The Animaionic Kickstarter project wants to upgrade Apple's 
Mac Mini to a workstation by adding a docking station. It extends it by two PCIe slots (for example for two graphics cards) and four M.2 SSD drives as well as one SD card slot. Optically the Animaionic case fits very well to the Mac Mini, which is simply inserted into the cutout provided for it and uses the additional graphics cards and SSD memory without further configuration. Anyone who owns a Mac Mini and often comes up against its (GPU)limits while working could be interested in this new solution.
Animaionic Dockingstation
The latest generation of the Mac Mini comes standard with a 4-core Intel i3 or 6-core Intel i7 processor, 16, 32 or 64 GB memory and 128 to a maximum of 2TB SSD memory - so in its maximum configuration it's actually not bad. However, GPU power is lacking, since due to the small size only the integrated, very weak Intel UHD Graphics 630 graphics unit of the processor can be used.
The four Thunderbolt 3 ports, however, allow an external upgrade via docking station, they are fast enough to support both external GPUs and SSDs. Because what the Mac Mini lacks for performance-hungry applications like video editing is GPU processor power. And that's exactly what the Animaionic docking station delivers. According to project benchmarks, a Mac Mini equipped with two AMD Radeon RX Vega56 GPUs even beats an iMac Pro in some cases.
Animaionic in Benchmarks
The project has a working prototype and wants to start delivery in May 2020, but it is still a long way from a successful conclusion: only 13 of the approximately 830 Euro Early Bird offers from Animaionic have been accepted and the project is still miles away from the target sum of 600,000 Euro - but it still has 36 days to find enough supporters. Also available is a model already equipped with two Radeon RX5700XT graphics cards and four 2TB SSDs for about 3,100 Euro.
Mac Mini with two external GPUs via Animaionic
So maybe there is no great need for upgradeable MAc Minis or the always existing risk at crowdfunding, to lose the - but quite considerable - amount is a deterrent for potential interested parties. As an alternative there are also simple eGPU solutions to use external graphics cards and via Thunderbolt 3 external memory solutions can be connected.
Animaionic Interfaces
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