Mac Mini 2014 Maxed out for heavy (non video editing) workloads?

[SSD-GUY]

Hey all

I'm a Hackintosher finishing up Uni, and now will not have a lot of time to keep building Hacks. This christmas holiday period will be the last time I have a couple of weeks free, as I start working soon.

My current hack is an i5 2500K, 16GB RAM and GTX 760. My usage includes browsing Safari with around 12 tabs open, playing 12 year old games such as UT2004, some light photo editing in Lightroom, photoshop, indesign and maybe a touch of iMovie, premiere, FCPx, but this is like once in 6 months for a 5 minute video clip, among other thing such as spotify, microsoft office (writing essays, powerpoint), multiple pdfs etc etc.

My question therefore is, I've come across an amazing 2014 maxed out mac Mini with top end i7 and 16gb RAM and flash ssd for roughly half of the price of it brand new, will the Mac Mini be able to handle my workload? I'm also connected to two 1080p displays, I understand the Mac Mini can't drive 4K displays, so I may upgrade to the U2515H (my dad is using it, looks quite nice), can it therefore run two 1440p displays without lagging issues?

Thanks all

 

[keysofanxiety]

Wait a few days. See what happens with the Mac refresh. The Mac Mini is bitterly long in the tooth. It's been ages since they updated it.

 

[twalk]

The new Mini will allow you to run Sierra, but otherwise it's not that great compared to what you've already got. Passmark for i5-2500K = 6438. Passmark for i7-4578U = 4679 (the max cpu for the 2014 Mini). The current i7 is about 73% as fast.

That said, it's not that massive of a difference or anything. Nothing that's going to cause you issues with that workload. It really just depends on if you want a new Mini or not

 

[SSD-GUY]

The Mini has actually gone so I'll be waiting around for the refresh. If not, it's either upgrading my rig to maybe a 3770K and an SSD to hold me down, and then maybe next year getting an iMac or something if the Mini still isn't updated.

I just ran a Luxmark GPU test and my old cheap GTX 760 is more than 5x faster than the top end mini, so it really is a step backwards.

Thanks all