Cpu super usage and high temperature - MacMini late 2012

Hi everybody,
is it normal that Cubase, only for being opened, NO project loaded, takes over 50% of CPU?, according to system monitoring?
I’m using a MacMini late 2012, I7 quadcore, 16GB RAM, 256 SSD drive (a bit full for the truth…)
And when I trying to unmix vocal from a 20’ video it arrived at 560%? :flushed: :flushed: :flushed:
I notice CPU temperature is often very high in situations where I wouldn’t expect (iStat pro 4.92).
Thanks,
Arturo

You’re using pretty old hardware there. What version of Cubase are using and what version of Mac OS are you running?

Hi wildschwein,
there’s an error in my post: I wrote late 2006 but it’s late 2012, now I’ve rectified.

Cubase 11, last release, OS Mojave 10.14.6.

I realized I had hd quite full and I made room so now I’ve 32/250 GB free; hope it’s enough…

But I also have problems with Time Machine that I can’t no more enter in…
Maybe I should do a complete reset but, as you can image, I would possibly avoid it; I’ve heard about Onyx but I’m afraid I could do make some mistake…

Thank you for answering,
Arturo

Hi Arturo,

Oh right. I think you are really pushing the envelope with very old hardware. Did you patch the Mac mini to install Mojave? For the late 2006 Mac mini the last supported operating system was Snow Leopard 10.6.8.

I don’t think with that set up you could expect to be getting the best performance with the latest version of Cubase. Also, Apple would not have done any testing with Mojave on older machines that they didn’t intend to support anymore – so Mojave is an experimental installation. There is a lot of stuff that is off the map support-wise. You could possibly install Windows 10 on the Mac instead though. The specs are still respectable on paper but CPUs have come a long quite a bit since that era especially in the thermal department. Early gen i7 CPUs do run pretty hot in my experience with them.

Others may have some suggestions and provide some advice that could help you improve performance but you are flying into some technological headwinds there.

Cheers,
Canaan
[Edit} Oh I se now you have updated the info to 2012 which means all of the above is is irrelevant.

HI again, Canaan
my MacMIni is late 2012, not 2006, I made a mistake in the original post…
In the screenshot you can see tech specs…

Schermata 2022-01-08 alle 12.13.33

So it’s not as old as you could think… I’m afraid I can have a malware or something like that…

1 Like

p.s. I’ve just done a Malware Bytes scan and everything seems to be ok…

That’s great news!

Yes it definitely is, but it’s only a part of the solution…
I’m afraid I’ll have to reinstall and maybe format…
Thank you for supporting :wink:

I didn’t see that info listed in your post over at Gearspace, but your hard drive is definitely TOO full as well. You’ve got just a little bit over 10% of it free, which means your Mac is working a lot harder with its swap files and caches AND its trying to pull your audio from it at the same time. You should think about getting an external and moving everything that doesn’t need to be on the OS drive off it. When I moved from my Mac Pro to a Mini last year, I dont keep anything on the system drive anymore except my basic account info. Documents/Pictures all that stuff are still there where they should be but I’ve begun moving those elsewhere, all my downloads now default to an external drive, all my DAW content is on a separate drive, etc… Keep your system drive as available as you possibly can because thats where the OS does its work in the background.

Run those hardware tests though, that will still tell you if you’ve got anything going on inside the Mac itself.

Hi Monotremata,
I agree and I’m keeping a lot of my data in external disk yet (photos, all music and libraries, download folder…) that I point to directly or trough with symbolic link but I did a quick check, after reading your post, and I realized I still have a lot of things I could move, over 10 GB at least…
I need to plan as do the movement but I’ll try, hoping it will help…

I also tried Apple hardware test but I received an error message " Cannot Load EFI/Drivers/TestSupport.efi" that drove me here so I’ll have to try another solution…

Thank you again for helping… I’ll let you know if I find a solution,

Arturo