Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “M1 Mac Mini vs Custom Performance PC”.
Hey, what’s up folks how’s it going! This watch hope you guys are all doing well. So recently we built a relatively compact gaming, slash performance pc for early 2021 and a few weeks back, we were testing out the late 2020 mac mini powered by the m1 soc by apple and we’re super impressed by the overall performance. Essentially, this tiny pc that starts around 700 gives you the same level of performance that we found on the late 2019 version of the mac pro that we tested early last year that retailed for over six thousand dollars. The question that we want to address in this article is: how does the m1, a mac mini, compare against a relatively powerful performance pc that retails for anywhere between sixteen to eighteen hundred dollars now in terms of our pc? Specifically, it’s powered by an amd ryzen.
7. 5800 x, that’s an eight core chip with 16 threads and here’s a ram and storage configuration. We have 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory from corsair and an sn 750 500 gigabyte capacity ssd by western digital.
The motherboard that we’re using is a b550 oros pro ax by gigabyte. It’S an itx board, so super compact now in terms of our discrete graphics card solution, we’re going to be using a zotek rtx 3060 ti it’s a great mid to higher end range card. In the current nvidia lineup now, if you want more information about the pc, including the build process, definitely check out our dedicated video in the description down below now in terms of uh, comparing the specifications of the m1 mac mini, it’s kind of difficult they’re running on Completely different architectures, but the mac mini that we have is the baseline 699 configuration which comes with the eight core cpu eight core gpu, as well as the 16 core neural engine, but only eight gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of ssd storage. But obviously you can upgrade the ram to 16 gigabytes and uh two terabytes in terms of the long-term ssd storage.
That’S right off the bat. There are some major limitations to the m1 architecture. Firstly, there is no user. Expandable options in terms of memory or ssd is whatever you get and currently you’re only limited to 16 gigabytes of ram on the current m1 sip platform in terms of physical ports and connectivity options, you’re also limited there only two usb type: a connections and two thunderbolt Connections and a single hdmi connection, you can only really support up to two monitors on the mac.
Mini one monitor could be up to 6k resolution, the other one up to 4k resolution and unfortunately, unlike the previous generation mac minis, there is no support for egpu expansion. If you want to use an external graphics card to either boost your gpu performance capabilities or to hook up additional external displays for the more in terms of software compatibility, you are going to run into some issues with the m1. Specifically, if you want to install windows, 10 and natively using boot camp, that’s not going to be supported with the m1 mac mini. You can run windows virtually now.
If you use a lot of x86 intel based apps on the mac os 10 platform, some of those apps can be translated to work on the m1 using rosetta 2, but probably not going to be optimized. All the native apple applications work flawlessly on the m1 are highly optimized for the chip and other popular apps are being quickly adopted to work with the new m1 at chip, including the adobe suite they’ve, just released beta versions of premiere pro lightroom photoshop to enable gpu Rendering capabilities, specifically with premiere pro, you can now use the h.264 hvec and prores codex to edit, render and export your videos with gpu acceleration enabled now before we take a look at the actual performance differences between the m1 mac mini and our custom build pc. I do want to bring it back to the actual form factor of the mac mini being extremely more portable and convenient in terms of size. It only measures around 197 millimeters by 197 millimeters. It’S only about 36 millimeters in terms of height. It can pretty much fit on anybody’s computer desk underneath a monitor in a shelf in a home, theater, slash, kind of living, room environment very easily, and there’s no question about it.
It’S the most ultimate compact pc. You can get on the market now. The case that we’re using on our pc is the fantax evolve swift ii.
It is a mini itx form factor, but certainly not the most compact itx case that you’re going to find out there, but it has a relatively small footprint about 170 millimeters by 240 millimeters, but it is quite tall at 490 millimeters. But thanks to that height, you have a gpu clearance rating of over 335 millimeters, so you can fit some relatively large and powerful gpus into this system. Furthermore, another benefit of the size comes with the greater expandability options.
You can actually fit up to four two and a half inch solid state drives into the case or a couple of three and a half inch mechanical hard drives, as well as having lots of ports and connectivity options on the motherboard itself. Okay, so let’s move on and finally talk about our benchmark performance results, starting with our cpu performance. We’Re going to first take a look at the single core and multi-core performance using cinebench r23 in terms of the single core performance, both the m1 and the 5800 x are getting around 1500 points, but on the multi-core performance, it’s a different story on the m1. We’Re getting around 7 500 points, but 16 000 points on the 5800x on geekbench we’re a little bit faster in terms of the single core performance on the m1 at 1700 points versus 1600 points on the 5800x, but the amd processor wins again in terms of the Multi-Core performance, getting over 10 000 points versus 7 500 points on the m1 now, certainly, the most important test for me specifically, is the render output times on premiere pro now on the m1, we are using the beta version of premiere pro that allows for gpu acceleration, Rendering and basically on the same 4k, six minute premiere pro project.
It took about four minutes 19 seconds to export the video on the m1 mac mini versus on our pc using the 5800x and rtx 3060 ti. It took about almost half that time at two minutes and seven seconds to export that 6 minute 4k file now in terms of the sequential read and write speeds of the ssd drives on both pcs they’re, probably running on fairly similar platforms, pci express a 4.0 and The sn 750 500 gigabyte western digital drive, using crystal disk mark on the windows platform, got sequential, read performance of just around three gigabytes, a second and a right performance of two and a half gigs, and on the amorphous disk mark which is kind of a port Of crystal disk spark on the os 10 side, we’re getting sequential, read performance about 2.8 gigabytes and write performance of 2.3 gigabytes on the 256 gigabyte ssd drive found on the m1 mac mini now. The graphical performance capabilities on the eight core gpu on the m1 isn’t quite mind-blowing. Obviously, it’s going to be great for sub 720p 1080p style resolution for a gaming and graphics rendering, but anything beyond that 4k or ultra wide is going to be quite a struggle and to demonstrate that we’re going to show you uh the benchmark results on the valley Benchmark using a native resolution of 3840 by 1440 high detail settings and on the m1 to mac menu, we got average frame rate of 22.6 frames per second and in the exact same settings and scenario using opengl, we got a average frame rate of 116.7 frames per. Second, using the rtx 3060 ti, that’s obviously a nine-day difference, and it’s really no surprise. Since you are looking at a mid to higher end level, nvidia graphics card, that’s available right now.
It’S obviously going to wipe the floor with the integrated graphics that we have on the m1 chip, but if you’re interested to see how much more powerful, this is kind of going to give you a rough idea in terms of what a discrete graphics card can do Compared to the m1, now the main question is: can you use the m1 as a main editing style, pc, replace a mac mini or even a mac pro, i would say for the most part yeah, you definitely can in terms of the price to performance ratio. I think it’s by far the best thing apple has offered for many years and generations in terms of, is it better than a pc uh, i would say, certainly not uh, even given the price point of some of the older parts that you can get in the Used market, you can probably make a fairly powerful pc for 12 to a thousand dollars that will probably be faster than what the m1 processor in the mac mini can deliver right now, uh, but really other than that guys. That’S really! This is kind of a fun video i want to make to kind of test out the m1 against a moderately powerful pc. Definitely let me know what you guys think uh. Are you in the market for a compact pc? Would you go m1 or custom built? I definitely love to hear your thoughts and opinions.
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