Hey welcome back to the channel today we're looking at a 2014 Mac Mini to see
if it's still usable today.
So here we go
Ok, so this time I'm not gonna tell you how much I got this for because people
get all bent out of shape but let's just say I got a really really smoking good
deal on this and I wanted to see what I could do with it if it's still a usable
computer today so I'm gonna break this up into a few different areas I'll put
an index down in the description and then at the very end I'll tell you some
things you can do with this and who I think this machine is good for if you
have any questions along the way leave comments down below I'll also have links
to anything I talked about any websites I talked about in the description as
well so first let's get into the specs of this machine so like I mentioned this
is the 2014 Mac Mini it's got an i5 4278 you dual-core processor 16 gigs of 1600
ddr3 RAM it's got the iris pro 5100 integrated graphics and a 256 SSD drive
now this is the version with the SSD drive soldered onto the board as far as
ports on this thing it's got a Gigabit Ethernet HDMI port two thunderbolt 2
ports three USB 3 ports SDXC card reader audio in port 3.5 millimeter headphone
jack and an IR receiver alright so I did some really basic benchmarking and the
only thing I'm going to talk about in this video is the GPU and the CPU
because benchmarking is really not that important unless you're comparing it
directly to a machine but for this benchmark let's talk about cinnamon and
Geekbench so in Geekbench we got a single core score of 35 60 but the
multi-core score is 69 49 which is pretty low and that's because of this
dual core processor on Cinebench we got a cpu score of 273 which that's pretty
low that's not a great score but again we're talking about basically a mobile
processor but the OpenGL score was a little bit better than I thought it was
gonna be that came in at 23 point 4 3 now again that's not a great score but
you got to remember we're talking about an integrated GPU not a dedicated one so
I was actually expecting that to be much worse so the data they use is where this
thing really excels it performs really great I mean even by today's standards
things open quickly you can have multiple tabs and virtual desktops open
with that 16 gigs of RAM the applications perform really well so
unless you're using some really processor intensive applications which
kind of goes beyond the basic usage category then you're not going to have a
problem with this machine it performs really well even with that dual-core
processor in there all right now gaming as you might have guessed is not great
on this machine because of that integrated GPU modern triple-a titles 3d
games are not going to run well some of them you can get to run by setting the
resolution really really low but then it's not an enjoyable experience so it's
not even really worth doing that things that do work well are things like
terraria or oxygen not included rimworld anything beyond that is not worth trying
now that being said there are some options that'll let you stream games
through this computer and still use it to play these games some of those
options are NVIDIA GeForce now that's currently in beta and I have the beta
for that it works really well lets you stream games to the machine over the
network that works fine steam in-home streaming works really well if you have
another machine on the network it's a dedicated gaming machine you can stream
games to the Mac Mini that works well I've tried that there's also options for
streaming games from Xbox one and PlayStation 4 the Xbox one application
is called one cast you can download a free trial of that I'll put a link down
in the description to that on the PlayStation 4 side the PlayStation
remote play they have an app for Mac OS so those are just some options for
playing games on this machine and I'm curious if you've had experience with
these or have any other recommendations if you do leave those down in the
comments section below now the video editing side is a little bit of a mixed
bag with this first of all Adobe Premiere and DaVinci resolve do not
run well on this, I did some testing on that I didn't even bother to video
because it was a really poor experience now the Final Cut Pro on the other hand
I took 4k video right off my Lumix g7 here loaded onto a timeline it plays
back really smooth it scrubbed really smooth I could do basic color correction
add transitions and things like that now if your timeline gets too long and too
complex like you're doing a lot of effects and layering in titles and
things like that that's when it really starts to bog down and it becomes a lot
more troublesome there's a way around that you can transcode the media first
and then you don't have to worry about it works just
fine if you're working in 1080p you can get away with a lot more on your
timeline with the 1080p because it's a lot less intensive to process if you're
going to get one of these machines for video editing either keep it at 1080p or
transcode everything to ProRes before you edit it and then you won't have a
problem with Pro res so let me talk a little bit about upgrade options and
there are some upgrades that you can do to this machine even as small as it is
now if you have the spinning drive you can actually open this up take out that
spinning drive and replace it with an SSD and you'll get much much faster read
and write speeds you can get either a Thunderbolt 2 enclosure or a USB 3 drive
enclosure and just attach that you can use that as your primary drive your boot
drive that works just fine that's a cheap and really easy way to get faster
read and write speeds on your machine faster boot times all that good stuff
the next upgrade you can do and really the only other available one as far as I
know is an external GPU now these Mac minis are not supported natively to use
an external GPU but there is a way to do that I'm going to be doing a video on
that later but I'll put a link down in the description on this video to the
utility that'll take you out there and if you want some instructions on how to
do that stay tuned for that video now if you know of any other upgrades that I'm
missing please leave those down in the comment section below I'd love to hear
about those I really want to know what you can do to kind of pimp this thing
out so who's this machine for well really I see it for anybody that wants a
kind of a lower end basic video editing machine you can get away with this
especially if you don't mind transcoding you can get these really cheaply use
Final Cut Pro and it's a really efficient editor if somebody that just
wants a secondary computer to do notes on and browse the web and just do basic
computing tasks even office and stuff like that that works fine for that
somebody that wants a box that they can stream games to and any place in their
house you can just set this up stream it over the Wi-Fi or wired network this
also makes a really good media center PC it's small and sleek and compact it'll
fit into most setups you can stream music to it movies games all kinds of
stuff it's got a port on the front at infrared port so you can use a remote
control that works really well as there are a lot of options for these
machines other than what they were just intended for so the question is this
usable today I would say yes depending on your use case now if you're looking
for a super powerful machine that you can upgrade the heck out of no it's not
gonna be the right for machine for you if you're looking at for an affordable
machine that you can get things done on that may not be the fastest but may be
fast enough for you it may be an option to look at you can do some of those
basic upgrades on it and get a little more life out of it and you can get them
super cheap now so it may be something to consider depending on what you're
using it for so hopefully you found this video useful and informative if you did
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