Got started hacking in 2015 when my last Mac died and the Apple alternatives SUCKED.
Today's Mac Mini and iMac Pro are nice machines now at least, but a) I don't want to buy a Mac with a dedicated display, and b) the Mini is price-performance challenged* ($1900 for just an 8th-gen i5 with 32GB RAM and 512GB SSD).
| ASRock Z390M-ITX/ac | $1772.27 |
|---|---|
| Metallic Gear MG-NE210_SR01 MiniITX Case | 68.46 |
| ASRock Z390M-ITX/ac | 119.99 |
| Seasonic FOCUS Plus SSR-850FX | 69.99 |
| Intel Core i5-9600K | 259.99 |
| Crucial 32GB DDR-2666 (2x16GB) | 244.99 |
| Noctua NH-C14S | 77.54 |
| Noctua NF-P14s redux (x2) | 42.42 |
| Samsung 970 PRO 512GB | 167.99 |
| Crucial MX500 500GB SSD (x2) | 125.92 |
| ASUS DUAL-RX580 8GB | 199.99 |
| ASUS USB-BT400 | 12.99 |
| Apple Magic Keyboard | 139.00 |
| Apple Magic Mouse 2 | 99.00 |
| Apple Magic Trackpad 2 | 144.00 |
I installed Windows 10 last week on one of the Crucial SSDs (the other is for Time Machine) just to make sure everything worked right.
Installation of 10.14.3 was hanging on apfs_module_init and that blocked me for several days (aaargh!) until I saw this comment which fixed everything.
aside: this is my 2nd AsRock (previously I've hacked a GA-Z97, AsRock Z170, two Intel NUCs (Skylake & Kaby Lake) my main machine (a Gigabyte Z-270) and they seem to have more problems than Gigabyte for some reason.
After that, installation went smooth, except currently sleeping or shutdown will just reboot the machine. (I just run Intel Power Gadget to keep the machine from trying to sleep).
I'll create a DSDT USB thing which might or might not fix the sleeping issue.
Nice and quiet box, the 3 Noctua fans give nice 'brown noise', and the ASUS DUAL RX-580 is pretty quiet too, just as quiet as my 1070-Ti in my main machine.
* for $100 less than the 2018 mini I got two 500GB SSDs ($125), the RX-580 ($200 on Black Friday), AND ~$400 of over-priced Apple input hardware (kbd, mouse, trackpad)
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