trs96
Moderator
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2012
- Messages
- 25,580
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte B460M Aorus Pro
- CPU
- i5-10500
- Graphics
- RX 570
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
The older 7020/9020 Dell Optiplex line is great if you have a small build budget and need support for older versions of macOS from Mavericks through Big Sur. They can run Monterey but support won't last much longer than the current supported macOS version. Looking forward you'll need newer hardware to keep up with the latest versions of Xcode that Apple releases the next few years.
If you want a newer Dell Optiplex with a 10th Gen Core I5 and UHD630 graphics this Optiplex 3080 looks like a very good deal. $733 at Amazon.com. Brand new, not refurbished. A 3 year warranty is included.
You could expect performance similar to this with the base model M1 Mac mini. So why buy this instead ? The cost is close to the M1 mini that retails for $699 and comes with 8GBs of ram and a 256GB NVMe. In reality, you'd have to upgrade the NVMe drive and ram in the Mac mini if you will be keeping it longer term and doing more than just surfing the internet and other basic tasks. If you have 8GBs of unified memory shared for everything, you end up using your small 256GB NVMe drive as a page file and possibly wear it out faster. It's not meant to be replaceable and would cost too much to replace it. Your M1 mini is mostly useless after an NVMe drive failure.
What if the NVMe in your Dell fails ? You buy a new one and install it yourself in a few minutes. No issues there.
A name brand 512 GB M.2 NVMe drive costs about $55. Some lesser known brands like SP sell for $45.
What does Apple charge for that 512GB upgrade ? $200 ! Way too much. If you ever want more than that minimal 8GBs of ram in your mini you'd have to buy a whole new mini and tack on $200 for the ram. With the 3080 you simply buy an 8GB DIMM of DDR4 ram at going market prices. Another 8GB stick of ram would only cost $30. Apple's "tax" is about 6.7x the cost of buying your own ram that you install yourself in a minute or two.
So you're paying Apple an extra $400 for 16GBs of ram and a 512GB NVMe boot drive. The Dell upgrades cost $85.
You are saving $300 from the start that you can put towards a nice 4K monitor if you need one. If you have the extra money to spend on the M1 mini upgrades it's certainly a great value for the performance. If your budget is smaller, this 10th gen Dell does make sense if you want a macOS Monterey and a Windows 10/11 dual boot computer.
How about running Windows 10/11 with an M1 SoC ? Not as simple to run that on your Mac mini. You can run it in a VM but it must be the ARM version. You have to pay for a Windows license, then pay for software such as Paralells to run it. With the Dell you run it on bare metal and you've already got a Pro license.
The 2020 iMac 20,1 used the same Intel Comet Lake i5 in the 27" base model. So that's a perfect match there. The i5-10505 is an i5-10500 with a small 100Mhz over clock. That's it. Everything else is identical.
Sure, Intel UHD630 graphics are weak compared to what the M1 mini offers but you get to add an AMD LP card to the Optiplex to get much better graphics performance. Prices for AMD cards should come back down to earth soon. The latter part of 2022. Use the supported UHD630 graphics until then. You can run dual 4K monitors off of the onboard graphics.
That 20,1 SMBIOS should be supported till the end of all Intel support, whenever that is. Maybe in 4 years ? Figure that you can keep running the latest supported version two years after Apple drops Intel support.
From Everymac.com...
The iMac "Core i5" 27-Inch Aluminum (Retina 5K, 2020/Comet Lake) features a 14-nm "Comet Lake" 3.1 GHz Intel "Core i5" processor (I5-10500) with six independent processor "cores" on a single chip, a 12 MB shared level 3 cache.
If you want a newer Dell Optiplex with a 10th Gen Core I5 and UHD630 graphics this Optiplex 3080 looks like a very good deal. $733 at Amazon.com. Brand new, not refurbished. A 3 year warranty is included.
You could expect performance similar to this with the base model M1 Mac mini. So why buy this instead ? The cost is close to the M1 mini that retails for $699 and comes with 8GBs of ram and a 256GB NVMe. In reality, you'd have to upgrade the NVMe drive and ram in the Mac mini if you will be keeping it longer term and doing more than just surfing the internet and other basic tasks. If you have 8GBs of unified memory shared for everything, you end up using your small 256GB NVMe drive as a page file and possibly wear it out faster. It's not meant to be replaceable and would cost too much to replace it. Your M1 mini is mostly useless after an NVMe drive failure.
What if the NVMe in your Dell fails ? You buy a new one and install it yourself in a few minutes. No issues there.
A name brand 512 GB M.2 NVMe drive costs about $55. Some lesser known brands like SP sell for $45.
What does Apple charge for that 512GB upgrade ? $200 ! Way too much. If you ever want more than that minimal 8GBs of ram in your mini you'd have to buy a whole new mini and tack on $200 for the ram. With the 3080 you simply buy an 8GB DIMM of DDR4 ram at going market prices. Another 8GB stick of ram would only cost $30. Apple's "tax" is about 6.7x the cost of buying your own ram that you install yourself in a minute or two.
So you're paying Apple an extra $400 for 16GBs of ram and a 512GB NVMe boot drive. The Dell upgrades cost $85.
You are saving $300 from the start that you can put towards a nice 4K monitor if you need one. If you have the extra money to spend on the M1 mini upgrades it's certainly a great value for the performance. If your budget is smaller, this 10th gen Dell does make sense if you want a macOS Monterey and a Windows 10/11 dual boot computer.
How about running Windows 10/11 with an M1 SoC ? Not as simple to run that on your Mac mini. You can run it in a VM but it must be the ARM version. You have to pay for a Windows license, then pay for software such as Paralells to run it. With the Dell you run it on bare metal and you've already got a Pro license.
The 2020 iMac 20,1 used the same Intel Comet Lake i5 in the 27" base model. So that's a perfect match there. The i5-10505 is an i5-10500 with a small 100Mhz over clock. That's it. Everything else is identical.
Sure, Intel UHD630 graphics are weak compared to what the M1 mini offers but you get to add an AMD LP card to the Optiplex to get much better graphics performance. Prices for AMD cards should come back down to earth soon. The latter part of 2022. Use the supported UHD630 graphics until then. You can run dual 4K monitors off of the onboard graphics.
That 20,1 SMBIOS should be supported till the end of all Intel support, whenever that is. Maybe in 4 years ? Figure that you can keep running the latest supported version two years after Apple drops Intel support.
From Everymac.com...
The iMac "Core i5" 27-Inch Aluminum (Retina 5K, 2020/Comet Lake) features a 14-nm "Comet Lake" 3.1 GHz Intel "Core i5" processor (I5-10500) with six independent processor "cores" on a single chip, a 12 MB shared level 3 cache.
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