Need help deciding on Mac Mini vs my old Mac Pro

[Intarweb]

I have the very first generation MacPro with 12gigs of ram. Nothing is upgraded outside of four HDDs inside. Here's the question, how much of a performance boost will the Mac mini (2.5, i5) give me over my MacPro if any? Obviously there are HDD speed considerations as all of mine are currently 7200 and above.

 

[CausticPuppy]

If you're replacing a Mac Pro, you probably should go with the 2.6GHz BTO model (quad core).

 

[saulinpa]

Almost everything will feel faster and smoother even with a base i5 mini. Exception would be anything that really needs 12GB of RAM. Need to know what you use your Pro for.

The first gen Pro does have 4 real cores running at 2, 2.6, or 3GHz which could be faster for raw computation speed. However its ram is less than half the speed of the new mini. The i5's Hyperthreading makes its two cores appear as four. Turboboost to 3.1 GHz will help as well.

The Pro would also have an older graphics card that could not keep up with the mini.

I agree that you should go to the i7 if you have the money. The 4 cores appearing as 8 will help for most modern applications.

For disk issues: If you need the space or speed then get an external Thunderbolt drive or SSD. Other "cheap" option would be to install two 1TB drives internal as RAID 0 to get speed and capacity.