As you say itīs a new 2012 Mini you might run OS 10.8. or 10.9 actually, right?
Though your model description number 10.11 confuses me (as far as I know there is just one model with some kinda ID
which was the very first Mini from 2005
) let me say that there might be an actual problem to use PTLE8 on OS 10.9.
The last OS LE8 was officially supported with was OS 10.6. then and though some people write they still use it on
newer systems it definitely is not meant to be working on those anymore.
So this might be it.
Probably you will have to upgrade to PT10/11 to get it working properly on a 2012 machine.
But thatīs just my personal thoughts of course.
Anyway.
Good luck to you and have fun,
VRW
ps: However as far as I know the 003 is still supported and you can get driver for using it with PT10/11.
And I donīt think the i5 to be the problem as I was running PT11 on a 2011 i5 Dual Mini without bigger problems for a few months in 2013.
I then replaced it with an i7 just because I got some CPU spikes from time to time with larger sessions and noticed that it would make
more sense to me for the future to have more CPU power actually. But most of the time it did just work well!
Hope that helps anyway.
MacMini i7Quad, 16GB Ram, MacOS 10.9.1, Apogee Quartet, Genelec Active, Yamaha NS10, Pro Tools 11.1.2, Logic 10.0.6, Waves, MCDSP, Duende Native, Softube, HOFA, IK Multimedia etc.