Macminicolo gotten ahold of the newly refreshed Mac mini and has found that it scores nicely with Geekbench. Some good take aways: the Mac Mini line is now on the same level as a Mac Pro and Xserve ...
Moving the USB SSD to internal you'd get a bit more performance out of it. The 2012 mini supports SATA III which is 6Gbit/s vs USB3 at 5Gbit/s. You can also get a kit to house two drives in the mini ...
If I want a server for doing anything other than as a CI server for Xcode*, I'm using Linux. Nobody is trying to suggest otherwise. Apple doesn't even market the mini for anything aside from CI ...