The new Mac Mini is a powerhouse, featuring up to a six-core i7 processor in a very small enclosure —that could lead to thermal constraints. AppleInsider strains the Mac mini, to see what happens when the machine is under load for a long time, and to see how bad the impact is on performance.
Apple’s Mac Mini is still the most inexpensive way to get a Mac, even though the base price is $300 more than the base model from 2014. Given the inclusion of four Thunderbolt 3 ports, it’s a difficult compare to the cheapest Wintel hardware, and is price and performance competitive with Intel’s NUC hardware for the first time.
The six-core Core i7 processor can be had for as low as $1099, and we feel that this model will be very popular in the scientific community, and for users not afraid to add external storage and add their own RAM. But, like the Core i9 in the MacBook Pro, that is a lot of heat in a very small enclosure when under load.
So, like with that MacBook Pro, we ran some tests to see how thermally constrained the enclosure is. Our test unit has 256GB of NVMe storage, and 32GB of RAM, retailing for $1899.
Read more at AppleInsider.com