- Joined
- Aug 31, 2010
- Messages
- 3,888
- Motherboard
- Asrock Z87E-ITX
- CPU
- i7-4770S
- Graphics
- GTX 760
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
I built my first Hackintosh so that I could properly coach an older friend of mine who had moved to a late 2012 i5 Mac Mini. I really like the small form factor of the Mini, but there was the extra cost of upgrading its memory to 8GB, because the standard 4GB doesn't really cut it if you're going to use a virtual machine, and the fact that the 1 TB hard disk is a 5400RPM drive. The Mini's performance is decent, but does not hold a candle to either my i3 3225 or i3 4340 PowerMacs which are, for all practical purposes, Mac Minis in a large form factor because they use HD 4000 or HD 4600 graphics. The Mac Mini had a Geekbench2 score of around 6600 whereas my i3 3225 is 8625 and my i3 4340 is 10,164. So not only is the budget Hackintosh faster in benchmarks, it is noticeably faster in actual use too.
My two cents worth.
Tom
View attachment 76130
Yep, I hear ya Tom.
When mine has been in use as a production machine, its been fitted with a 480Gb SSD and 16Gb of 1600Mhz ram; short of doubling up the SSD to a raid setup I couldnt really boost it any more. It also has the Radeon 6330M GPU so the graphics output was good.
Part of me would still like to own the next new one, but I doubt it will include discrete graphics.