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More RAM or EGPU

T

Timothy Leo Crowley

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 5, 2016
197
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I have a 2018 Mac mini 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3 with 8 gigs of ram.

I am thinking of doing a but of an upgrade. I have a couple of questions.

Which will make my Mac preform better, especially with the Apple Photos app and some light video editing. Upgrade to 32 gigs of ram? Or buying an EGPU.

Does the Photos app support an EGPU?

Any info or suggestions most welcome.

Mahalo
 
RAM is temporary data storage. It doesn't make a computer compute faster. Adding a faster processor (e.g., an EGPU) will.
 
Last edited:
drmeatball said:
Ram first. Always ram. Ram is where your computer does it's thinking. Doesn't matter how fast the brain is if there's no room to think (which results in disk swapping).
Click to expand...
I can flip that around just as easily and say that it doesn’t matter how much data space you have if the processor can’t think any faster. That’s why I recommended the GPU. RAM is temporary data storage—it doesn’t make the computer process data inherently faster. If it’s lacking, it can slow the machine down as memory management tasks suck away CPU cycles. But that is seldom a problem, as we almost never see the memory pressure any color other than green.
 
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I wouldn’t even consider an eGPU until I upgraded to at least 16GB of RAM, preferably 32GB.
I do quite.a bit of work with photos and short videos. I still own a 2014 Mini with only 8GB or RAM. The main reason I bought a 2018 i7 Mini wasn't the much faster CPU, it was to be able to increase the RAM.

But you don’t need any of us to tell you what is best for you to do. You can tell whether RAM or CPU/GPU is your problem by using the Activity Monitor while you do whatever you normally do. Just open Activity Monitor and click on the Memory tab, Then open the CPU History window. Keep an eye on the little memory graph at the bottom of the Activity Monitor. If the memory graph goes yellow or red you need more RAM. If the CPU cores are always working flat out you need an eGPU.

GetRealBro
 
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getrealbro said:
I wouldn’t even consider an eGPU until I upgraded to at least 16GB of RAM, preferably 32GB.
I do quite.a bit of work with photos and short videos. I still own a 2014 Mini with only 8GB or RAM. The main reason I bought a 2018 i7 Mini wasn't the much faster CPU, it was to be able to increase the RAM.

But you don’t need any of us to tell you what is best for you to do. You can tell whether RAM or CPU/GPU is your problem by using the Activity Monitor while you do whatever you normally do. Just open Activity Monitor and click on the Memory tab, Then open the CPU History window. Keep an eye on the little memory graph at the bottom of the Activity Monitor. If the memory graph goes yellow or red you need more RAM. If the CPU cores are always working flat out you need an eGPU.

GetRealBro
Click to expand...


Thank you. That's a great tip. I hadn't thought of that.
 
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Timothy Leo Crowley said:
I have a 2018 Mac mini 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3 with 8 gigs of ram.

I am thinking of doing a but of an upgrade. I have a couple of questions.

Which will make my Mac preform better, especially with the Apple Photos app and some light video editing. Upgrade to 32 gigs of ram? Or buying an EGPU.

Does the Photos app support an EGPU?

Any info or suggestions most welcome.

Mahalo
Click to expand...

Buy an Egpu and you will be happy
 
eGPU costs a lot more than RAM. Just an empty eGPU enclosure without a card in it already costs more than a 32GB RAM kit for the Mini.
 
Timothy Leo Crowley said:
I have a 2018 Mac mini 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i3 with 8 gigs of ram.

I am thinking of doing a but of an upgrade. I have a couple of questions.

Which will make my Mac preform better, especially with the Apple Photos app and some light video editing. Upgrade to 32 gigs of ram? Or buying an EGPU.

Does the Photos app support an EGPU?

Any info or suggestions most welcome.

Mahalo
Click to expand...

If you are just doing light video editing and Apple Photos app, the best upgrade would be to add a few external USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3 SSD drives of say 1Tb and up. Don't edit video and photos on the main boot drive as that will simply slow your computer down. If you have a base Core i3 2018 model, you probably have a 128Gb SSD drive in it and that is pretty limiting for photos and light video editing.

Your Core i3 is very capable in editing 1080p and 4K footage coming from an iPhone or a normal camera if you are just using the latest iMovie. The minimum requirement for iMovie for 4K editing is 4GB of RAM, so 8GB is plenty. Where you need more than 8GB is when you are dealing with Final Cut Pro X or Davinci Resolve and 4K RAW files, color grading, professional 3D effects, FUSION and where that's when you may benefit from an eGPU. The fact of the matter is, you really don't need an eGPU for light video editing (that's an overkill), because the iGPU HD630 on the Mini 2018 is far more capable than the older HD4000 or HD3000 or the HD Iris of the past models. And the Intel's iGPU in conjunction with the Apple T2 can encode 4K and 1080p movies for viewing on your iPhone or iPad in no time. It's all there.

What is important in video editing is disk I/O and disk storage. You don't yet have any external fast drives to act as your video scratch and video read drives. When you buy those, you will help your Mac Mini edit movies more smoothly. iMovie doesn't really need 32GB of RAM and for light video editing and you don't need to go out and get Final Cut Pro X or Davinci Resolve. Use what is given to you by Apple free of charge.
 
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chabig said:
RAM is temporary data storage. It doesn't make a computer compute faster. Adding a faster processor (e.g., an EGPU) will.
Click to expand...

Your processor can read data from RAM much faster than from a hard drive + the faster the RAM, the faster the processing speed. Telling someone that 8GB is enough in 2020 doesn't seem like a smart advice to me.

If the person is not gaming, upgrading from 8GB to 32GB would be a much smarter move then leaving the 8GB in tact and adding an EGPU.
 
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iluvmacs99 said:
If you are just doing light video editing and Apple Photos app, the best upgrade would be to add a few external USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3 SSD drives of say 1Tb and up. Don't edit video and photos on the main boot drive as that will simply slow your computer down. If you have a base Core i3 2018 model, you probably have a 128Gb SSD drive in it and that is pretty limiting for photos and light video editing.

Your Core i3 is very capable in editing 1080p and 4K footage coming from an iPhone or a normal camera if you are just using the latest iMovie. The minimum requirement for iMovie for 4K editing is 4GB of RAM, so 8GB is plenty. Where you need more than 8GB is when you are dealing with Final Cut Pro X or Davinci Resolve and 4K RAW files, color grading, professional 3D effects, FUSION and where that's when you may benefit from an eGPU. The fact of the matter is, you really don't need an eGPU for light video editing (that's an overkill), because the iGPU HD630 on the Mini 2018 is far more capable than the older HD4000 or HD3000 or the HD Iris of the past models. And the Intel's iGPU in conjunction with the Apple T2 can encode 4K and 1080p movies for viewing on your iPhone or iPad in no time. It's all there.

What is important in video editing is disk I/O and disk storage. You don't yet have any external fast drives to act as your video scratch and video read drives. When you buy those, you will help your Mac Mini edit movies more smoothly. iMovie doesn't really need 32GB of RAM and for light video editing and you don't need to go out and get Final Cut Pro X or Davinci Resolve. Use what is given to you by Apple free of charge.
Click to expand...

+1

I bought an eGPU but purely because of using motion graphics. Before I did that I tested some of the motion 5 projects on a bare i7 Mac mini and it ran them. Very slowly though. For standard 1080 and a bit of 4k footage from a camera I'd imagine the i3 will handle with ease.

Stick about 16gb of Ram, 32 if you fancy spending the extra but it's unlikely to need it. I run 8gb on a 2018 i7 MacBook Pro and I rarely go into the Amber on memory pressure when doing light/mobile processing (what the laptop is for).

What makes the difference is having a couple of external USB C (Gen2) drives with a Sabrent & Samsung PCIe NVMe drives that run at 950mbs read and 700mbs write. Keep the internal drive clear of any clutter and store everything on the two drives.
 
The reality is that an eGPU isn’t going to make your workflow all that much faster. Apple Photos uses Metal, but mostly in stuff that has to be close to real-time already. If that’s not laggy, it won’t help you much. Same with video work, if it isn’t laggy during editing, an eGPU isn’t going to be all that noticeable. Some very specific things will be a lot faster, but they aren’t things you do often as a lighter user.

RAM and CPU are going to be a more noticeable impact, and RAM is the only one of the two you can upgrade without replacing the whole system. RAM first.
 
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I use my '18 Mini for photo editing. I upgraded to 32GB (installed myself) and the benefit is very noticeable. Many photo apps don't utilize a gpu for most tasks. Those that do will also still run fine (if a bit slower) without the eGpu. I did buy one later on. Only marginal improvement for the cost.

RAM is the most important upgrade you can do. Get the gpu after.
 
chabig said:
I can flip that around just as easily and say that it doesn’t matter how much data space you have if the processor can’t think any faster. That’s why I recommended the GPU. RAM is temporary data storage—it doesn’t make the computer process data inherently faster. If it’s lacking, it can slow the machine down as memory management tasks suck away CPU cycles. But that is seldom a problem, as we almost never see the memory pressure any color other than green.
Click to expand...

You could flip it around, but it would not hold up.

An egpu probably makes sense for a small fraction of users for a few reasons. It's a non-standard option, so it isn't always well supported. You would have to find a card that is well supported. OSX lacks CUDA, which is one of the more reliable frameworks for gpu based acceleration. A lot of applications benefit minimally under most workloads.

If most of your workload isn't easily parallelizable over a massive number of threads from the implementation end, then it's not a compelling candidate for gpu acceleration. These things are not really synchronous with the cpu with cpu functionality, so you need tasks that perform a lot of work relative toe the amount of data transferred to really benefit. When you externalize the gpu, you need even more work to benefit, at least partly due to increased communication latency.
 
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