Good evening. New to the forum but a long time Logic user.

My early 2007 Mac Pro is about ready for retirement and while I really like the look of the new ones I'm not in the mood to spend $3K + right now. I'm thinking about a new Mac Mini. I can fully load one for about half the cost of a new, baseline Mac Pro.

My question to the forum: is anyone running Logic X (or Ableton Live 9) on a Mac Mini? Will I see a big difference in performance between my old Mac Pro's 2x2.66 Ghz dual-core Intel Xeon and the new Mac Mini's 2.6 Ghz quad-core Intel Core i7? Thanks in advance for the assistance.

Good evening. New to the forum but a long time Logic user. My early 2007 Mac Pro is about ready for retirement and while I really like the look of the new ones I'm not in the mood to spend $3K + right now. I'm thinking about a new Mac Mini. I can fully load one for about half the cost of a new, baseline Mac Pro. My question to the forum: is anyone running Logic X (or Ableton Live 9) on a Mac Mini? Will I see a big difference in performance between my old Mac Pro's 2x2.66 Ghz dual-core Intel Xeon and the new Mac Mini's 2.6 Ghz quad-core Intel Core i7?

Thanks in advance for the assistance. My experience This is my experience with MAC Mini.

Logic Pro X Mac Logic Pro X For Macbook

I bought the new version of the Quad Core 2.3 I7. The 'rotational rate' of the stock hard drive was 5800.

For some reason, this was not fast enough for me to run logic. It made no sense. I would get that error 'system overloaded' if I had more than one track playing with no plugins. So i upgraded from 4GB to 16GB ram. The same thing happened. Someone said to upgrade my hard drive to 7200, so I ordered the 250GB SSD drive from OWC and installed it myself (along with the 1TB that is stock). All of my problems went away.

Well at least for the time being. I do have a new issue, but I'll post that somewhere else. The Mini is a mighty powerful Mac for LPX. I just finished setting up a 2.6 GHz i7 Mini with user installed RAM ( 16 GB) and two internal SSD: 500 GB for OSX/apps/various user documents, and a 960 GB drive for sample libraries. Project files are on an external mechanical 7200 rpm drive via USB 3. The 1T 5400 rpm mechanical drive that came with the Mini is now an external backup drive.

A picture always tells the story. First screen short is from a L9 demo tune with 80 tracks.

The second is the demo that comes with LPX with 69 tracks. Both with an I/O buffer size of 128. Use of demo tunes available in Logic give us a means of standardization (all users of the same version of Logic will have them) when comparing performance on various systems. In my case, I purchased a standard 2012 Mac Mini with a single internal hard drive. The internal drive was replaced and a second drive added via the OWC Data Double for the Mac Mini. Although I have a fair tolerance to tinkering, this was by far, the most risky procedure to date. Many steps involving manipulating delicate connectors.

I'm not advising anyone to do this. OWC has an excellent video 'how to' videos. A good approach would be to view them, then reconsider if it's worth the risk. Often, the smart move is to just forget about it.

Some have said that the factory 5400 rpm drive is good enough for Mac OSX and apps like Logic. Everything else (sample libraries and project files) can be on external USB3 drives. Replacing the internal drive (without adding a second drive) is somewhat easier than going through all of the steps to add the second drive. But not really easy! Perhaps a more sensible option would be to pay OWC to do the installation, a service they offer for the Mac Mini.