MacPro

nunzy said:

Razor is smart to support Mac gaming. It is a growing market. People are starting to get it.

I agree.  This seems the ideal way to go.  IMHO this is a continuing trend Apple started with the new Mac Pro, keep it simple and have everything extra external and so future proofed.  They just didn't go far enough!

I am curious, for gaming how much difference will an i7 make to an i5 when running a high end Nvidia card in this box for gaming for the likes of VR or 4K GTAV etc..   In other words, is the CPU also critical?

This is the only metric that matters:  "The company was still the most profitable on the 2018 list"

So that’s where ‘Apple is Doomed’, came from!

cgWerks said:

Mike Wuerthele said:
I'm not certain I'd bother with the TB1 in the 2012 and an eGPU. It's doable, but man, the performance hit is rough.

Yeah, it's just more of a... what's the alternative (if not going Hackintosh)? I need to buy something in the next month or so here, and it seems my options are 2012 quad-core Mini, Hackintosh, or 2013 Mac Pro. They all have potential downsides. The Mac Pro looks best for me, but I'm concerned about spending that much money if OS support drops off before, say, 4 years or so.

I'm really hoping we'll see something at WWDC. But, I fear I'm just going to get disappointed.

As it happens I have both the Macs you mention, no Hackintosh though, the 2012 Mini is nice and I did upgrade its RAM and SSD but it was a bit of a fiddle, mine runs 24/7 as a Windows machine ironically.   I love my late 2013 6 core Mac Pro, I am sure you would too.  It runs Windows in Boot Camp like lightening and supports Catalyst as well as being a phenomenal work horse as a Mac, I use Photoshop and FCPro mostly.  I upped the RAM to 32 GB and put in a 500 GB SSD it and use RAID 0 externals for data.  Best Mac I have ever owned so far and that's a lot. A used one would be a good investment IMHO, it doesn't feel like a five year old Mac for one second. The upgrades I did took less than 5 minutes.  I truly don't see any OS support dropping that model within four years.

Mike Wuerthele said:

jas99 said:

I've been using this approach for many, many years. It works well.
I suggest using the sparse bundle option, as it grows in size as you add files, taking less space than the other formats which reserve the maximum size you set when creating the disk image.

We didn't suggest sparse bundles at this time because of the difficulty some backup utilities have with them. We'll keep looking at it going forward.

Three words solve that issue ...  Carbon Copy Cloner