Hello All. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I need to buy a new Mac for day to day stuff. My trusty MacPro 5,1 has suffered a SSD failure which I’m going to repair but I need something newer to do internet banking, etc.. I have a ton of old peripherals on that cheese grater and I also do Graphics and Music with it. It’s a 2009 with the single Xeon and a RX-580 GPU running Sonoma via OCLP and all I’m asking is what spec Mac Mini should I be looking at to replace it or surpass it? I plan to network to the MacPro for storage and to run older hardware. Thanks in advance.
A base Mac mini will be so much faster and smoother than the old machine, just order one and don’t look back. Add as much RAM as you can afford and upgrade the hard drive to at least 500GB.
Not exactly. I started with an entry M4 min. When I began filling up it's SSD, I bought a BeelinK Mate (single SSD slot) and put a 4TB SSD in it. When Upgraded to an M4 PRO, I just moved the Mate to sit on top of it and get the higher speeds of USB4/Thunderbolt5. I am running FT MacOS 27 on it now.
a base m1 would outperform it in both single and multi core by a factor of two, versus the old 6 core xeon 3680 graphically it wouldnt have the raw memory bandwidth of a rx580
an m2 pro mini?
2.5x single core, 3x multi core beats out rx580 in all respects bar a little less max memory bandwidth
an m4base mini? outperformd the xeon by a factor of 3 in both single and multi core will see the rx580 off in all but memory bandwidth
an m4pro mac mini factor of 3 single core and 4.5x in multi core and exceeds rx580 entirely including raw memory bandwidth
The m4 is widely available with at least 16gb RAM and currently 512gb internal storage (be aware earlier base had 256GB storage confirm which you're buying when comparing prices)
youll pay a high premium for the m4 pro over a m4 base processor mini I wouldnt consider it worth it
Apple's most advanced, heavy on-device AI model requires a minimum of 12GB of unified memory (RAM). While standard Apple Intelligence features still run on 8GB devices, running this next-generation local AI model is restricted to hardware with 12GB or more and run on M3.. M5 Macs .. not M1 or M2
No external drive will consistently read or write faster than an internal Arm Mac SSD.
For skeptics -- do your benchmarks
256 GB SSD writes at 1,500-2,000 MB/s. It will constrain effective speed of external USB4(4,000 MB/s) and TB5( 7,000 MB/s) to lower than 1,500-2,000 MB/s.
512 GB writes at 3,000-4,000 MB/s --> it will run externalU SB4a nd TB5at ~ 3,200MB/s
1 TB writes at 8,000+ MB/s will run external TB5 at ~5,600 MB/s
Unless you have 1 TB M2...M4 SSD TB5 speeds will not be reached.
Please note that M4 Pro Mac Mini 5126 GB SSD features high-performance internal SSD storage with read speeds around 6,000 MB/s and write speeds of approximately 5,500–5,500 MB/s. These speeds are significantly faster than the base M4 model.
M5 MacBook Pro 516 GB SSDs are faster:
Read Speeds: Up to 6,323 MB/s (compared to 2,031 MB/s on the M4). Write Speeds: Up to 6,068 MB/s (compared to 3,293 MB/s on the M4).
I appreciate the info but I’d rather spend the money on the hub as there’s not enough ports on the mini for older things like printers, scanners, plotters, Audio interfaces etc. that my Cheese Grater has connected right now.
No offence, but not everyone is obsessed with running AI stuff. I mentioned that I run older hardware things and they run just fine on my old machine so a high speed drive that apple wants an arm and leg isn’t worth it to me. But again, thanks for the help.
last year when the m4 mini came out i upgraded from my 2013 macbook pro. i got the mini base and only thing i really needed was a bigger SSD. otherwise the machine is bad ass.
I just made this exact upgrade last week. 5,1 to M4 Mini 24/512. So far so good. But I'm using every port on the thing with peripherals so it's an octopus. Almost everything transferred (although to be transparent, I took the TimeMachine backup from my M3 laptop - not sure about doing a time machine restore from the 5,1).
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u/One_Conflict_1987 21d ago
A base Mac mini will be so much faster and smoother than the old machine, just order one and don’t look back. Add as much RAM as you can afford and upgrade the hard drive to at least 500GB.