- #BEST GAMING EXTERNAL GRAPHICS CARD FOR PC 2018 UPGRADE#
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The only limit on the Helios FX enclosure is that it won't fit the Vega 64 cards. This is the OWC Mercury Helios FX eGPU case. I'd simply be able to buy the next generation and drop it into the Helios FX enclosure.
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Even if I upgrade after a year or two of use, I can probably get close to half my board cost back. It's a standard PC board, and given how many crypto miners are buying up GPUs, there's always a used board market. There's no upgrade path between the two units.īy contrast, I can sell my Vega 56 at any time. Had you bought that for $699, you would have been out of luck in October, just four months later, when Apple introduced the eGPU Pro.
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In June, Apple announced the BlackMagic eGPU, containing a Radeon Pro 580 GPU. While the extra $320 might be worth it for the extra ports, the big ding against Apple's eGPU solution is that it's not upgradeable.
It also contains an 8GB Vega 56, but it adds a bunch of ports, turning it into a Thunderbolt hub. Now, compare that to Apple's recommended BlackMagic eGPU Pro, which sells for $1,199.
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If you add the $299 price of the Helios FX enclosure to the $579 GPU, the total eGPU solution cost is $879.Īlso: Max out your new Mac Mini with iFixit's new RAM upgrade kit It's still a whole lot less expensive than a MacBook Pro or iMac, both with screens I didn't want. See it now: Helios FX enclosure at AmazonĪt $579, the card was a quarter of the cost of the whole Mac Mini, but I expected the expense when I planned the purchase.See it now: Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX Vega 56 at Amazon.The exact model I bought was the Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX Vega 56 8GB HBM2 Dual HDMI/DP PCI-E Graphics Card. To that, I added the Sapphire Vega 56 card recommended directly by Apple. I've reviewed a number of OWC products in the past with excellent results, so I reached out to it for its Mercury Helios FX eGPU enclosure. Toss some effects on top of that stream, add a third or fourth 4K video layer, and the chipboard 630 chip didn't have the chops.įor that kind of load, an eGPU was necessary. But add a second camera and everything slowed to a crawl. But I will tell you this: The off-the-shelf Mac Mini i7 with 32GB of RAM edited a single 4K video stream in Final Cut surprisingly well. I'm not going to give you benchmarks, because they can be found all over the web. When I built out my 2018 Mac Mini with the intent of making it my main workhorse machine, I knew its onboard Intel 630 graphics were probably not good enough for the kind of graphics load multicam 4K video editing requires. That means that all modern Macs, from the lowliest 2018 MacBook Air to the Mac Mini, can be turbocharged with a high-end graphics card in an eGPU (external GPU) case. All currently-shipping modern Macs (we won't talk about the trash can!) support Thunderbolt 3. Its graphics capabilities are anemic.įortunately, it doesn't have to stay that way. The best 65-inch TVs: Big screens for big entertainmentĪ fully-equipped 2018 Mac Mini is impressive in all but one way.
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