Any one using a mac mini with smaart?

[Dan Lewis]

Hi Guys

I'm looking at putting together a measurement rig for my PA company and have been looking at the mac mini as a base and just wondered if anyone has experience of using this platform. I have managed to install the smaart 6.1 demo on a friends machine and the processor usage was acceptable (in the 65 - 70% region). This was on a dual core 2.0Ghz machine with 2gb of ram.

The reason i was looking at using the mini is it seems to be a very compact platform with a reasonable amount of horse power and i have found a nice rackmount solution which should mean i can have the machine and usb sound card all in 2U and shallow enough to fit in a standard rack case.

Any experiences or suggestions gratefully accepted.

Currently using my personal laptop (Mac Book Pro 2.6Ghz Core 2 Duo) with my ancient Edirol UA5 that has traveled the world and amazingly still works

Cheers

Dan.

[Adam Black]

Hi Dan,

We are using a Mac Mini as our trade show demo machine for v7. As v7 does far more processing than v6 you shouldn't have any trouble whatsoever running v6 on one. Unless of course it comes with Snow Leopard installed, v6 has trouble with Snow Leopard.

[Dan Lewis]

Hi Adam

Thanks for your reply, are you going to use a standard spec mini? or have you upgraded the ram to 4gb as i have read this then lets the GPU grab up to 512mb of shared ram once you have the 4gb installed.

Obviously i want to use V7 when it comes out so only want to buy the machine once

One little part of me is thinking of finding a decent second hand model and putting 4gb of ram in it and an SSD for something that should be pretty quick for less outlay than a new one.

Dan.

[Adam Black]

Dan,

Our Mac Mini is a stock dual core 2GHz with 2GB of RAM. This is the recommended minimum for v7.

If you're planning on using this machine with v7 you may want to consider what v7 is capable of. As I'm not aware of what you know of v7 I'll get into some basics. With v7 we allow you to run as many live measurements, from as many channels, as you wish. The only limiting factor is your machine. So for example a dual core 2GHz with 2GB of RAM can handle about four simultaneous MTW Transfer Function measurements. A slower machine couldn't handle this amount of processing without noticeable lag. A faster machine could handle more of course. We're seeing about 8 live MTW Transfer Function measurements on quad core, with no lag.

Just wanted to make sure you were aware of this so you can make an informed purchase.

[Dan Lewis]

Thanks again for the detailed reply Adam, i have read the pre release literature but its always good to have a real world baseline to work from.

I think for this machines main application four simultaneous transfer functions will be more than enough.

I feel a credit card bashing coming on