k @ 4.0Ghz (4.4Ghz Turbo Boost)
16GB DDR3 RAM @ 2133Mhz
1TB Samsung 840 Evo SSD
4TB Western Digital HDD
Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 with 2GB VRAM
As you can tell, my graphics card is the weak point here, although it's not something I feel particularly inclined to upgrade.
It's certainly worth a shot if you're technically inclined, but it's certainly quite time consuming to get up and running. Once it's running though it'll generally behave so long as your components are compatible.
That's the kind of hardware I would love to have in a desktop Mac. How stable would you say that this computer is, running OSX? What do you consider the main issues? I'm pretty techincal, and convinced that I could do it if I wanted to, provided I had a guide.
Now that it's running it's absolutely fine - I've had no issues other than a few hiccups when I upgraded it to Yosemite.
The hardest part was basically getting OS X to behave with my Devil's Canyon processor. When I was previously using Chameleon the only way I could get it to not kernel panic was to underclock my RAM to 1333Mhz and disable Turbo Boost. With Clover it works perfectly, however it required a DSDT file and a specific config which I found by consulting Google.
The only kexts I needed if memory serves correctly were:
FakeSMC
my network drivers
my graphics drivers
my audio drivers
With that said, if you google for recommended builds (ie the ones on TonyMacx86) you can pretty much just buy whatever components they suggest and it's more or less guaranteed to work without issues.
Apple doesn't have anything that can hold its own against a custom PC, but building your own isn't really necessary. Respected companies, like Asus, now offer affordable compact PCs that are far more powerful, far more innovative than anything Apple has done.
You mentioned $1200-$1300 price range, something powerful enough to play first person shooter games, and not have to worry about upgrading for a long time. For $1179, the Asus ROG G20 has an i7-4790 CPU, 8GB of RAM, 1TB hybrid drive, and a real desktop GTX 760 GPU. That is some serious performance in a small nice looking case. What kind of Mini do you get for $1200? Slow dual-core notebook CPU, lame integrated graphics, non-upgradable memory...
Of course you could build your own PC. There are lots of excellent small form factor choices these days, and new components from NVIDIA and Intel run cooler than ever. Neither my i7-4790k or GTX 980 go above 60C while gaming, and that is in a small mini-ITX case using just two 18dB case fans.