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toysbyus
Inspiring
July 4, 2020
Question

is 16 Gigs RAM in a new Mac Mini sufficient to run AI and PS CC without issues?

  • July 4, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 525 views

Straightforward question. I am finally upgrading my old Mac Mini running El Capitan to a new Mini running Catalina OS. The model I am going to buy is running 16 GIGs of Ram......is this sufficient to easily run PS CC and AI CC?

 

I ask because the RAM in the new Minis is not owner replaceable easily so I have to order the config that I will be using......

 

Any help would be very appreciated.

 

Steve

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3 replies

Participant
April 5, 2021

My 2020 M1 Mac Mini is ALWAYS telling me I don't have enough RAM to even use the paint brush.  I have the 16GB Mac Mini.  It's very frustrating and annoying.  The simplest tasks are sometimes difficult.  I'm not impressed.  My 8GB RAM 2020 Mac Book Pro runs much better.

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 4, 2020

It should work well.

 

But RAM isn't the most important thing. The critical factor is the scratch disk. Photoshop moves large amounts of data around, and there is never enough RAM no matter how much you have. So working data are written to temp files on disk. This is the scratch disk. RAM is more of a cache for the scratch disk's main memory.

 

4-500 GB free space should be minimum, preferably more. NVMe drives are fast enough not to be a bottleneck, so put the scratch disk on the system drive for best performance. The advice used to be a separate scratch disk, but that was with spinning drives with a read/write head that could only be in one place at a time.

Derek Cross
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 4, 2020

16GB of RAM should be OK to run Photoshop but have plenty of spare disk space also.