Help Me select Mini

The best Mac Mini to buy is the 2.8ghz Intel Core I7. You will have to order this machine from apple. I would make sure it has the 8gigs of ram and a esata 3 solid state hard drive. go to www.Ultraf.biz and click on the link; Optimization Guide for Apple OS X. Follow the steps and you will be amazed. The 2.5ghz Intel Core I5 does sound good but the I7 sounds better. Do not buy the 2.3ghz, it does not sound all that good and for difference the bigger processors sound better.

I just bought one - went for the base version with 64gig SSD and 8gigs RAM. Added external 2TB Thunderbolt drive for music storage. Works great - sounds great!

CPU speed doesn't matter, RAM does. A solid state drive is said to help. Buy the bottom of the line mini and have it shipped to Other World Computing (OWC). You set up an order with them in advance and give Apple the OWC mailing address with an RMA. Have them install 8gb RAM (cheap) and replace the hard drive with an SSD drive of 120gb or more. Buy from them a cheap optical hard drive USB enclosure, and they will install your original HD in that and copy all the contents to the SSD. Now you have a backup of your operating system, and even some storage space to back up your music if you like. The new mini's don't have disk drives, so you'll need to buy an external one from OWC if you don't have another means of reading your CD's for burning purposes. I bought a blueray compatible external drive so it could be used for playing movies of all types. My external hared drive, on which I store music, is firewire - allowing the USB to be dedicated to just the DAC. Good luck, Peter