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Ventura on 2012 Mini. How is the Speed?

FFabian

FFabian

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 26, 2010
157
185
Bochum, Germany
I recently upgraded my dual core 2012 Mini to 8GB RAM and SSD. It runs Catalina, the last supported MacOS version. I’m thinking about installing Ventura via Open Core for security issues. How is the speed compared to Catalina. Is Ventura faster or will it make my Mini run more sluggish? Any opinions/experiences on this with switching from Catalina to Ventura?
 
My (2012 i5 8GB/256 SSD) experience was terrible like slow and laggy so I dropped back down to Monterey.
 
I have recently upgraded to Ventura on my 2012 mini.
I don't notice any significant slowdown, the system does not feel particularly sluggish.
If you want the best results, I would suggest continuing with RAM upgrade to 16GB.
One reason for that: the HD 4000 video shares memory with your main memory.
1.5GB of VRAM (result of more than 8GB RAM installed) can help, even though it is shared memory.
 
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I posted about this a few weeks ago. When initially installed on my 2012 i5 16GB 256 SSD it wasn’t bad but would gradually slow right down.
When the latest MacOS update came out several weeks ago suddenly the computer had no issues with speed. I’m not a power user at all so the only thing I’ve noticed is Google Maps doesn’t work on Safari. Otherwise I’m happy with the patch.
 
mr.steevo said:
I posted about this a few weeks ago. When initially installed on my 2012 i5 16GB 256 SSD it wasn’t bad but would gradually slow right down.
When the latest MacOS update came out several weeks ago suddenly the computer had no issues with speed. I’m not a power user at all so the only thing I’ve noticed is Google Maps doesn’t work on Safari. Otherwise I’m happy with the patch.
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My (2012 i5 16GB/1TB SSD) with Ventura, Google Maps work fine with Safari.
 
It's my understanding that Ventura is not quite ready for normal use via OCLP. Mr. Macintosh recommends sticking with Big Sur or Monterey until Ventura has better support. Big Sur 11.7.5 is coming out any day now. Big Sur runs really great on my 2012 Mac Mini (i7 quad-core). I tried Monterey and Ventura and they all ran just as well, so you can't really go wrong either way. I feel like they all run faster than Catalina. It's also worth noting that Big Sur via OCLP still has the 2012 Mac Mini drivers installed within the OS, so you don't need to install any root patches. I think I'm going to stick with Big Sur until it receives its final security update around October, then I will move to Monterey.
 
Been using Ventura on mine via OCLP for a few months now. Works great! For day-to-day tasks (email, browsing, messaging, Teams calls, spreadsheets, etc) it doesn't feel much less responsive than my Mac Pro on Monterey and I think if I had a better SSD than the A400 it would feel much snappier.
 
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Monterey is excellent on the 2012 Mini with OCLP. I don't think there's any worth for me to try upgrading further. We use this 2012 Mini as a media player so it's gotten a new lease of life but Ventura doesn't add any utility for it.
 
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Corefile said:
Monterey is excellent on the 2012 Mini with OCLP. I don't think there's any worth for me to try upgrading further. We use this 2012 Mini as a media player so it's gotten a new lease of life but Ventura doesn't add any utility for it.
Click to expand...
When I was messing around with OCLP a month ago, I swear it seemed like Monterey ran a little better than Big Sur. Ventura ran pretty nice too. Did you update to 12.6.4?
 
Insidious said:
When I was messing around with OCLP a month ago, I swear it seemed like Monterey ran a little better than Big Sur. Ventura ran pretty nice too. Did you update to 12.6.4?
Click to expand...
I think I updated to 12.6.1 then disabled further updates as I don't care about security on this thing. It serves its purpose for media content (basically Finder and VLC app) and can use Firefox for youtube videos.
 
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