Toy Project to beat 2018 MBP

[CodeJoy]

I have a little weekend project planned. It's a dirt cheap small form factor PC, and I'm wondering how close to the performance of the MBP 2018 it's possible to get. Or can it even beat it? I'll reveal more as we go, but to start things off, I've paid roughly the equivalent of $230 for the parts. This is for CPU, graphics, motherboard, cooler and power supply. I'll be using SSD and memory sticks that I already had laying around, and I've not included case or peripherals in the price either. If all goes according to plan, I should be receiving the parts today Friday.

So for around $230, how close do you guys think it's actually possible to get? (Let's aim for the 13" i5 to keep things simple.) And what would be the hardware choice to get there?

I'll let you know my choices after I hear yours. I'm mainly interested in the hardware config here, so I don't care if it's Windows, Linux or macOS. I'll try to benchmark on macOS in the end if possible.

 

[twalk]

The easiest way would probably be the AsRock Deskmini, which is going for as low as $120 anymore on the occasional newegg sales. Get a i3 Kaby Lake processor or better a Pentium Kaby Lake (<$60) which is almost as fast. (It's been reported that AsRock is keeping back the Coffee Lake Deskmini's until all the previous versions sell out.)

The Deskmini isn't the greatest to hackintosh, but it works great for Windows and Linux

 

[CodeJoy]

Interesting. I didn't even know about the Deskmini, as I don't think it's sold where I'm at. Still, it does look like a possible way forward.

I ended up going in another direction entirely, and based it on a 2200G, i.e. 4-core Ryzen 3 with Vega 8 graphics. Initial tests show it to be about 10% faster than the 2018 13" MBP in Cinebench, and maybe 80-90% faster for anything graphics related. It's really more on par with the 2018 15" for graphics. I knew from benchmarks that it would be close, but seeing it in action it's just stunning how good value for money this delivers. This is not a good hackintosh PC though, but I never intended it as such either.

What's funny to me is that this whole system is roughly the cost of what people spend on upgrades for the MBP's. It's a third of the cost of an eGPU. The upgrades and the eGPU may have their place in rare circumstances, but they're amazingly poor value for the vast majority. This build here is on the other extreme end of the scale. It's quite possibly the best computing value you can get for money in 2018.