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Comment by simongr3dal | Hacker News Reader

They can try to cram all the overheating CPU power into the thin chassis as much as they like, but it is lagging so much behind in GPU power.

The top-of-the-line option, a Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2, doesn't seems like it's going to perform much better than an NVidia Geforce GTX 1050[0], and at $350 extra it's twice the cost of a standalone NVidia Geforce GTX 1050.

[0]: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-pro-vega-20.c32...

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The sad part about this, I thought I'd put together a new Mac Mini as a once a month gaming machine and a daily OSX driver so I didn't have to built an entire gaming desktop.

Well there's an absolute ton of issues with external GPUs in bootcamped Windows.

So.. that's not even an option.

Yes, it's a bad idea. At that point I'd suggest

- getting a console, which probably offers the best price/performance ratio

- using something like ASRock's Deskmini A300 which is really affordable and features a GPU capable of light to medium gaming

- or use a proper desktop setup if you don't want to cut any corners

In any case stick to a proper Windows environment for gaming. My daily driver is a Mac Mini, but for gaming I boot up a dedicated Windows box.

Yeah I do build $1500-2500ish gaming PCs every few years. I game a lot less than I did a decade ago, maybe a few times a month, so I wanted OSX around when I wasn't. But I'm done building hackintoshes. I had a really nice one the last 3 years waiting on the Mini to ever (because we gave up) update and it did. I was really excited to use that with OSX as my daily and flip to Windows + egpu when I gamed. I'm glad I looked into it to verify it ran egpus horribly (if at all). I didn't expect there to be any issues with that. Figured it'd be perfect.

So now instead I've got a "gaming" desktop that sits pretty idle and a MBP again.. like usual.

Mobile GPUs perform absolutely miserably; no surprise given the design constraints. Using your link as a comparison, its nearest neighbors are top-of-the-line parts from nine years ago, and budget parts from four years ago.

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