It remains to be seen how long the Mini can maintain the turbo clock, but the Mini is seeming like a better deal in my position, unless Apple bumps the spec for the iMac and keeps the price the same. You're paying a premium for the 5K screen and faster base single-core performance, I guess.

Even if I add the Magic Keyboard and Magic Mouse (which I don't really want), the Mac Mini is still a little bit cheaper. The 27' i7 iMac plus the same extras comes to about $3000 (the mid-tier one with the Radeon 575). I'm looking for a 1 TB SSD on both machines with 32 GB MacSales ram.I just priced both of these configurations for myself (using a family member's educational discount) the base i7 Mac Mini + Applecare + 32GB RAM + 27' 4K monitor + 1TB USB3 external drive comes to about $2600 with tax, if I skip the keyboard and mouse. $1200 less for the Mac mini, and even after adding in the cost of a nice $500 monitor (and that could be a lot less if it's not 4k), still a $700 difference. I was all set to buy a 2017 27' 4.2 quad-core i7 iMac, but this new Mac Mini 6-core 3.2 i7 has me reconsidering if I should go with the Mac Mini. With my new iMac i7 that can turbo up to 4.2ghz, the difference is quite a jump in power (I would say it is about 3 time as powerful for single core processing, and 2 times for multicore.).įor high cpu plugins usage get the highest single core speed you can, without sacrificing to much for more cores (which are also useful for large complicated sessions) My gut tells me that single core performance would be more important, but I am just guessing.Single core is very important for Live - been using since V3, and could never get the true value out of my 2.8ghz x 8 Xeon Mac Pro, as Live always crapped out with lots of room left across the cores but hitting the single core ceiling I don't think I am a heavy user by any means, but there might be the odd CPU intensive plug-in, like Diva, Softube Modular etc. Say with 20-30 tracks (out of which 10 or so instruments, the rest audio), and a mix of plug-ins (mainly EQ's, filters etc), some native Ableton, and some 3rd party.say 3-4 per track? How much would Ableton doing be single-core vs multi-core in my typical Ableton usage? That leads me to another question, which I know has probably been answered a hundred times before in other forums.

2017 mac mini quad core