Building an Ultra-Compact $682 Skylake Hackintosh Mac Mini Capable of Running Two 4K Monitors at a Time

We’ve seen multiple inexpensive PC configurations capable of running MacOS lately, but what about a Hackintosh Mac Mini costing just $682? According to Snazzy Labs, this computer is certainly a viable option for 4K video editing regardless of its small and ultra-compact size.

Sure, it’s not nearly as powerful as most Hackintosh workstations in the $1000 to $2000 range that you can build on your own, but it’s clearly capable of editing 4K video which could be more than enough for those content creators working on a shoestring budget.

All in all, this extremely portable aluminum Hackintosh Mac Mini build seems to be indeed one of the best lower-cost and higher-performance alternatives to the Mac Mini you can currently get. So, let’s find out how you can assemble it from scratch and what level of performance you can expect for the price.

Apparently, the biggest trade-off of this system is the absence of a dedicated GPU, but considering the small physical size of the Streacom F1C-WS case and the overall extremely quiet performance and efficiency this ultra-compact Hackintosh Mac Mini build delivers, we couldn’t ask for more, could we? Other than that, it’s capable of running the latest MacOS flawlessly just as if you are using a genuine Mac computer.

When you add the blazing-fast performance that in reality doubles the performance of the $1,300 Mac Mini in every single category, you get an excellent portable desktop workstation that can handle most of your 4K video editing projects with ease. And, what’s more, it can run two 4K monitors at a time despite the lack of a dedicated GPU onboard. In terms of storage capacity, this particular Gigabyte H-170 Motherboard can handle up to four SSDs and 32GB of DDR4 2133 RAM; it even provides support for M2 drives.

For those of you who want to put this build together, here’s the full list of the components that you will need:

• Gigabyte H-170 Motherboard (Amazon)
• Intel Skylake i5-6500 CPU (B&H, Amazon)
• Crucial Ballistix DDR4 RAM (16GB) (B&H, Amazon)
• Samsung 850 Pro 250GB SSD (B&H, Amazon)
• MiniBox 160W PicoPSU (Amazon)
• Noctua NH-L9i CPU Cooler (Amazon)
• External PicoPSU Power Brick (Amazon)
• Streacom F1C-WS (Quiet PC USA)
• Broadcom BCM94352Z (Amazon)

The other Snazzy Labs video about the custom built Skylake Hackintosh Mac Mini includes a few performance benchmarks and showcases how does the system stack up against a $1,300 Apple Mac Mini in a real-world environment.

All in all, this very simple and easy build shouldn’t take you more than a few hours to finish, so if you want a blazing-fast performance in a ultra-small and compact package, that $682 Skylake Hackintosh Mac Mini may be the perfect video editing rig for your creative workflow in the studio or on the go.

[source: Snazzy Labs]

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