Hi everyone, Aaron here for ZolloTech and this is the 2018 Mac mini.
Now if you're not familiar with this, that's probably because it hasn't been updated in
four years or so, but basically this is a computer you can buy and plug into any monitor
you would like.
So what I did is I bought this with the intent of actually using it as my main editing computer.
Previously I had been using a 2017 MacBook Pro fully spec'd out and I decided to pick
this up.
Now the first thing is the price.
These range all the way from $799 to $4199 and you can spec these out quite a lot with
a lot of different options for storage and RAM and things like that.
Now this one in particular is pretty expensive just because I wanted to edit video with it.
So this comes with a 3.2 Ghz 6-core 8th generation core i7.
It turbo boosts up to 4.6 Ghz.
It also has 32GB of RAM which you can replace.
You just flip this over, take the bottom off and you have to slide the whole computer out
of this container basically and then you can replace the RAM.
I didn't really want to get into that too much even though I could have, but I got 32GB
of RAM, 1TB of storage and then also a 10 Gigabit ethernet.
And we'll talk about the jack on the back in a moment.
It also has an Intel UHD Graphics 630.
Which that is the big downfall of this computer.
There is no dedicated graphics card inside of this.
The one thing they did do though is put a lot of really great ports on the back.
So on the back we have our power button.
Then we just have a plug where this actually connects to our power supply which is inside
the computer itself.
There is no power brick for this, just a simple plug to the wall.
10 Gigabit ethernet, 4 thunderbolt 3 ports, HDMI, two USB-A and a headphone out.
We also have a giant vent here on the back for a redesigned cooling system.
Now if we compare this with the previous generation.
It's the exact same dimension and everything it just has different ports on the back and
it's a different color.
So you'll see we have older ports on the back of the older one.
We have Thunderbolt 2 and then we have an SD slot, audio in, audio out and those are
a couple things they probably could have kept; the audio in and the SD card, but they decided
not to.
You'll see it's the exact same dimension as the previous generation, but it's a lot faster.
On the front it's the same except it doesn't have the IR port like the old one where you
could use a remote for it when it was out.
That's it, they're pretty much identical as far as form factor is concerned and then you
just have a new paint job of space gray.
Now this one comes in at $2599.
It's very expensive, but again I was going to edit video with it full time.
So the single core geekbench on this was pretty impressive.
Now I have seen higher scores that this.
This is what I got when I was running it.
I probably could get a little bit higher, but 5670 for single core and 24343 for multi-core.
If we take a look at a couple other benchmarks; lets do that now.
Now I ran Cinebench and you'll see the CPU score came in at 1001, where the Open GL score
came in at 46.17 frames per second.
Now my plan was to use with an eGPU.
What that means is I've got this connected to my monitor and then I use one of these
ports to connect to an external graphics chip of my choice.
So I'm using it with an RX580 and I got some pretty impressive results with that as well.
Now with the eGPU I got 1018 for the cpu and 67.94 frames per second for Open GL.
Now using Geekbench without the eGPU I got 23921 which isn't very impressive, but with
the eGPU I got 122604.
So it definitely makes a big difference.
Now I did all of my editing in Final Cut Pro and while you're using the timeline in Final
Cut Pro there's no slow downs whatsoever.
It's super fast all of the time and that parts really nice.
And the one thing I was really impressed with is even when you're exporting video there's
no thermal throttling.
Not really under its base clock speed of 3.2 Ghz.
So when you're editing video or exporting video, I did see it go to 3.2, bump up a little
bit higher and come down like I'd expect with turbo boost, but even though this computer
was at 90 to 100 degrees on the chipset it still maintained its base clock speed for
the most part.
My concern is the overall temperature over the long term and reliability of a long term.
And Apple's known pretty much at this point for having really warm Macs or really hot
thermals.
And the top of this Mac, I'm not sure if they are using it as a heat sync because it's always
about 110 degrees on the surface of this Mac mini.
So it's really warm all of the time.
So as far as editing video I did do a test exporting with the eGPU and without it.
And with the eGPU this file, I did the same file when I exported it through the MacBook
Air and the MacBook Pro and what I was using was an external solid state drive.
I have a Samsung T5 and I have all of my files for Final Cut on this.
This is my scratch disk.
I just connect it, it's actually USB-C, but it's using a Thunderbolt 3 cable.
USB-C into the back of the Mac mini and what happens is I edit off of this and export the
file onto the computer itself.
And in doing that I got fifteen minutes and twenty eight seconds with the eGPU.
Then I took the eGPU off, let it cool down a little bit and then exported it and got
twenty two minutes and thirty five seconds.
Now to compare that with a 2017 MacBook Pro that was fully spec'd out, I got thirteen
minutes and fifty eight seconds.
So I actually beat it probably due to that internal graphics chip.
Also, I ran that on the MacBook Air previously so I thought I'd share that here.
That was fifty minutes and fifty six seconds and a 2016 MacBook Pro was twenty four minutes
and thirty six seconds.
So yes it's fast, but I don't know if it's worth its price if you've already got a MacBook
Pro.
Now of course you can do everything outside of editing as well.
If it's going to run Final Cut Pro and export video and everything you can probably run
some pretty heavy things on this as long as they are not graphic intensive.
If they are you are going to want an eGPU for this so that's an additional cost.
And the eGPU isn't as fast as if you had an internal GPU so you may want to get an iMac
for example which would be faster and about the same price if you're going to spend for
the higher spec.
But if you want to get into the Mac ecosystem with a cheaper device around $800 to $1000
then this is the one to get.
It's actually the cheapest way to get into a Mac at this point.
So if you want to use it for web surfing, playing some games on FaceBook, whatever you'd
want this will do the job, but don't expect it to perform up to an iMac level or a MacBook
Pro or iMac Pro level.
SO that's it for the Mac mini, let me know what you think in the comments below.
I think this is a great little machine and definitely worth picking up if it's the right
fit for you.
But a lot of people will use these in server racks as well.
There are some server places that use these quite a bit in a row of them and just daisy
chain them together with the 10 Gigabit ethernet and that's it.
So let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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As always, thanks for watching.
This is Aaron, I'll see you next time.