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[dchin]

I am presently using a fairly powerful Windows 8 PC in my living room, a quad-core Intel Core i7 3770K with 32GB RAM, and a dedicated Radeon 7850 GPU.  Needless to say, this runs without any problem whatsover. I am thinking of getting a Mac Mini for a bedroom because of its compact size and look.  The specification of the Mac Mini (the one with 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 with 4 GB RAM plus Intel HD Graphics 4000) pales in comparison with my present PC.  I am particularly concerned about playing 1080p 3D movie, which file size is typically 30 to 40 GB.  Another old PC I have really struggles when playing back such movies.  Can this Mac Mini cope with the load, especially when it does not have a dedicated GPU?  If you have any direct experience with the Mac Mini, I shall be most grateful if you can share it with me.  Thanks.

[JohnT]

Media Center for Mac does not do video playback.  In general though, the hardware specs for that Mac should be fine for playing 1080p.  I use a Haswell i3 with HD4400 graphics for my HTPC and it works great.

[glynor]

My current-gen (Ivy) Mac Mini can play 1080p video just fine when booted to Windows in MC19.  It also runs fine when running Windows in a Parallels Windows 7 VM.  I have it set to Red October Standard, though you could probably get it running under ROHQ with some tweaks to madVR.

Mine is a Core i7 @ 2.6GHz model (the top CPU) with a fusion drive.  I've also subsequently upgraded it to 16GB of RAM, though it worked fine when booted directly to Windows before this with the stock 4GB RAM.