Dear Micky Do, So you advise buying a mac pro. Minimum $2999 for a quad core. Oh, wait! Ebay has quad core mac minis for about $1000. Do the math. And you think the mac pro will not overheat?
Dear Frank4, Thanks for the advice.
It will take a massive job for a Mac Pro to overheat. I've done massive 4K video editing (footage from an Arri 4K camera), and the Mac Pro's fans barely make a whisper. This is because of the thermal design. A Mac Mini doing the same job will have its fans go noisy within half a minute, but a Mac Pro (especially the cylindrical one) would take over an hour or more before the fans go noisy.
You pay what you get for. Keep in mind that the nMP has way better hardware than the Mini in every way (Xeon CPUs, ECC RAM - these are pricey, PCIe SSDs as standard - these custom-built SSDs don't come cheap either, and custom dual AMD FirePro GPUs - these are pretty cheap if you compare them to the market value. Apple somehow managed to get a great deal on these GPUs from AMD to be used in the nMP).
A Mac Mini isn't designed for heavy, sustained work. It is only intended to be used as an entry-level Mac or a HTPC, or some tasks like light-medium 1080p editing.
But if you want, just go ahead and let the Mac Mini heat up as it is, because the fans will spin up to the max to cool it down. If it truly overheats, the Mac will automatically shut down. Some people have been doing this for years on MBPs and they're still running strong.