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Is 8GB of RAM sufficient?


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I am about to take the plunge and swap from Adobe to Affinity, and I am buying a new Mac Mini at the same time.

My problem is: will 8GB of RAM be sufficient? So many people say go for 16GB, as if money is no object, but I really don't want to spend good money on overkill if 8GB is going to be plenty.

I am a retired professional, these days producing PDFs for books, plus a few posters, flyers, etc, but I will probably never need to use all elements of the software at the same time, the files will never be huge, and I won't be trying to use video or music software.

Thanks.

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Welcome to the Affinity forums, @Graham Carter.

8GB is the minimum recommended, and would work for some purposes, but it's hard to say whether it will be enough for you or not.

What kind of books will you produce? How many pages, what kind of content (text, pictures, both)?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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8GB isn't a lot for modern software. Suggest you run Affinity on what you have now before getting the new Mac Mini and see how it goes. There is a 6 month free trial of Affinity at the moment. If it were a PC you could start with 8GB and upgrade if necessary but I gather this isn't an option with the Mac Mini.

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9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Welcome to the Affinity forums, @Graham Carter.

8GB is the minimum recommended, and would work for some purposes, but it's hard to say whether it will be enough for you or not.

What kind of books will you produce? How many pages, what kind of content (text, pictures, both)?

The last book was 200 pages of full colour, 216mm square - not a huge challenge for my ancient Mac running very old versions of Quark XPress and Photoshop.

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9 hours ago, RichardMH said:

8GB isn't a lot for modern software. Suggest you run Affinity on what you have now before getting the new Mac Mini and see how it goes. There is a 6 month free trial of Affinity at the moment. If it were a PC you could start with 8GB and upgrade if necessary but I gather this isn't an option with the Mac Mini.

The free trial of Affinity is very tempting, but I can't install it on my trusty old (actually ancient) Mac as it is on its last legs, using a very old version of OS and struggling to connect to the internet. New software now would probably cause it to blow up. I think you are right that there doesn't seem to be an option to upgrade the Mac Mini if you go for the smaller memory and find it's not enough, so I will have to bite the bullet and go for the expensive option. :(

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1 hour ago, Graham Carter said:

The last book was 200 pages of full colour, 216mm square - not a huge challenge for my ancient Mac running very old versions of Quark XPress and Photoshop.

If I had to guess, I would want more than 8GB of RAM. 

How much does your old Mac have?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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