Now, compare that to Apple's recommended BlackMagic eGPU Pro, which sells for $1,199.
#2018 MAC MINI FOR SALE UPGRADE#
If you add the $299 price of the Helios FX enclosure to the $579 GPU, the total eGPU solution cost is $879.Īlso: Max out your new Mac Mini with iFixit's new RAM upgrade kit
#2018 MAC MINI FOR SALE PRO#
It's still a whole lot less expensive than a MacBook Pro or iMac, both with screens I didn't want. See it now: Helios FX enclosure at AmazonĪt $579, the card was a quarter of the cost of the whole Mac Mini, but I expected the expense when I planned the purchase.See it now: Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX Vega 56 at Amazon.The exact model I bought was the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX Vega 56 8GB HBM2 Dual HDMI/DP PCI-E Graphics Card. To that, I added the Sapphire Vega 56 card recommended directly by Apple. I've reviewed a number of OWC products in the past with excellent results, so I reached out to it for its Mercury Helios FX eGPU enclosure. Toss some effects on top of that stream, add a third or fourth 4K video layer, and the chipboard 630 chip didn't have the chops.įor that kind of load, an eGPU was necessary. But add a second camera and everything slowed to a crawl.
But I will tell you this: The off-the-shelf Mac Mini i7 with 32GB of RAM edited a single 4K video stream in Final Cut surprisingly well. I'm not going to give you benchmarks, because they can be found all over the web. When I built out my 2018 Mac Mini with the intent of making it my main workhorse machine, I knew its onboard Intel 630 graphics were probably not good enough for the kind of graphics load multicam 4K video editing requires. That means that all modern Macs, from the lowliest 2018 MacBook Air to the Mac Mini, can be turbocharged with a high-end graphics card in an eGPU (external GPU) case. All currently-shipping modern Macs (we won't talk about the trash can!) support Thunderbolt 3. Its graphics capabilities are anemic.įortunately, it doesn't have to stay that way. Make your home smarter with these six tech upgradesĪ fully-equipped 2018 Mac Mini is impressive in all but one way.Companies are using multi-factor authentication.iOS 15: Fix your iPhone battery drain problems.Here's how Windows 11 users will get new features.