I just picked up a Mac Mini, mainly for browsing the internet and soem programming.

I'd like to optimize it for WoW somewhat, so I don't have to switch to my PC every time I want to play. Upgrade options are pretty much limited just to RAM and whatever can be attached via USB and Firewire.

How important would upgrading from the shipping 512MB ram to a full 1GB be? WoW runs as is with nearly everything at minimum acceptably well for exploriong and solo PvE, I shudder to think of what a batteground or instance would be like though. I'm used to a mid to high end PC. I don't expect to match the PC in performance, but would like things to be a bit smoother.

Are there any settings in OSX I could use to enhance performance?

Would there be any firewire or USB based audio interfaces that would put less of a load on the system than the built in sound? I'm likely to get one anyways, probably one of the M-Audio audiophiles, but if theres another that would help lighten the load more it would be considered.

The ram will help but that's pretty much all you can do, i think.

It's an intel.

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Q u o t e:
Boomboom,

PPC or Intel? PPC the memory upgrade will boost performance overall with the system, but the game performance won't improve that much. I personally have a PPC Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM and while playable, I would never chose to play on that system. IMHO I don't think it would be worth the time or money to upgrade the RAM in the system.

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my wife has been playing wow on it for almost a year (ppc mini) and she is quite happy with it. THough she does lag pretty bad in shatra.

Well after playing on it for a while heres my thoughts.

The baseline 1.8ghz Intel Mac Mini will play wow acceptably well for most people. The biggest problems are PvP and crowded cities. In PvP its jerky motion... you try to move to the right, then forward, then left... as everything finally gets processed, to the server, back to you... you really don't know where you'll be. Very small PvP engagements in otherwise mostly empty areas aren't bad, but more than once I lost because the swap to berserker stance didn't get processed until after I was furiously mashing Pummel and ended up thunderclapping instead. If you don't PvP, then this isn't something to worry about. Crowded cities, especailly Shattrath, are horrible. Whenever I had to fly over Shatt, I expected to spend at least 2-3 minutes flying over the city.

Other situations can be a problem, such as the flak guns in Blades Edge, and where there are a lot of spells being thrown around. But not as much of a gameplay problem as the above. Your playstyle may give you other concerns, this is what has affected me the most.

Solution without upgrading is to turn most things down. I would recommend...

Resolution: As low as you can stand for CRT, native for LCD.
Oversampling: As low as you can stand. You may want it a bit higher though, the tearing and wierd visual artifacts having this low causes can really screw you up and make it harder to figure out whats going on around you. BIG problem in PvP and positioning sensitve PvE if its hard to get a bearing on your surroundings. Most of the time lower settings simply look ugly, but there are those cases where it actually makes the game harder to play, and these cases can't always be planned for.
UI Scale: Doesn't seem to affect performance, at least not to a noticeable degree.
Spell Detail: Max out. No matter what. It's a performance hit, sometimes a big one, but turning this down is a severe tactical disadvantage against any sort of spellcaster. Wiped my group several times agianst Thespia when I didn't see the cloud in time. If you are running something where spells arne't a big deal, you might want to temporarily turn it down, just remember to turn it back up. I don't ever remember that, so I just leave it up... much easier that way.
Everything else... As low as you can stand.

I've since upgraded to 2GB ram. The upper end performance really isn't that much different that I can see, what it is is far more consistent. Might only gain 1 or 2 FPS average... but you won't be radomly losing 15FPS for no obvious reason. Personally I'd take a gain in consistency over the baseline Mini even if it came at the cost of slightly lower average performance. I can adjust to consistently poor performance. I can't adjust to randomly bad but sometimes OK perforamce. With the ram upgrade I'm playing with turning things back up, I don't have recomendations yet as I haven't toyed with it enough.

Overall... the baseline Mini is fine playing on as a backup system, or if you just want to hop on and do a quick run somewhere or to check your auctions without switching computers. If you want it to be your primary WoW system(which it became for me when my PC desktop died), you'll want to upgrade the RAM substantially. At least a gig, two if you can afford it(RAM prices have recently dropped tremendously BTW).

I cannot speak for the PPC minis as I've never used one. Closest I came was removing it from a KVM switch so I could work on a dell that I was onsite to repair. The lower end Intel minis- would obviously have lower performance, but the general balance of baseline to upgraded model performance should be similar.

I use a ppc 1.4ghz with half a gig of ram. I am able to raid and pvp ok. A few tricks I use,
Open up your Activity Monitor , located in /Applications/Utilities.
Kill the processes that you KNOW aren't vital. Widgets, iTunes helper, bloated safari sessions :).

I have a M-Audio Firewire Solo sound card. Can't comment yet if disabling the audio will increase frame rates or stability noticeably, because with such a low frame rate, I depend on many audio clues to time my spells. A familiar shotgun click causes a reflexive polymorph in instances.

I enjoy pvp, so I had to learn to play with key binds instead of mouse-clicks. I had a very low arena rating, which improved significantly when switching from clicking to keys.

To compete in raids, I use an add-on that predicts when my spell cast has "officially" completed, and indicate when it would be a good idea to hit your /stopcasting and /cast nuke macro. This has improved my overall raid dps, because it lets me cast many more nukes per fight. Works really well on bosses. I personally use Quartz, it's pretty lightweight and is the only add-on I load outside of a threat meter.

I am eagerly awaiting Leapord, which I hear will have ppc graphics improvements.
I appreciate performance improvements from OS upgrades.

I have that same 1.4 GHz G4 mini, but with 1 GB RAM. The extra RAM, from your description of your experience, doesn't seem to make much difference.

Heh. For my first year or so in WoW, I thought a max 15 fps, and an average of about 10, was normal. Then I started hearing people complain because their framerate dropped below 30. Sheesh.

Looked into upgrade options. If I could afford an upgrade, I'd go for the MacBook Pro with the 17" screen, and maybe add a larger external display. Alternatively, the top end iMac. But the laptop would let me get rid of this Windows piece of junk I'm typing on right now (the mini's getting an airport upgrade).

PvP. I suck at PvP. Part of it is I'm old and slow. Part of it is I almost never see the other guy coming until he's right on top of me. And then the machine slows down my already slow reaction time. I figure it's about 50-50 me and this machine, but I won't be sure until I can try some better hardware.

At least it's better than the G4 tower I started WoW with. I have no idea what frame rates I was getting on that machine, but I couldn't even run behind one of my guildies from Menethil Harbor to Thelsamar. Was pretty pathetic.