Cube Planning

[mykuls]

I got a good deal on a cube and have it gutted and ready to go. I was going to put my 2014 Mac mini inside but I couldn’t bare to wreck it.

Just want to get some feedback on my motherboard choices. Thin mini-itx are lagging behind, so they are out of the question.

#1 - NUC8i5 BEH
#2 - ASRock Desk Mini 310 (mini-stx)
#3 - a board someone knows about that I haven’t seen???

With the price, I am leaning towards the ASRock deskmini. With either MB I plan to use different WiFi as in this post. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/...dapter-handoff-unlock-with-watch-uefi.215895/. I am going to try and reuse the heat sink bridging the gap with old heatsink material or copper. May or may not install a Sata dvd drive.

Touch switch will be tackled after I pick a mobo.

Thanks for any suggestions/help for my planning.

Mike

 

[phunguss]

Just want to get some feedback on my motherboard choices. Thin mini-itx are lagging behind, so they are out of the question.

#1 - NUC8i5 BEH
#2 - ASRock Desk Mini 310 (mini-stx)
#3 - a board someone knows about that I haven’t seen???

You don't have to use a thin Mini-ITX, regular Mini-ITX fit fine. You don't have to have the newest motherboard or processor to have a good hackintosh. A Xeon Sandy Bridge (2nd gen) in an X79 series will still beat that NUC. There are plenty of Mini-ITX that fit fine into a cube, or a Mini-STX at least have a CPU socket. I do have an ASRock X99E-ITX-AC mini-ITX motherboard with an E5-2696 v3 18core/36thread that will fit into a cube.

Z170, H97, H87, H61 are all workable mini-ITX options. GigaByte, ASUS, and ASRock all make mini-STX, though I do not own an ASUS one yet. I have two each of the GigaByte and ASRock and they work fine, even in a mac-mini (2006-2009) case.