As the title suggests, my HTPC hooked up to my TV is a 2010 Mac Mini - 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 320M 256MB.
It mainly runs Plex which works fine, with no slowdown on video although sometimes this can happen if it starts doing things in the background. I'm generally happy with that but in an ideal world I'd like a better one to address the following problems:
Currently if I want to stream a video to it via AirPlay I have to load up Rowmote or screen sharing and quit Plex, which is a pain. It doesn't seem to have enough oomph (don't know if CPU or GPU) to do both simultaneously.
What sort of upgrade would I need? I'd love to be able to play games on it but that's not a major requirement. I'm looking at the 2012 2.5GHz Core i5 model, but if feels odd upgrading just for what looks like a smallish CPU upgrade (and GPU?). I could sell my old one of course but I'd still need to put a couple hundred pounds in so it would need to be a decent upgrade.
This is probably window shopping, but would do you folks reckon would be a good upgrade?
P.S. What about the quad-core version? Quite a lot more expensive and just seems like overkill for my needs...
It mainly runs Plex which works fine, with no slowdown on video although sometimes this can happen if it starts doing things in the background. I'm generally happy with that but in an ideal world I'd like a better one to address the following problems:
- Very slow running other day to day apps (Chrome takes forever to load)
- Cannot stream AirPlay videos to it smoothly (using AirServer) while Plex is running
- Cannot smoothly run Plex on one user account and log in to a second using the multiple account logon feature of screen sharing
Currently if I want to stream a video to it via AirPlay I have to load up Rowmote or screen sharing and quit Plex, which is a pain. It doesn't seem to have enough oomph (don't know if CPU or GPU) to do both simultaneously.
What sort of upgrade would I need? I'd love to be able to play games on it but that's not a major requirement. I'm looking at the 2012 2.5GHz Core i5 model, but if feels odd upgrading just for what looks like a smallish CPU upgrade (and GPU?). I could sell my old one of course but I'd still need to put a couple hundred pounds in so it would need to be a decent upgrade.
This is probably window shopping, but would do you folks reckon would be a good upgrade?
P.S. What about the quad-core version? Quite a lot more expensive and just seems like overkill for my needs...