Any new mini owners who do design work??

[xheathen]

Hi all! Ive quite honestly been struggling with this decision so I'm hoping to find someone out there who would be using the mini for what I'd plan on using it for.

Basically I do design work. This includes mainly cs5. I work on web files that at most are 50mb in conjunction with dev software, iTunes, browsers etc. I also do print design and digital painting and I'm pretty much working on ps and illustrator on files maybe 200 to 500mb.

The gaming I do is pretty light. Portal 2, starcraft 2 and half-life are pretty much it.

I'm planning on running win7 on it but probably through bootcamp and not parallels (not totally sold either way).

So baiscially i think it's down to 3 options. If I'm actually going with the mini, it seems like the biggest bang for the buck is to stick to the stock 799 and do something with the hdd.

Option 1 is to get the stock 799 mini and slap either a momentus XT or Scorpio 7200 drive in it.

Option 2 is the same model but buy the 2010 mini additional sata cable and put a SSD boot drive in it to speed up most basic tasks.

Option 3 is the stock 21.5 iMac. I think in a debate between the mini server the iMac wins and I'll use my existing 24" monitor as the main screen. Obviously this is the most expensive option.

So Im hoping to see if someone happens to use theirs for exactly the same thing as I would who can tell me if the mini is a good choice, or if I need to just buck up and spend the dollars for the iMac.

Thanks so much in advance!

 

[slyseekr]

Basically I do design work. This includes mainly cs5. I work on web files that at most are 50mb in conjunction with dev software, iTunes, browsers etc. I also do print design and digital painting and I'm pretty much working on ps and illustrator on files maybe 200 to 500mb.

The Mac mini would have been ideal for your needs up until your print/digital painting work. I really feel documents that require this much filespace generally require more RAM than the mini (or even an iMac) allows, or a relatively large SSD to be able to handle the massive amount of paging/scratch space those monster files require.

I've worked with Illustrator CS5 files with vectors as large as 60"x60" @ 300dpi on my 2010 i7 MBP w/ 8GB, and would likely avoid doing that kind of work again, since it pretty much rendered the application useless over long periods of time (and also depleted ~100GB of hard drive space at times). I doubt the 2010 mini would do a much better job at handing the same task.