CS3 on New Intel Mac Mini & Leopard?

[neil poulsen]

Is anyone running CS3 Photoshop on an Intel based Mac Mini with Leopard installed? My daughter is considering this system, and we'd like to get some input on how well it handles CS3 PS. It sells for such a reasonable price, it's worth considering.

How well does it run, and what file sizes are you processing? Also, how much RAM do you have installed, or do you think is needed?

Any other input would be appreciated.

[SamReeves]

With the mini, I would max it out to 2GB. That way if the next version of Photoshop needs more resources you won't be up the creek without a paddle.

[Peter Mounier]

The Mac Mini comes with 1Gb of ram, and PS CS3 requires 512 Mb to operate. So that only leaves you with 512Mb for the OS to operate, and very little ram for Photoshop to cache files and History. It would be advisable to run PS only, and not also have other apps open at the same time. You can do pretty well with 2Gb ram if the files you're working on aren't in the 100's of Mb in size. Is your daughter going to be working on files from scanned LF images? If so, I would suggest having at least 4Gb ram, which means that the mini is insufficient.

Peter

[Paul H]

You can get 3GB in the Mini - either 1 x 2GB and 1 x 1GB, or you can put a pair of 2GB DIMMS in (although the system only sees 3GB).

Max the RAM out, then you should be fine.

[Ken Lee]

Remember that you can also purchase a 4 GB USB thumb drive (for not too much money these days) and designate it as the primary scratch disk. It's very helpful to have a dedicated scratch disk, separate from the disk on which the program resides (the hard drive). This allows many operations to be done in parallel.

Placing your actual photos (the files) on another USB drive (like a portable hard drive) will also speed things up, since the I/O can happen in parallel with the other operations.

It is best if you leave the thumb drive empty. Format it for the Mac OS, but don't place any files on it.

My 3-year-old Powerbook does pretty nicely with 2 GB of RAM, and the separate scratch disk.

[neil poulsen]

Remember that you can also purchase a 4 GB USB thumb drive (for not too much money these days) and designate it as the primary scratch disk. It's very helpful to have a dedicated scratch disk, separate from the disk on which the program resides (the hard drive). This allows many operations to be done in parallel. . . .

What a great idea. I'd never heard of that. I'll bet it would be faster than most HD's.

[Doug Dolde]

I remember seeing a study that USB flash drives aren't that fast. In fact they are pretty slow to consider as a scratch disk. Can't remember the source though.

[Henry Ambrose]

A firewire hard drive will be much faster than a usb flash drive.

But before you buy extra parts for a Mini, think about a 20" iMac instead.
The iMac has a much bigger and faster HD, firewire 800, 400 and USB2, separate graphics card (not shared with main memory like the mini) 4GB max RAM and they throw in a big screen. Of course its $500 more but its a lot more capable machine.

The faster and 3 times bigger hard drive and real graphics card are overwhelming improvements over the Mini for PS work.

[neil poulsen]

So much for that theory!

[Enrico Faini]

I don't know about the mac mini, but I'm running CS3 on a macbook air (1.6GHz core2duo w/ 2GB ram) and it can easily handle an 8bit 2400dpi scan of 5x7 transparency (about 600MB)
it's not blazingly fast, but it is ok as long as I don't have a ton of other apps open at the same time

I must however point out that I don't do any heavy photoshop work, but just some very basic adjustments to get the image ready for printing.

if you max out the ram, and are not too concerned if when you apply a filter it takes a few seconds longer to do it, than I believe a macmini should be more than adquate for most work