Mac mini for streaming video games upgrade#
Mac mini for streaming video games portable#
Mac mini for streaming video games Pc#
Mac mini for streaming video games windows#

Mac mini for streaming video games windows#

Mini PCs are available for less than $250, but Windows PCs in that price range have unusably slow processors and less memory and storage than most people need.

Mac mini for streaming video games portable#

The Mac mini is also quite a bit larger than most of the Windows mini PCs we tested, and Apple’s internal storage upgrades are pricey enough that you should look at an external hard drive or a portable SSD if you need more space. But the new Mac mini has fewer ports than the Intel-based model it replaces, and none of those ports are accessible from the front.

Mac mini for streaming video games upgrade#

For everyday browsing and general use, an M1 Mac mini with 8 GB of memory is good enough, though if you plan to use yours for professional photo and video editing or app development, you should step up to 16 GB of memory you can’t upgrade the Mac mini’s memory and storage after you buy it, so you need to make that decision up-front. The Mac mini is one of Apple’s first computers to stop using Intel chips, and the result is a surprisingly fast and energy-efficient mini desktop with enough processor power to edit video and compile code, as well as sufficient graphics performance to keep a pair of 4K monitors feeling fast and fluid (we can emphatically say this was not true of Mac minis with Intel’s integrated graphics). If you prefer macOS, get the Mac mini with Apple’s M1 processor.

Mac mini for streaming video games Pc#

We like the Asus PN50 bare-bones mini PC because its AMD Ryzen processors offer good enough performance for everything from web browsing to light gaming, and because the PN50 squeezes in all of the ports most people will need (including a microSD card slot on the front). But if you’re comfortable installing these things yourself, it’s often more economical to buy a bare-bones system, especially if you need a large SSD, for storing big video files or games, or 16 GB of memory, for editing high-resolution photos and videos. A somewhat cheaper version with 4 GB of memory is available (and you can upgrade the memory later, if you want), but we think most people are likely to be happier with the extra speed and responsiveness that 8 GB of memory offers.Ī “bare-bones” mini PC comes without memory, storage, or an operating system, so it’s not ready to use out of the box. The CTL Chromebox CBX2 includes twice as much memory as other similarly priced budget Chromeboxes we considered, and it has plenty of ports. In fact, the app you use for almost everything on a Chrome OS device is the Chrome web browser, and your device has to be connected to the internet for most tasks. But unlike a Windows or Mac computer, a Chrome OS device (mostly) can’t use desktop apps. Thanks to Google’s Chrome OS, the CTL Chromebox CBX2 is faster than a similarly priced, $300 Windows PC at browsing the web, handling basic word processing, and playing movies. And for easy upgrades later on, you need to remove only one screw to access its M.2 storage and two memory slots. Its fan is nearly silent in everyday use and tolerable under more intensive workloads. On the back, it has one DisplayPort and one HDMI port so you can easily use multiple monitors (if you order a custom configuration, you can add more USB-C, DisplayPort, or HDMI ports). The front panel has one USB Type-C port for newer accessories as well as a Type-A port for older cables and USB drives. Steam is the best thing to happen to non-console, non-mobile gaming in a couple of decades.Lenovo sells several ThinkCentre mini PCs with the same basic design, including the M80q Tiny and M90q Tiny, but the M70q Tiny offers the best combination of price and features.

If the resolution of the host display is set in-game to the same as the client, that's that much less work the client has to do. It sounds like as much of the work, including graphical work, as possible should be done on the host. Remember, the client can be a low-performance device, so long as it can sufficiently play the stream, as it doesn't handle rendering the game's graphics. While it would be feasible to do this on a headless server with a beefy processor and minimal graphical power, you're almost certainly going to get better results if a decent enough GPU is used on the host.

Ideally, the hosting machine would need to be powerful enough to play the game and to encode the stream simultaneously. Does the hosting machine need powerful graphics or would a headless Xeon PC server work well? I ask as I am looking at getting one anyway to host opensim and that only being a database doesn't require much in the way of a GPU the graphics being handled by the client viewer.