I was curious if anyone on here was using a Mac Mini with Zbrush successfully? I was thinking of buying one of these instead of a G5 because it’s half the price. Any feedback on this set up?
I’ve been using ZBrush 2.0 on my Mac Mini (intel core duo) for more than a year. I’ve been able to work with meshes that have 8 million polys. That’s the extreme. Most of the time it performs well and doesn’t misbehave when the mesh is 1.5 million polys. Get as much RAM as you can.
The Core Duo 2 intel Mac minis will do a much better job than mine. I’m saving up to get a iMac.
Thanks Will 
I was also wondering if anyone was successfully running ZB3 via Boot Camp in Vista or Windows on the Mac? If so, was it slow? Any hang ups or crashes?
Your answers will help me decide whether or not I should plunk down $700 for a mini or just jump for a G5 or PC.
I’m using z3 with Boot Camp using Vista on my iMac, and things work great. Good performance, no crashes. Don’t get a Mac Mini or a PC. Get an iMac or Mac Pro. Although, people are speculating about a new Mac Pro soon, because the current one is out of date. So if you want a Mac Pro (which I’m currently saving for), I say wait for the new one to come out.
Hey there, thanks for the info , great to know I can go ahead and just get the PC license since the Mac version is delayed 
Any particular reason why you say don’t go for the mini? Since I have no plans to upgrade my other software to an Intel machine, the mini will be a dedicated machine for zbrush. If this was the only software I was going to use on it, I assumed it would not be over burdened, but if you know better, let me know. Thanks!
Well I use my iMac for Zbrush, Maya, Photoshop, and Unity Game Engine. The Mac Mini sucks for game development. The graphics card is a joke and not suitable for Maya or shader based game development in general. If you plan on rendering anything with Mental Ray, Vray, or whatever, the Mac Mini won’t cut it. I don’t know exactly what you use zbrush for, but for me at least the Mac Mini would not cut it, just because the other programs that are needed for game dev. The Mac Mini is for casual computer users, not graphics intense applications.
Thanks hypno, so you can’t upgrade a or request an upgraded card with the mini?
For my purposes all I use Zbrush for is modeling and posing, then I take the sculpt into Photoshop, do some finishing up and use the image as a reference sketch to create a finished oil or acrylic painting. Ahhh, remember when artists use to use camel haired paint brushes and actual lead pencils? :lol:
AKAIK , the card can’t be upgraded unfortunately. The Mac Mini might be good enough for you if you are just modeling and posing. I couldn’t use it for what I need, but maybe you could get by with it. Decisions, decisions 
AlchemicXII,
Obviously the higher end computer you get the better the job it will do, however, for your purposes stated above, I think the Mac Mini should cope OK. The biggest drawback is going to be the RAM limit - get the max if you can.
Thanks guys for all your input. If I can manage to create work similar in detail to say Antropus’s (http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=054103) using a mini, I think I’ll be fine. All I need is light, shadow and poses
I’ll be upgrading my g4 powermac circa 2001 to a mac pro later next year, so as I said before, the mini will just be my dedicated sculpt station and I’m not expecting much more than that from it.