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Comment by thirdsun | Hacker News Reader

Is that really an issue with Intel's integrated GPUs? Honestly asking.

I'm considering a Mac Mini, but there's no way I'm going back to low PPI displays and the lack of affordable 5K / 27" options concerns me (in my opinion 4K/UHD at 27" is a borderline unusable combination with its effective resolution of 1080p - feel free to convince me otherwise).

If those few 5K options can't be driven smoothly by an Intel GPU, it's settled and I'm waiting for an iMac update instead. Ideally I'd like a multi monitor setup though.

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I have an iMac 5K and I need to scale things up a little bit for my (tired) eyes.

For me personally 4K 27'' would be better. At 163 PPI it would be worse than the 218 PPI of the 5K display, but it would not be a deal breaker if the color quality was the same.

Looking to buy a 4k 27 inch external monitor for my 2018 macbook. What's the problem with it and why is it not better than a 1080p?

It's better than 1080p as it is much sharper and crisper, but 1080p at 27 inches results in rather large UI elements. An effective resolution of 2560x1440px (as seen in any iMac 27) seems like the proper resolution for a display of that size.

Read more about it here: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

I'm curios about this too, does the Mac Mini offer "scaled" options, like MacBooks do with their built-in display, when connecting to an external 4k monitor? I think it does some supersampling, resulting in higher effective resolution.

Sure, it does offer scaling, but you really want 2x scaling - I tried non-integer values on a 5k display, just to get a sense for it, and it was as disappointing as expected. Slightly blurry text, rather obvious that this wasn‘t the recommended native setting.

In my opinion 2x scaling is the only option and that leaves you with an effective resolution of 1920x1080 points - sure, it‘s sharp, but far from true 5k and more importantly the same screen real estate we used to fit into 20-24 incch displays for years. It‘s the wrong resolution for 27“.

Yes, it does. Though at that point it's effectively rendering at 5k anyway, so any performance problems you have with a real 5k you'll also have with that setup.

I found I preferred 4k at 27" to 24", because the larger sizes help with eye strain. Would definitely recommend trying both before buying if possible.

My Thinkpad with Intel integerated graphics is unable to power a 4k display as smoothly as my desktop with 1070. It definitely makes a difference.

The 545/645 found in the 13" MBPs can drive a 5k display adequately. Not sure about this 630, though.

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