4K $185 Optiplex CustoMac Mini vs. $800+ 2018 Mac mini refresh
I was looking at the total cost of my 9010 SFF today now that I'm nearly finished with all of the upgrades. The grand total comes to $185.32 for everything. Has an NVMe boot drive, 500 GB WD Blue storage drive (swapped out the 250 drive) and a 4K @ 60Hz K600 Quadro graphics card. The only thing this build can't do in contrast to the 2018 mini is support TH3 external drives, monitors or other Thunderbolt peripherals. If you want to connect this build to a 4K TV then you'd need to adapt the DP 1.2 ouput on the K600 to HDMI 2.0. There are
active DP to HDMI adapters on Amazon that do this for under 20 USD.
This build was done to show that it's possible to get a really nice, fast Mojave hackintosh without having to spend 800 dollars plus. Whether you buy a 2018 mini or custom build your own mini-itx system you'll spend 4x as much to get about the same performance. The other nice thing is that if your budget is larger, it's easy to upgrade the ram, to 32 GB and to install a newer AMD graphics card like the RX 560 LP card by MSI. The use of the single slot K600 leaves open the option of using the x4 PCIe slot for an NVMe drive.
Note that the total price
includes all taxes and shipping costs. Here's the evidence to support this.
This is from the Paypal invoice.
The NVMe drive was purchased from Newegg.com, not Ebay.
With the money you save on this "build" it's possible to buy a 4K LG 27" monitor and you'd still come in at much less than just buying the base model 2018 mini. See:
LG monitor on Amazon My total cost would be $523 for a 4K CustoMac mini with LG monitor. As is the trend lately, Apple overpriced this entry level Mac by about 200-300 dollars.
Was all the work to save over $615 worth it ? I think so. The new Apple Mini is smaller and quieter but I don't have any problems with those two aspects of the Optiplex CustoMac mini. The superior cooling system in the Optiplex allows full performance of the i7-3770 CPU so I can edit videos and photos without the machine getting too hot.
My 9010 SFF never even comes close to 75C temps when stressing the CPU. One thing I can be certain of with my i7-3770 is that it was never overclocked and stayed at temps well below 60C for most of the time (3 years) the previous owner used it. Just think of buying one of these 2018 minis used in three years from now. If the previous owner did anything that pushed the CPU for longer periods I would not want that 3 year old machine that has a CPU pushing 90C temps much of the time. When you stress the i3-8100 it goes up to it's TJ Max 100 degrees Celsius in a minute. Then it thermal throttles the CPU.
Look at the following chart and you can see how much hotter it gets than even the Inel NUC.
Click to enlarge.
What's going on here ? A few things. Apple has never put desktop class chips in a Mac mini before. They use very low quality thermal compound on the CPU. The mini is a very small enclosed system that doesn't allow for much airflow through the case. If all you do with it is surf the net and read your email it's not a problem. Why pay 800 USD for a Mac mini when you can do that on any smartphone, tablet or even a $299 Windows laptop ?
Quinn's thumbnail pic kind of makes this look like the new Mac mini will melt it's Aluminum casing.
Maybe Apple should have renamed the new mini the "Mac hottie" instead. I know, marketing at
Apple would never allow that.
Here's the base model Late 2018 Mac mini specs.
Yes, I know the Dell only has 1600 MHz DDR3 ram but since I'm not using the integrated HD4000 graphics that is not really a factor in the graphics performance. The UHD 630 graphics in the Apple mini is really the weakest link there. Especially if you want to work with video editing with one. External GPUs that you add via TH3 can get very expensive very quickly. They start around 400 dollars and go up steeply from there.
What if I don't want to even spend 100 dollars to try out the Dell Optiplex CustoMac Mini ?
I posted about 9 months ago in regard to how you could buy parts on Ebay and build your own. The total cost will only be about 65 USD. You would need to have your own mATX case, hard drive and ATX power supply to try this. If you have 2 or 4 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz ram that is Dell compatible, then it costs even less. All of the Samsung and Hynix DDR3 1600 ram seems to work well in these boards.
Thanks again, your guides have been easy to follow and because of that, provided a great base to learn about this stuff. You're welcome Nick. I've created these Hackintosh 101 guides so those new to this have a place to start that is affordable, without having to spend over 700 dollars on a...
www.tonymacx86.com
