Mac Mini with two 4K LG Ultrafine Displays (Performance/Fan noise question)

[MosesOlsen]

Hello! I recently traded in a 2017 15” MacBook Pro for a 16” 2019 MacBook Pro. My at-home setup includes two 4K LG Ultrafine displays. My 2017 MacBook ran perfectly fine with the displays and the fan noise was almost silent. I don’t do anything too intensive: my work consists of virtual desktops and basic software. For entertainment, I browsed the web and played Hearthstone on medium settings.

However, my 2019 MacBook has been a disappointing mess to say the least. For a computer with a lot of improvements, it sure does seem like a downgrade. When using both displays and while playing Hearthstone, my computer sounds like a jet engine. The fan noise seems like a widespread issue.

This gets to my question: how does the Mac Mini (most recent model) run with two 4K monitors? Since I use it mainly as a desktop, I’m thinking of trading in my MacBook for a new unit. The Mac Pro is complete overkill for my needs and the iMac is ugly. Any thoughts?

 

[FilmIndustryGuy]

I used the Mac mini with only 1 4k ultrafine and it ran silent 100% of the time even on heavy load exporting 4k. performance was very smooth but I had 32gb ram and the quad core 3.6

 

[sergioarista]

q

Hello! I recently traded in a 2017 15” MacBook Pro for a 16” 2019 MacBook Pro. My at-home setup includes two 4K LG Ultrafine displays. My 2017 MacBook ran perfectly fine with the displays and the fan noise was almost silent. I don’t do anything too intensive: my work consists of virtual desktops and basic software. For entertainment, I browsed the web and played Hearthstone on medium settings.

However, my 2019 MacBook has been a disappointing mess to say the least. For a computer with a lot of improvements, it sure does seem like a downgrade. When using both displays and while playing Hearthstone, my computer sounds like a jet engine. The fan noise seems like a widespread issue.

This gets to my question: how does the Mac Mini (most recent model) run with two 4K monitors? Since I use it mainly as a desktop, I’m thinking of trading in my MacBook for a new unit. The Mac Pro is complete overkill for my needs and the iMac is ugly. Any thoughts?

I have that setup with 2 21.5” lg ultra fine monitors, which runs silent most of the times, but it depends very much on your use case; for example with FCPX runs very well, office apps, Safari an the like runs perfectly silent, but for streaming with OBS it struggles as the second monitor consumes too many resources ie. window server process consumes around 45% more cpu just to handle windows and tabs, and streaming multi cam full screen makes gpu go to 100% utilization.


So in short it runs very well for most of the apps most of the time depending in your use case scenario

 

[Fieldstone]

I have two 4K LG Ultrafine displays connected to my Mac Mini 2018. There are no noise at all.