The author's Experience with their Mac Mini Setup

For this project, I needed to plug in Internet and display the graphics card itself had two HDMI ports to display ports and a DVI port so you should have no problem connecting this to any modern monitor. However, by far my biggest complaint with this box overall is the fan noise even when under no sort of load at all it still makes a noticeable sound you can always hear the fans going off unless the Mac Mini is asleep but for me it's a necessary sacrifice. It is kind of obnoxious coming from an almost completely silent Mac Mini setup but it's totally worth it for those performance boosts and that I can get used to it and I guess a silver lining here is that you don't actually notice an increase in the fan noise when the GPU is actually under load utilizing it for color grading and effects and whatnot.

Benchmarks: Performance Comparison with eGPU

Of course, I wanted to run some benchmarks just to prove that buying all this stuff for the Mac Mini is actually worth. You're actually going to see performance gains so the first benchmark I did was the standard Bruce x5k test if you're not sure what that is it's essentially just an XML file that you import into your timeline it basically brings in a bunch of GPU intensive generators titles transitions and the effects at a very short time but at a 5k resolution. Taking a look at some of the results, the Mac Mini without the SSD and without the eGPU took a minute and 59 seconds to export which is not bad on its own but then when you throw in the eGPU it only took a minute and 17 seconds closer to a minute and 18 seconds but we'll just call it a minute in 17 and it was like a minute at 17 and 95 milliseconds. But here's where you see a much more noticeable difference.

Further Benchmarks: Rendering Times

I basically just did a render out not even an export just to render out of a five-minute video, it's a video I actually have on the channel, the iPhone 11 vs. 1 + 70 comparison so I rendered up a timeline without the SSD and without the GPU and that took 36 minutes and 21 seconds which is not fun at all but whether you throw on the GPU it only took 27 minutes in 32 seconds which is a lot better for some people who aren't professionals who don't do this for a living. That less than 10 minute difference is not going to matter much but for those who are I'm sure you know that having a GPU at the Mac Mini setup is critical even though these benchmarks generally speak aren't very very drastic when looking at them comparatively just the general performance and validity of this machine when doing graphical and video work has gone up a crap-ton. For example, I don't have to look at my footage in performance mode and FCPX anymore I can look at them and play back my footage in full quality which is something I definitely couldn't do after adding color special effects transitions and whatnot.

Conclusion: The Mac Mini Setup's Performance

The author concludes that their Mac Mini setup has been a great overall experience, especially for those who want the best performance without breaking the bank. However, they mention that the fan noise can be obnoxious, but it's worth it for the performance gains. They also appreciate the increase in performance when using the eGPU and the SSD, which allows them to render videos quickly and efficiently.

Peripherals: Logitech Crafstax and BenQ 4K Thunderbolt 3 Monitor

The author uses a Logitech Craft mouse with an MX Master 2 as their primary peripherals. They mention that they have recently added a BenQ 4K Thunderbolt 3 monitor to their setup, which has been great for connecting the SSD directly to it.

Products Used and Links:

* Mac Mini

* eGPU

* SSD (Solid-State Drive)

* RAM (Memory Upgrade)

* BenQ 4K Thunderbolt 3 Monitor

* Logitech Craft Mouse with MX Master 2

All products used in this setup are linked in the description below for those interested in purchasing or learning more about them.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys I'm all CEO of nine-to-five Mac and in the past few months I've been looking for a new Mac desktop to use as my main machine for video editing and whatnot but I didn't want to spend more than $2,000 so how did I go about doing that well that's what this video is about today we're gonna be going over my ultimate Mac Mini setup under $2,000 firstly I picked up the baseline I five Mac Mini with eight gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigs storage for a grand total of nine twenty nine on amazon.com I don't think that sale is still active but I was lucky to give for that price when I did so the first thing I did knowing that the 8 gigabyte of RAM and 256 gigs of storage was not gonna cut it I went out and got a 16 gig single stick from Kingston and it only cost me about 70 bucks for a grand total of 20 gigs of RAM and yes I know that is a super weird number but it's better than 8 gigs for sure and I know it's gonna give me a noticeable performance boost when video editing and whatnot and if you're looking to do the same thing with your Mac Mini doing a self user upgrade Jeff did a great video on the channel giving you a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so it's the video I used whoo and I installed the RAM on my machine and because I only got a single dipstick I know when the time comes when I'm ready to upgrade I can just spend another 70 bucks and get a grand total of 32 gigs of RAM in the machine which is pretty cool adding in that 16 gigs of ram has been pretty helpful overall when using apps that are hella RAM hungry like Chrome and all the Adobe applications you can see a noticeable difference so I'm glad I got this in here now on addressing the storage side of things I knew there was really only one Avenue I could take given the way the Mac Mini is built all the storage is soldered on so I really only have one choice and that was to get an external Thunderbolt 3 Drive so I scoured the internet looking for something that would fit my fancy and fit the desired budget and then I came across the shell from fledging it's a small portable Thunderbolt 3 Drive and I've loved using it so far their Amazon listing claims that it has transfer speeds of up to 2,000 megabits Plus read it right and I gotta say when throwing it on the Blackmagic disc test does just that it's 385 for the one terabyte version of this drive and I got a say for that price it's a great option it's only a little bit taller and thicker than a Samsung t5 and still smaller than a Samsung x5 plus I really like that it has an aluminum chassis to match the aesthetics of the Mac Mini kinda it's not exactly space grey but it'll do for sure another really great aspect of this drive is that it's portable like I said so a certain scenario that I utilize quite often almost on a weekly if not daily basis and starting a video here in the office and then when I've got to go I just finish it up on the MacBook Air because I have a Final Cut library saved on the drive and that makes it incredibly easy for me to use I can just pick up right where I left off but overall I just got to say I really have loved using the shell from fledging if you're looking for a semi inexpensive or at least comparatively inexpensive Thunderbolt 3 Drive this is definitely one you should check out there will be links in the description down below arguably the most important part of this upgrade setup is the GPU because as you all know the Mac Mini does not come with a dedicated graphics card which sucks but power colors got us covered this is the power color Mini Pro it's an all-in-one a GPU solution and it's made by power color with the 570 graphics card inside with eight gigabytes of vram and as you can see with the videos I make color and graphical work a huge aspect of my workflow so without this accessory I wouldn't be able to edit videos efficiently nor properly you can snag this guy for 480 bucks on Amazon right now and for those looking to use a 570 GPU externally this is probably one of the best solutions you can get as buying the graphics card and a chassis separately are likely going to cost you a little bit more money you can really tell they put a lot of effort into making the chassis as small as possible it's less than four inches wide and can easily be snuck behind a desk set up if you don't want the e GPU being seen on your desk obviously white isn't an issue either because you can easily carry this guy with one hand or even bring with you on a trip or something of that nature and obviously the biggest part or the heaviest part of the setup as far as the easy view is concerned is going to be the power supply because it's separate from the chassis but yeah I actually took the power color mini Pro with me on a trip and I was editing with the MacBook err raw canon c200 footage and it worked pretty well taking a look around the mini pro box itself it's got two USB 3.0 ports on the front alongside the Thunderbolt three port so if you needed to plug in any extra peripherals you can do that here and even though most mac mini users including myself won't have much use for it there's a Gigabit Ethernet port on the other side if you need plug in Internet the graphics card itself has two HDMI ports to display ports and a DVI port so you should have no problem connecting this to any modern monitor but by far my biggest complaint with this box overall is the fan noise even when under no sort of load at all it still makes a noticeable sound you can always hear the fans going off unless the Mac Mini is asleep but for me it's a necessary sacrifice it is kind of obnoxious coming from an almost completely silent Mac Mini setup but it's totally worth it for those performance boosts and that I can get used to it and I guess a silver lining here is that you don't actually notice an increase in the fan noise when the GPU is actually under load utilizing it for color grading and effects and whatnot so take that for what it is so of course I wanted to run some benchmarks just to prove that buying all this stuff for the Mac Mini is actually worth than you're actually going to see performance gains so the first benchmark I did was the standard Bruce x5k test if you're not sure what that is it's essentially just an XML file that you import into your timeline it basically brings in a bunch of GPU intensive generators titles transitions and the effects at a very short time but at a 5k resolution if you've watched any benchmarking videos on the channel in the past done by Jeff I'm sure you're aware of what it is so taking a look at some of the results the Mac Mini without the SSD and without the e GPU took a minute and 59 seconds to export which is not bad on its own but then when you throw in the e GPU it only took a minute in 17 seconds closer to a minute in 18 seconds but we'll just call it a minute in 17 and it was like a minute at 17 and 95 milliseconds but either way pretty noticeable difference but here's where you see a much more noticeable difference I basically just did a render out not even an export just to render out of a five-minute video it's a video I actually have on the channel the iPhone 11 vs. 1 + 70 comparison so I rendered up a timeline without the SSD and without the GPU and that took 36 minutes and 21 seconds which is not fun at all but whether you throw on the GPU it only took 27 minutes in 32 seconds which is a lot better for some people who aren't professionals who don't do this for a living that less than 10 minute difference is not going to matter much but for those who are I'm sure you know that having a GPU at the Mac Mini setup is critical even though these benchmarks generally speak aren't very very drastic when looking at them comparatively just the general performance and validity of this machine when doing graphical and video work has gone up a crap-ton for example I don't have to look at my footage in performance mode and FCPX anymore I can look at them and play back my footage in full quality which is something I definitely couldn't do after adding color special effects transitions and whatnot that's something I can do just fine perfectly smooth with the EGP you RAM in SSD it's been a great overall setup for me to have and it's totally worth it if you want to Mac Mini but you really want the best performance you can get under that $2,000 mark some of these products might have gone off sale so you might see it a bit over 2000 but it's all definitely gonna be under that 2100 mark which I feel is great for what you're getting I've edited Rossie 200 footage raw red footage on here and had little to no issues the export times could be a little bit shorter but like I said for under $2,000 I'm definitely not going to complain and for my personal everyday workflow it's been a great great setup to have so like I said all these products will be linked in the description down below if you want to check them out the SSD the RAM and of course the e GPU as well as other products that I've added to my desk set up like I've recently added to this thirty-one point five inch Ben q 4k Thunderbolt 3 monitor which has been really great because I can just plug my SSD right into that guy and as far as peripherals goes because the Mac Mini doesn't come with any a keyboard and mouse I'm still rocking the Logitech crafts in MX master 2's with hopefully the new versions on the way but yeah all that stuff will be linked down the description for you to check out and that's pretty much it for this video if you enjoyed make sure to give a thumbs up and stay subscribed because there's definitely more content coming from us very very soon thanks for watching and I'll talk to you guys in the next onewhat's up guys I'm all CEO of nine-to-five Mac and in the past few months I've been looking for a new Mac desktop to use as my main machine for video editing and whatnot but I didn't want to spend more than $2,000 so how did I go about doing that well that's what this video is about today we're gonna be going over my ultimate Mac Mini setup under $2,000 firstly I picked up the baseline I five Mac Mini with eight gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigs storage for a grand total of nine twenty nine on amazon.com I don't think that sale is still active but I was lucky to give for that price when I did so the first thing I did knowing that the 8 gigabyte of RAM and 256 gigs of storage was not gonna cut it I went out and got a 16 gig single stick from Kingston and it only cost me about 70 bucks for a grand total of 20 gigs of RAM and yes I know that is a super weird number but it's better than 8 gigs for sure and I know it's gonna give me a noticeable performance boost when video editing and whatnot and if you're looking to do the same thing with your Mac Mini doing a self user upgrade Jeff did a great video on the channel giving you a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so it's the video I used whoo and I installed the RAM on my machine and because I only got a single dipstick I know when the time comes when I'm ready to upgrade I can just spend another 70 bucks and get a grand total of 32 gigs of RAM in the machine which is pretty cool adding in that 16 gigs of ram has been pretty helpful overall when using apps that are hella RAM hungry like Chrome and all the Adobe applications you can see a noticeable difference so I'm glad I got this in here now on addressing the storage side of things I knew there was really only one Avenue I could take given the way the Mac Mini is built all the storage is soldered on so I really only have one choice and that was to get an external Thunderbolt 3 Drive so I scoured the internet looking for something that would fit my fancy and fit the desired budget and then I came across the shell from fledging it's a small portable Thunderbolt 3 Drive and I've loved using it so far their Amazon listing claims that it has transfer speeds of up to 2,000 megabits Plus read it right and I gotta say when throwing it on the Blackmagic disc test does just that it's 385 for the one terabyte version of this drive and I got a say for that price it's a great option it's only a little bit taller and thicker than a Samsung t5 and still smaller than a Samsung x5 plus I really like that it has an aluminum chassis to match the aesthetics of the Mac Mini kinda it's not exactly space grey but it'll do for sure another really great aspect of this drive is that it's portable like I said so a certain scenario that I utilize quite often almost on a weekly if not daily basis and starting a video here in the office and then when I've got to go I just finish it up on the MacBook Air because I have a Final Cut library saved on the drive and that makes it incredibly easy for me to use I can just pick up right where I left off but overall I just got to say I really have loved using the shell from fledging if you're looking for a semi inexpensive or at least comparatively inexpensive Thunderbolt 3 Drive this is definitely one you should check out there will be links in the description down below arguably the most important part of this upgrade setup is the GPU because as you all know the Mac Mini does not come with a dedicated graphics card which sucks but power colors got us covered this is the power color Mini Pro it's an all-in-one a GPU solution and it's made by power color with the 570 graphics card inside with eight gigabytes of vram and as you can see with the videos I make color and graphical work a huge aspect of my workflow so without this accessory I wouldn't be able to edit videos efficiently nor properly you can snag this guy for 480 bucks on Amazon right now and for those looking to use a 570 GPU externally this is probably one of the best solutions you can get as buying the graphics card and a chassis separately are likely going to cost you a little bit more money you can really tell they put a lot of effort into making the chassis as small as possible it's less than four inches wide and can easily be snuck behind a desk set up if you don't want the e GPU being seen on your desk obviously white isn't an issue either because you can easily carry this guy with one hand or even bring with you on a trip or something of that nature and obviously the biggest part or the heaviest part of the setup as far as the easy view is concerned is going to be the power supply because it's separate from the chassis but yeah I actually took the power color mini Pro with me on a trip and I was editing with the MacBook err raw canon c200 footage and it worked pretty well taking a look around the mini pro box itself it's got two USB 3.0 ports on the front alongside the Thunderbolt three port so if you needed to plug in any extra peripherals you can do that here and even though most mac mini users including myself won't have much use for it there's a Gigabit Ethernet port on the other side if you need plug in Internet the graphics card itself has two HDMI ports to display ports and a DVI port so you should have no problem connecting this to any modern monitor but by far my biggest complaint with this box overall is the fan noise even when under no sort of load at all it still makes a noticeable sound you can always hear the fans going off unless the Mac Mini is asleep but for me it's a necessary sacrifice it is kind of obnoxious coming from an almost completely silent Mac Mini setup but it's totally worth it for those performance boosts and that I can get used to it and I guess a silver lining here is that you don't actually notice an increase in the fan noise when the GPU is actually under load utilizing it for color grading and effects and whatnot so take that for what it is so of course I wanted to run some benchmarks just to prove that buying all this stuff for the Mac Mini is actually worth than you're actually going to see performance gains so the first benchmark I did was the standard Bruce x5k test if you're not sure what that is it's essentially just an XML file that you import into your timeline it basically brings in a bunch of GPU intensive generators titles transitions and the effects at a very short time but at a 5k resolution if you've watched any benchmarking videos on the channel in the past done by Jeff I'm sure you're aware of what it is so taking a look at some of the results the Mac Mini without the SSD and without the e GPU took a minute and 59 seconds to export which is not bad on its own but then when you throw in the e GPU it only took a minute in 17 seconds closer to a minute in 18 seconds but we'll just call it a minute in 17 and it was like a minute at 17 and 95 milliseconds but either way pretty noticeable difference but here's where you see a much more noticeable difference I basically just did a render out not even an export just to render out of a five-minute video it's a video I actually have on the channel the iPhone 11 vs. 1 + 70 comparison so I rendered up a timeline without the SSD and without the GPU and that took 36 minutes and 21 seconds which is not fun at all but whether you throw on the GPU it only took 27 minutes in 32 seconds which is a lot better for some people who aren't professionals who don't do this for a living that less than 10 minute difference is not going to matter much but for those who are I'm sure you know that having a GPU at the Mac Mini setup is critical even though these benchmarks generally speak aren't very very drastic when looking at them comparatively just the general performance and validity of this machine when doing graphical and video work has gone up a crap-ton for example I don't have to look at my footage in performance mode and FCPX anymore I can look at them and play back my footage in full quality which is something I definitely couldn't do after adding color special effects transitions and whatnot that's something I can do just fine perfectly smooth with the EGP you RAM in SSD it's been a great overall setup for me to have and it's totally worth it if you want to Mac Mini but you really want the best performance you can get under that $2,000 mark some of these products might have gone off sale so you might see it a bit over 2000 but it's all definitely gonna be under that 2100 mark which I feel is great for what you're getting I've edited Rossie 200 footage raw red footage on here and had little to no issues the export times could be a little bit shorter but like I said for under $2,000 I'm definitely not going to complain and for my personal everyday workflow it's been a great great setup to have so like I said all these products will be linked in the description down below if you want to check them out the SSD the RAM and of course the e GPU as well as other products that I've added to my desk set up like I've recently added to this thirty-one point five inch Ben q 4k Thunderbolt 3 monitor which has been really great because I can just plug my SSD right into that guy and as far as peripherals goes because the Mac Mini doesn't come with any a keyboard and mouse I'm still rocking the Logitech crafts in MX master 2's with hopefully the new versions on the way but yeah all that stuff will be linked down the description for you to check out and that's pretty much it for this video if you enjoyed make sure to give a thumbs up and stay subscribed because there's definitely more content coming from us very very soon thanks for watching and I'll talk to you guys in the next one\n"