[siidooloo]

A mac mini plus egpu would cost less then and iMac and have roughly similar performance. And if you go with VII, or a couple VIIs would get you better performance then a specced out iMac Pro for half the money. It would requires dongele-ing things off the machine but it gets you what you want.

Edit: Apple should offer a more elegent solution, but long term this is probably where most of the market is going. Most people don’t need as big a machine any more, and egpus offer 85% of the performance. I expect we’ll end up with people increasingly buying cpu units,gpu units, hard drive units.

[coldtea]

>A mac mini plus egpu would cost less then and iMac and have roughly similar performance.

And you'd have the bother of the external cables for the egpu, the extra cost of the adapter cage, slightly less performance, and no SSD/memory/etc upgradability still. And a stifled box with worse cooling than a tower could offer (and thus more throttling).

[siidooloo]

I agree.

[_ph_]

A Mac Mini with an eGpu and external drives is the closest thing to a normal desktop machine in the Apple universe, but it still is a very inelegant solution compared to if Apple offered a desktop machine between the Mini and the Pro. Also, while the Mini got a nice upgrade, for a real desktop, the processor isn't ample - the iMac at least offers an 8-core i9.

[vbezhenar]

I just have a thought. What about building a case for Mac Mini. Like you could put there Mac Mini, your drives, your GPU and then connect all that stuff via thunderbolt, all in a single enclosure. Also few fans to cool everything. Did someone make something similar?

[_ph_]

Hehe, I was thinking the same. First of all, I am surprised that none of the eGPU housings do have some space for storage drives, either 2.5" SATA or for NVMe cards. But when one is at it, make a bay for the Mini too :). Which also shows why it is so annoying that Apple doesn't just basically offer the Mini motherboard in a larger box.

[leoc]

You could probably build an eGPU box with the same footprint as the 2018 Mini for stacking above it: it should be just possible to fit a small-form-factor GPU in that space. It would be a lot less unwieldy and weird-looking than plunking a normal full-sized eGPU next to the Mini.

[gehwartzen]

The Sonnet Puck pretty much has that form factor (just not a matched case material) but tops out with an RX570 and uses MXM form factor cards so a bit less than ideal.

[_ph_]

especially, if the card would be in vertical, there should be place for a full-sized gpu.

[greedo]

I wish OWC made an updated ministack (https://www.owcdigital.com/products/ministack) that supported Thunderbolt and had a built in PSU.

[kalleboo]

Sonnet sells a rackmount case https://www.sonnettech.com/product/xmacminiservertb3.html