Welcome everyone to my TED talk with an obnoxiously long title, though this will most definitely die somewhere in the abyss of Reddit, due to a lack of a nice photo which would definitely arouse your curiosity.
No, today we're serious, that was a long shot, not the first U820 on our subreddit, definitely not the last.
Let's start the fun!
I decided to try and install the newest release of macOS (as of April 29th, when I installed the thing)
I decided to use Clover, due to the ease and the seemingly perfect components of the build. This build was honestly the easiest one I've done in my entire life, period. I've installed multiple hackintoshes since 2016, there were easy builds, there were difficult ones as well. My first build ever took me 19 hours of constant work, no pee breaks! There were builds which took one evening. My last build took 9 months. Obviously never ever had any build worked first try. This one? Shy of maybe two hours, with my first EFI and boom! Worked right away! Which can only mean these components ARE actually perfect and me being a complete idiot had perfectly nailed the install.
Now, for the specifications:
The build is not really a build, honestly. It's a Mini PC by a company called Minisforum. You can obviously go and check everything out yourself here, but I'm gonna run it down quick for everyone:
CPU: Intel Core i5-8259U, clocked at 2.3GHz, with possibility of turboing up to 3.8GHz if in the mood
GPU: Intel Iris Graphics 655 (not as bad as I thought, we'll get to that)
RAM: Kingston I Forgot Which Model 2x8GB DDR4 2400MHz (maybe 3200MHz, questionmark? I know, I should be more prepared..)
Motherboard/Laptop Make and Model Mini PC Model: Minisforum U820
Audio Codec: Yeah, no, still Behringer U-Phoria
Ethernet Card: Realtek RTL8168/8111 and 2.5Gbps LAN which is powered by Intel's I225 V
Wifi/BT Card: It's Intel's 6th generation AX200
BIOS revision: monkE
Now, what works and what don't:
Honestly, everything that can work, works on this system perfectly fine. If you have any particular questions, want me to try out anything on this system, feel free to write in the comments and I'll be sure to address it somewhere in the future, because, oh baby, this system has a future.
Airdrop? Works. iMessage, FaceTime, iCloud, WiFi, BT? Works just as fine. Everything you can imagine, it just works. It's a perfect system! I love it! u/darkguy2008 asked about iOS emulation in Xcode at acceptable speeds and it has acceptable speeds, yessir, we're gonna talk about emulation in a second though! I don't know about 4K though, it's because of you why I bought myself a 4K monitor, still waiting for it to arrive......
(also Xcode is 12GB, not 2, it takes forever to install, even on a Kingston 512GB NVMe SSD, it's like a fresh install of League of Legends a few seasons back, how could you lie to me like this, I will never ever forgive you, I'm taking the kids and the dog, and moving to Louisiana)
Benchmarks:
Minisforum says 3933/1016 in Geekbench 5.3.1 on Windoze. Computer says 3910/946 in Cinebench 5.4.0 on macOS, not too big of a margin. On Windoze untested/I forgot, sorry.
Newest installment of Cinebench says 3528 on Multicore. Not bad!
Cooler benchmarks:
Now, the PC spew out 7655/7023 in Geekbench 5.4.0 on macOS when GPU was benchmarked, for OpenGL and Metal, respectively.
What does that mean? Believe it or not, but actual good performance in games and anything harshly rendering-related. Therefore, wanting to benchmark the machine my way, I took my HDD and installed Windows 10 20H2 on it. I'm gonna make it quick, so mods don't see and won't ban me, cause it's all on Windows now, will do macOS gaming on this puppy a little later! (that's what I meant by future, multiple posts about that thing incoming)
I ran:
- Cyberpunk 2077 as the first shot. After extensive tweaking, new special magic beta Intel experimental drivers and 2137 crashes, I finally ran it, on the lowest (im)possible settings, at a steady, for me definitely playable, 14fps.
- Far Cry 5 was a completely different story, it runs on 1440x900 in over 30fps at Low settings, which for me is completely stunning and I love it.
- No Man's Sky runs at 1920x1080 on Medium-Low settings in at least 30fps without a hitch, just melting the rest of my brain away.
- GTA V ironically did not run at all.
What does all of this mean and why is this important?
It creates some kind of view of what the PC is/can be capable of. To add more irony and a bit of controversy, this PC, according to Geekbench, runs about seven times as fast as what I've considered my main PC, which now is a PC just for work and everything else I do, I do on this smol puppy of a computer. It's a box 13x13x5 centimeters! It's so tiny and I love it!
Emulation:
That a cool topic to talk about. This PC blew my mind away. Is it because Xcode iOS emulation? Kinda, yeah, it's cool. But the real deal is that it's capable of running Animal Crossing: New Horizons using Yuzu emulator in nearly full speed! Now THAT's performance! Haven't driven Batocera on it yet, but I have a lot of hope. That should give you a bit of a rundown, how and why this thing is so cool and how can you use it to your benefit.
Epilogue and other skadoodles:
I've had my fair bit of fun with this very multifunctional piece of hardware barely bigger than my own hand (had to check) a bit smaller than my own hand. It eats up just 65 watts of power at peak, eating from a USB-C 19V connector, and it's perfect for just about any application. Server? You've got your two RJ45 connectors. Gaming machine? You've seen that one. Rendering and anything art related? Making music never was so smooth, ever. On macOS, of course, using FL Studio 20. Office machine? Everything you do will be a breeze.
The temperatures and airflow, uhhhhhhh.....
Could be better. But it's a Mini PC, it's a Frankenstein of components squished into Raspberry Pi case (not really)
I saw at least one more U820 here, I'll be glad to make more content about it, cause it's really, REALLY cool. If you've searched for a machine which will be easy to maintain and install macOS on, this just might be something for you. Now, for all you've been waiting for... get the drums, please... the neofetch desktop screenshot!
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