Mac Mini i5 and CS6

So I'm not the typical user of machines when it comes to computers. I abuse computers, put them through their paces and once it seems like that's all that I could do to a machine I cram in more storage, beef it up and make it run that much faster and squeeze every last bit of processing power out of it. That being said I've long been in favor of machines that could do what I needed and allow me to upgrade them beyond belief.

The Beast
About 4 years ago I was in the market for a new machine and had my eye on the multi-core Mac workstations that were on the market (8-core and 12-core). We were planning to take a trip to Alaska and it came down to a choice of trip or machine. Alaska was awesome, but that $10k that I needed to get the latest and greatest beefed up Mac had come and gone. I started to look at other options I may have, so I purchased an AMD server motherboard and added a couple of 6-core processors. Then I upgraded the memory to 64gb. Added a raid controller and striped a couple of SSDs, copied my pagefile and temp files to it and boom... super fast. I've heard stories of "nobody will ever use 64gb of memory," but those people don't use Premiere, After Effects, Lightwave, Modo, and have open a 1.5gb Photoshop document all at the same time.

So I've been using the AMD machine for a while. Then I started getting errors, blue screens, and lost files. It's running Windows Vista x64 Business which seems like a bad idea, but it's been stripped to the core and only has things necessary to it's required tasks. I run backups on the machine daily (nightly) and have been getting tired of doing my own IT.

Sleeping Beauty
So I have another machine, Mac Mini 2.3GHz i5 (dual core) circa 2011 with 16gb of RAM, that I've been using for e-mails and for running some other apps that don't necessarily need to be on my machine workhorse (accounting, hacking research apps, etc). I got the idea to try and use it as a fail-over about a week ago... I had a big render project and my workstation was tied up. So I downloaded the Adobe CS6 apps from the Creative Cloud and moved my Wacom tablet over. The more I used the little Mac Mini the more I loved it. I couldn't remember why I had left Apple a while back, but I was smitten.

As days turned into nights I began to extremely adore my little Mac, almost completely forgetting about the big workstation. Then I started to bog down the little machine. I accidentally left Parallels open one day when I opened Photoshop to work on a large file. This cost me about 20 minutes of delay before I finally realized what had happened. Also I had another file I was working on in Illustrator with its 18 artboards and about 90 blends in it. From a distance zoomed out, the little Mac handled the file okay. Then I zoomed into one of the artboards and basically brought the machine to its knees. I had to start working in wireframe mode just to be able to zoom out enough to tell where I was. (It only has the integrated Intel 3000 card.)

I expanded the little machine, added external storage, a hub, tore it apart and added an SSD so I could use it as a Photoshop swap file. The more I worked on the machine, the more I noticed its limitations. It's been upgraded to the max. Also I've been using multiple Windows machines for a while. I use mapped drives to my server so I can connect to the files without issue (same drive letters on multiple machines). On the Mac this wasn't an option, so every file that had 40 or 50 links in InDesign had to be relinked, file by file... a painstaking task that sometimes resulted in me realizing that I had opened the wrong file (waste of time). There were learning curves to my new process.

I had added a mini-display port monitor to the machine some time ago to expand the machine to run multiple screens and watched the system temperature closely because I was concerned about ventilation. This wasn't an issue until I started taxing the machine. Tonight I come in and the machine's CPU temperature sensor indicated 94º C while the machine was idle. It had Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, MySQL Workbench, Parallels, Firefox, Thunderbird, Filezilla, Word, and Excel open and it was basically doing nothing. By comparison, my workstation with the 12 cores, full load hits around 50º C (when I'm rendering on all 12 cores) and it being idle with the same apps open (VMware instead of Parallels) is around 29º C. I was a little freaked out. I went online and read about the phenomenon fearing the worst. In actuality when I upgraded the machine by adding the SSD, I inadvertently failed to reconnect the cooling fan (whoops). It's now hanging out at a balmy 50ºC.

Mac Mini a good option?
As I've been looking at replacements for my situation because I'm still not a huge fan of doing my own IT anymore (especially on deadline), I will leave you with this advice. If someone asks "Can you run Adobe Photoshop CS6 on a Mac Mini" the answer is "Yes." Pretty decently on the i5 model, probably even better on the i7. If someone said to me "I'm thinking about buying the Mac Mini to use as a workstation, what do you think?" I would ask what it was going to be used for. If it's going to be doing video, 3d editing, or anything that might require any bit of graphics it's definitely not recommended, although there are people out there who will attest to the contrary. If it is to be doing anything in Photoshop that requires any bit of horsepower then definitely not. If it's going to be showing complex renderings in Illustrator then definitely not. If it's going to be used for Web, then sure, it's a great platform.

Calm before the storm
While I did not have any warnings from my own Mac Mini about its insanely high temperature, nor did it shut down, it's definitely plagued by the same problems as the Mac Book Air. Poor ventilation by design and a lack of scalability. This means at some point the machine will have baked all of its internal components and have a shortened life-cycle. While the $1200 Mac Mini i7 might look like it's a decent deal, by the time it has been upgraded to hold enough RAM to be useful and storage to make it viable for a workstation, it's 2/3rds of the way price-wise to an iMac 27" which is a real workstation (albeit all-in-one). The Mac Mini shares the same laptop processors as the Mac Books, whereas the iMac has a full blown desktop processor. It's still going to have the same issues as the other Macs with heating, ventilation, and the ability for Apple to kill it in a single OS Update, but it's far better suited for doing things like opening Photoshop.

What other options do are out there?
Until then you can take the road less traveled and get a decent multicore Windows machine and do your own IT (stay away from Windows 8 for now). If you're going to try and make a Hackintosh machine remember that it will need an Intel processor (similar to the Macs). My AMD workstation will not run MacOS at all and Virtual Machines do not allow for virtualized high-end video cards, so no running Lightwave, Photoshop, or Firefox with 3d Acceleration in Windows from under Ubuntu or Debian. Outside of the IT aspect there is very little difference between running a Mac and running a Windows workstation using the Adobe Creative Suite.

Good Luck,
-Chris