1 reply to this topic

[Steven Gordon]

I'd like to replace my three-year-old MacBook Pro (13", 2.26 GHz core2-duo processor) with a quad-core i7 Mac mini with 16 GB of RAM.

 

The benchmarks for the CPU look plenty powerful for what I do. But I hesitate about the GPU, an Intel 4000HD chip.

 

Like many of you, I work quite a lot in Adobe Illustrator where the quad-core processor and RAM will handle large files nicely. Sometimes I get into Photoshop, creating multi-layered terrain images where many of the layers contain gradients.

 

Anyone have experience mapping with the mini?

[Dennis McClendon]

I'm using a probably 2010 Mini running Snow Leopard.  It's perfectly fine for most programs, even a little bit of work I've done in ArcGIS via Parallels.  It's perfectly speedy with FreeHand, even for large files.

 

I've only recently begun trying to work in Illustrator, and one thing I notice is how slow nudging objects with the arrow keys is in large files.  It lags far behind, so I often overshoot where I want something to go.  I don't know if that's endemic to Illustrator or means I need a more powerful machine.