You get two M.2 x4 PCI-e Gen 3 slots for SSDs, and two SO-DIMM slots for RAM. In Intel’s Hades Canyon NUC, you’re restricted to just storage and RAM upgrades, but they’re very easy to do and don’t have rigid requirements on specs. Just unscrew and remove the bottom plate.

Getting access to the RAM and storage slots in the Hades Canyon NUC is a cinch. When it comes to on-board graphics performance, the Hades Canyon NUC will whomp hard on the Mac Mini. A quad-core Mac Mini and the Hades Canyon is less easy to call, especially since Apple could end up favoring cooler temps and throttle performance during extended workloads.

The Core i7-8705G and Core i7-8809G are solid performers with four cores and eight threads, but they’ll have trouble beating raw speed.Ī face-off between a six-core Mac Mini and the Hades Canyon NUC in multi-threaded tasks will also likely favor the Mac Mini. With higher base clock speeds, the Mac Mini should outperform the Intel Hades Canyon NUC and its mobile-class CPU on tasks that utilize only one core. The Core i5 Mac Mini’s processor specs are a dead lock for the Core i5-8500, but we can’t be sure, as this image on Apple’s website implies that the Mini’s CPU is embedded…and the 8500 is a socketed part. (We’re not certain, though, because the picture on Apple’s site seem to show an embedded CPU.) IDG Given the clock speeds listed on Apple’s site, we assume that the 8th-generation Coffee Lake Core i3 and Core i5 processors in the Mac Mini are full desktop parts.

Apple mac mini i7 quad core