Thinking About A Mac Mini

[RagePie]

I have owned many Macs in the past and I am considering a return to the Macintosh world with the purchase of a base 2009 Mac Mini. Currently, I own a Dell Dimension e520 running Vista with the following specs:

1.86ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 with 800mhz FSB
4GB of 667mhz DDR2 RAM
160GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
ATI Radeon HD 3450 with 512MB of VRAM

What I am curious about is how the base Mini, assuming it was upgraded to 4GB of RAM, would compare to my current setup in terms of performance. I am not really looking for a performance increase, since the main point of this would be to move to Mac OS X, but at the same time I am not looking to go backwards either.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tomorrow]

I think if you upgrade the RAM you will see a slight performance increase. Sounds like a decent purchase to me.

 

[panzer06]

I have owned many Macs in the past and I am considering a return to the Macintosh world with the purchase of a base 2009 Mac Mini. Currently, I own a Dell Dimension e520 running Vista with the following specs:

1.86ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 with 800mhz FSB
4GB of 667mhz DDR2 RAM
160GB 7200rpm SATA HDD
ATI Radeon HD 3450 with 512MB of VRAM

What I am curious about is how the base Mini, assuming it was upgraded to 4GB of RAM, would compare to my current setup in terms of performance. I am not really looking for a performance increase, since the main point of this would be to move to Mac OS X, but at the same time I am not looking to go backwards either.

Thanks in advance.

The mini would be comparable to your setup. The new nvidia 8400m does a decent job in OS X and Windows. I've even played a few games with it and if I keep the settings around med (sometimes low) works well under bootcamp.

I bought the base and upgraded the RAM to 4GB and the HD to 500GB

Cheers,

 

[rgarjr]

The mini's, although small pack a mighty punch performance wise.

 

[alphaod]

Small footprint, a good bit of power; don't get the upgrade version; just buy your own HDD and RAM upgrades.

It'll be faster than your current machine.

 

[RagePie]

Thanks!

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Thanks!

Just get the entry level model. Get 4GB of RAM from a decent third party and get a 7200rpm 2.5" drive - the biggest and fastest you can get is a 7200rpm 500gb drive. I know Seagate do them but I think Western Digital might too. It'll definitely be a little faster across the board. The CPU is slightly faster, the RAM is a good chunk faster, if you were running Vista 32bit then you only had 3GB of RAM accessible whereas now you'll have 4GB in OS X. The graphics cards are pretty much equal although the 9400m seems to be a smidgeon faster.

 

[veterator]

Get the base Mini. Upgrade the ram and hard drive yourself, Apple charges way too much to do it. I just bought my parents a Mini with the base ram and hard drive. Then found 4 GB ram and 500 GB drive on line for about what the drive upgrade to 360 GB cost through Apple. Now they also have an external drive for backups or whatever.

I use a similar mini to run my entertainment system. They are small, yet a full power computer.

 

[J&JPolangin]

I wanted to do the same thing but our base PX only carries the upgraded model and $789 is crazy for the "apple" upgrades price compared to a DIY mod...