Prebuilt Anyone else look at the M1 Mac Mini and get a bit jealous?

[Skripka]

The more I think about it, and the longer the outrageous GPU prices continue...the more I think of minimal-izing getting an M1 for all my non-gaming computing tasks. It would be smaller in volume than comparable home-builts, use less power, be quieter, and so on. Somewhat annoyingly from a space-efficiency perspective I think 50% of the device enclosure at present is empty space.

The catches of course being gaming, and choice of OS...also this FSYNC implementation issue that I would sincerely hope is a bug:

Golem.de: IT-News für Profis

 

[Phuncz]

Most of Apple's hardware designs are envy inducing. I can only imagine the playground some of the higher level engineers get to play with. I expect the industrial design engineers get a lot of freedom to reach the design goals. Look at the Mac Pro in my avatar: cylindrical aluminium enclosure, a triangular shaped heatsink, GPU and CPU PCBs attached to it. We all would love to be able to design our hardware around our enclosure projects, but in the end it's just too complex, too costly or too prohibitively, while Apple just puts it on a shelf. Often for a very high price though.

There's a lot to say about the brand otherwise, but their industrial design and hardware innovations are impressive.

 

[NinoPecorino]

it looks like intel, amd, and nvidia will be producing products similar to the m1 chip in the next few years and i'm sure there will be very attractive sff cases to follow

 

[LeChuck81]

If someone is going to build a (very) SFF desktop around the soon-to-be-released Ryzen 6000 mobile APUs, namely the "U", series, I believe they can easily achieve something comparatively small to a Mac Mini M1 and similar (if not better) in performance.
And, incidentally, something you could also gaming decently on.

 

[Skripka]

If someone is going to build a (very) SFF desktop around the soome-to-be-released Ryzen 6000 mobile APUs, namely the "U", series, I believe they can easily achieve something comparatively small to a Mac Mini M1 and similar (if not better) in performance.
And, incidentally, something you could also gaming decently on.

We'll see. Even the Minisform HX90 is still 30% bigger in volume (2.2L vs 1.4L), it also is as nice a desk ornament as a Linksys wifi router from 15 years ago...My only experience with a mini-PC is a Lenovo Ryzen APU something or other that is in the fam for a light-duty office machine. That thing is not quiet at idle, and at load is annoying.

Thinking that if I actually did this....I'd move my NCase remote, then no need for fighting low settings and framerates with APUs or the noise. Use optical-USB/Displayport, have a KVM switch to my USB hub, and a Mini on my desktop.

 

[XcPNehVYlE4A3C]

my setup is basically like this, except i recently upgraded to a m1 max macbook so i can have a nice GPU on the mac side too. I dock to the desk or use RDP to work on the PC.

SFF has been stagnant and boring the last few years, Asrock really gave it a good shot with the deskmini GTX/RX, but sadly that didnt take off.

but apples move to ARM just shot us into the next level of SFF ive been dreaming of for years: a powerful, silent, low-power, tiny, portable machine... everything but affordable i guess (although the base model mini at 600$ is a great deal imo)

oh and the funny part, if you look inside the m1 mac mini - its half empty, and iirc is using an oversized power supply from the intel mini. the whole computer could be the size of a small laptop power brick

 

[gazpl]

there are more mini pcs with ryzen 5900hx.
morefine s500+
beelink GTR5

got the s500+ here, fan is pretty loud under load but it supports 64GB ram and packs quite a punch in 1L (cinebench r23 multi 11.9k)

There's also the asrock jupiter x300 if you are looking for a small barebone (5700G is a stretch but a 5600G could be fine)

 

[Questors]

No. I have never and will never be jealous of anything coming out of Apple, ever. They are one of the most garbage anti-consumer proprietary locked down anal retentive companies that has ever existed.

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

Way to go :