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CookieFlow

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 4, 2015
52
31
Hi,

I'm moving country next month and I am considering selling my gaming computer since it's pretty hard to take with me.
In the past I had iMacs and Macbooks connected to external monitors but never really liked those setups. I much prefer ultrawide over 16:9 so no iMac for me. And my Macbooks fans always ran crazy loud, external monitors always had connections issues, not always waking up from sleep from my keyboard etc.

I'm considering getting a Mac Mini, but I'm having a really hard time justifying the price (it's 1500$ here for the base i5/512/8), so I want to be sure I would be happy with it before selling my gaming rig (3700x/16 gb ram/1TB Nvme 4.0/5700XT) since I would have to spend around 700-800$ extra after selling my rig to get something a lot less powerful.


-Can it comfortably run a 3440*1440 monitor at 100hz doing basic stuff: having 5-10 chrome tabs open, with one tab playing 1080p twitch/youtube constantly.
By comfortably I mean without having crazy loud fanspin and not temps in the 90° C (which was not the case of my Macbook pro 2016 that felt like a jet engine)

-I cannot spend/justify the money Apple asks for an extra 500gb of storage. I think I would be fine with 512 for a while, but I would consider an external 1-2TB SSD in the future. I would like to plug my peripherals at the back of the monitor instead of the Mac mini. Is that possible with 1 cable only?

-Does running an external GPU make a difference in thermals? If yes, is it significant?


I will switch back to console gaming with the PS5, so I don't need a gaming rig anymore and I prefer MacOS.
But spending 1500$ on a 3 year old cpu, slow ram etc really bugs me. But if it can do that, I would probably go that route.
If at least they had 10th gen that could have helped me justify that cost more.


Thanks for the help !
 
Last edited:
Hi,

I'm moving country next month and I am considering selling my gaming computer since it's pretty hard to take with me.
In the past I had iMacs and Macbooks connected to external monitors but never really liked those setups. I much prefer ultrawide over 16:9 so no iMac for me. And my Macbooks fans always ran crazy loud, external monitors always had connections issues, not always waking up from sleep from my keyboard etc.

I'm considering getting a Mac Mini, but I'm having a really hard time justifying the price (it's 1500$ here for the base i5/512/8), so I want to be sure I would be happy with it before selling my gaming rig (3700x/16 gb ram/1TB Nvme 4.0/5700XT) since I would have to spend around 700-800$ extra after selling my rig to get something a lot less powerful.


-Can it comfortably run a 3440*1440 monitor at 100hz doing basic stuff: having 5-10 chrome tabs open, with one tab playing 1080p twitch/youtube constantly.
By comfortably I mean without having crazy loud fanspin and not temps in the 90° C (which was not the case of my Macbook pro 2016 that felt like a jet engine)

-I cannot spend/justify the money Apple asks for an extra 500gb of storage. I think I would be fine with 512 for a while, but I would consider an external 1-2TB SSD in the future. I would like to plug my peripherals at the back of the monitor instead of the Mac mini. Is that possible with 1 cable only?


I will switch back to console gaming with the PS5, so I don't need a gaming rig anymore and I prefer MacOS.
But spending 1500$ on a 3 year old cpu, slow ram etc really bugs me. But if it can do that, I would probably go that route.
If at least they had 10th gen that could have helped me justify that cost more.


Thanks for the help !

Mine is only an i3 w/ 256GB of storage and it performs well under those conditions. No loud fans or anything.
 
to give credit to mac mini 2020 i5 8gb ram 512ssd, ive never heard the fans yet even playing csgo
 
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