I kinda see what you guys are saying…………

[ZxZDeViLZxZ]

4gb ddr3 and a ssd 6gb is perfectly fine for most ill admit though nothing I sport has less then 8 so was more so just pointing out 4 + 6gb ssd great

[mostapha]

I fill up 4GB of RAM all the time. Since putting 16GB in my laptop, I apparently haven't touched my swap/page files. Like…ever. Firefox shows the most noticeable improvement……it's not uncommon for it to have a 3GB footprint by itself.

I won't be going back to less ram than whatever I can stuff in a computer or HDDs any time soon. They both make too big of a difference in my computers getting out of my way.

Also, I retract my statement about never buying non-Laptop Apples. Scaling the computers back to awesome but not absolute overkill just for the sake of overkill, the only real difference between upgrading the mid-level Mac Mini (with aftermarket parts, not from Apple) and building a hackintosh from scratch is that the Hackintosh has 32GB of RAM instead of 16 and can run 3 monitors instead of 2, plus to install the second SSD in the Mac Mini, you have to take it completely apart……as in, you have to remove everything from the case including the logic board and the power supply.

I never planned on running 3 displays. I could see getting a second screen and wanting to use it (which the Mini can do), but if I got a 3rd, I'd probably just plug it into an Apple TV.

Expanding it (more video cards, PCIe SSDs, etc.) is also a lot cheaper, but you can do that to the Mini too……OWC released a $350 PCIe Thunderbolt chassis that's apparently pretty decent. Certainly worth a try compared to the $1000 ones from the likes of Sonnet. So, if I wanted to spend like $700 on it, I could boot off an SSD that gives like 800 MB/s uncompressed, which Thunderbolt can totally support.

So……for what I actually do, the Mini is perfectly viable. And it'd actually work. And it would have something resembling a warranty. And I could spend the extra money on something like an Apogee Quartet instead of a computer that was so ridiculous overkill that I'd feel bad not doing anything real on it.

The biggest drawback is that the videocard I'd get with the Hackintosh would support OpenCL……which means I could play with that. But I have no idea what I'd actually write that would need that power at this point.

Ugh. Complicated.