Mac Mini mid 2011 vs mini 2012 (yes, another thread sorry)

[troy14]

Hey everyone.

I know this subject has been beaten to death, but I am just wondering something.

I'm deciding between picking up the older midlevel mini 2011 with the dedicated AMD card with 256mb of DDR5 memory, and the new base 2012 with intel HD 4000. Both will be upgraded to either 8gb or 16gb of memory.

I have read tons of things saying they are both pretty much equal, but if the intel uses shared ram - would putting in 16gb (so it always has enough/max amount of shared ram possible) put it at an advantage over the AMD with only 256mb?

I can't really find any more or recent benchmarks comparing these two minis.

[costabunny]

all I can add is my 2012 (with 16GB) thus has 768MB Available for video mem. This should give it the advantage in texture handling etc.

I dont play many games but can happily play MW3, World of Tanks and Skyrim at 1600x900 with nice enough looking graphics and smooth framerates.

Don't know how the AMD would handle those, but for me the USB3 and newer cpu tech was more important (the i7 2.3 screams along quicker than my old octamonster mac pro).

[troy14]

Originally Posted by costabunny

all I can add is my 2012 (with 16GB) thus has 768MB Available for video mem. This should give it the advantage in texture handling etc.

I dont play many games but can happily play MW3, World of Tanks and Skyrim at 1600x900 with nice enough looking graphics and smooth framerates.

Don't know how the AMD would handle those, but for me the USB3 and newer cpu tech was more important (the i7 2.3 screams along quicker than my old octamonster mac pro).

Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't be getting the quad core / i7 so it would probably be a little worse performance than what you're describing. USB3 I don't care or need, just trying to figure out which to buy.. such hard decisions

[costabunny]

Originally Posted by troy14

Thanks for the reply. I wouldn't be getting the quad core / i7 so it would probably be a little worse performance than what you're describing. USB3 I don't care or need, just trying to figure out which to buy.. such hard decisions

I guess it really depends on your target use of the system.