Mac desktops forum: Old iMac v new Mac mini

Yes, I would need an optical drive and would probably need to purchase a keyboard and mouse as they will go with the old G5 tower I'll be selling.

That's going to up the overall cost of the mini quite a bit.

For sheer processing power, especially rendering video files, is there a marked difference either way ? I'm also a little concerned about graphics on the mini.

Related note: I'm actually pretty annoyed at having to sell the old tower, it's still a great machine but PowerPC is effectively redundant now.

Probably, but I'd say the performance difference would probably be closer to noticeable rather than marked. The Mini is clocked slower, but has a more efficient CPU, and IIRC each core on the i5 is hyperthreaded which will also give it a boost.

But then again, the Mini is pretty cramped inside, and the heat generated from running the CPU like that would be ill advised. The iMac isn't a whole lot better, but there's at least a bigger volume of space for heat to spread out, plus three fans to push air out as opposed to just one on the Mini. Neither system is well suited to any kind of intense and prolonged stress like video rendering because they simply were not designed for that sort of thing. That really is the Mac Pro's domain, where the inside of the case is segmented off into three distinct thermal zones. I'm guessing the Mac Pro is out of your price range, and Apple doesn't have anything like a low to mid-range tower unit, so the iMac is probably the least bad option for Final Cut Pro. You'll do less damage to an iMac with that program than a Mini to be sure, but you'll still slowly damage either one.

The Mac Mini is the better choice.

Not just for the chip, but for the connections that can be made off of it. It's a state of the art machine that can access the latest RAM, Thunderbolt displays and hard drives, Firewire 800 connections and Gigabit Ethernet. The relative speed advantages, ability to stuff in more RAM -- you'll more than get by with 64-bit OSX Lion and 8GB of RAM that you buy somewhere else cheaper than directly from Apple.

Hands down, you'll get more usable life out of a new Mac Mini than you will from an old iMac.

Thanks for that.

The only issue I'm having now is about the possible heat issue if grinding through video renders as mentioned above. I don't a lot of video work, it's just fun stuff for me so might not be a problem.

Aside from the Thunderbolt and the Core i5 CPU, an Early 09 iMac is going to have pretty much the same array of connections. Even more, in that it will probably have a FW400 port instead of just FW800. And while you'd likely have to pay the $30 for it, there's no reason the iMac couldn't run Lion.

Gigabit ethernet has been a staple on all Macs since around the switch to Intel CPUs, and the iMacs have had FW800 connections for quite some time now as well. Video rendering is far more CPU intensive than RAM intensive, so even if the RAM were slightly better in a Mini it wouldn't do much in the way of speeding up the rendering process.

So most of your proposed benefits aren't unique to the Mini or aren't that beneficial. I will definitely grant that a Core i5 is a better CPU than a Core 2 Duo, but neither system is designed for even light video editing work. Any time the CPUs start getting up around full utilization for more than a few seconds, you're starting to overwhelm the cooling systems. The iMac has three fans, and each one of them is about 2.5-3X the size of the single fan in the Mini. The heatsink for the CPU on the iMac is also significantly bigger on the iMac, which gives the fan more time to push the heat out. We're really talking degrees of damage here, since virtually any rendering project is going to cause a lot of excess heat to build up in the unit. Heat neither unit was designed to handle. The iMac's size works in its favor, even if only just.

If it weren't for the whole licensing thing, I'd say build a hackintosh. Maybe a better solution would be to look for a program that runs on Windows and can import FCP projects. Then you have a much broader array of system designs you can choose from which would be far better suited to what the OP wants to do.