Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Ultimate M1 Mac Mini Setup – Same Performance as Mac Pro?”.
What’S up folks how’s it going this watch hope you guys are all doing well hope you guys had an awesome new year’s, and today we’re going to be talking about the late 2020 version of the m1 mac mini. Now we already did a comparison between the macbook pro, as well as the macbook air equipped with the m1 chip, and it was impressive to see what this new apple silicon is really capable of. It’S essentially giving you a high performance, desktop experience at a much lower price point, and certainly, if you’re looking for a desktop style setup with a standalone os, 10 native running machine, the m1 mac mini gives a bang for the dollar. That’S never really been seen before. On the apple side, just to give you guys a comparison when we covered the late 2018 version of the mac mini that had a six core intel processor on geekbench, it scored around the mid 4000 mark versus the new amac mini with the m1, is scoring in The mid 7 000 point mark, so that’s a massive difference and in fact, even more insane is that the base configuration version of the mac mini that we have over here with the 8 gigabytes of ram and 256 gigabytes of ssd storage cost around 6.99, and we Had the late 2019 version of the mac pro that uh starts around six thousand dollars. It also has a eight core intel xeon processor and that on geekbench is scoring just under the 8 000 point mark so from a performance perspective, essentially you’re getting a mac pro. Like performance for a small fraction of the price now that might seem to be too good to be true, but there are some limitations with the m1 chip. It’S a system in package, soc setup, so you have dram embedded inside. So whatever configuration you go with initially you’re going to be stuck with that ram and ssd configuration forever, and that means being limited to 8 or 16 gigabytes of ram. You do have a decent amount of options in terms of long-term ssd storage, with the base model. Having 256 gigabytes all the way up to two terabytes.
Furthermore, at the back of the mac menu, you also are kind of limited in terms of ports and connectivity options. You have two usb type: a 3.1 gen, 2 connections, two thunderbolt 3 connections, a single full size, hdmi 2.0 connection, as well as gigabit ethernet and a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. Furthermore, you can also really only connect two external monitors. One of them can be up to 6k resolution, the other one 4k resolution. Unfortunately, you can’t hook up a third monitor for a triple monitor configuration which kind of sucks something you can do on the previous intel generation mac minis. Now, given the performance capabilities of the m1 chip, i think the mac mini could probably make one of the best os 10 budget friendly, desktop experiences possible and we’re going to be talking about my current setup right now, and what you’re looking at right now is kind Of a work in progress, but it’s just an idea in terms of what you can do and the real potential capabilities of the m1 chip, given the right attachments and accessories.
Now, let’s talk about displays, you can really hook this thing up to any display up to 6k resolution, we’re specifically using the acer cb. 34. 2 ck. It’S a 34 inch ultra wide panel with a native resolution of 3840 by 1440 75 hertz refresh rate and a great to great response time of about one millisecond. So it’s a perfect companion piece for really any type of setup, even if you’re gon na be doing uh some gaming, but specifically for my purposes, which is video, editing, photo editing and a little bit of audio production. It’S going to be a perfect companion piece for the mac mini. You can hook it up via the hdmi 2.0 connections. There’S actually two of them on this monitor, as well as a full-size display port and a 5 port usb 3.0 hub now, over the past couple of years, due to the popularization of these ultra wides, the price has really come down.
In fact, this acer could be typically found for under 400, both in canada and the us, and that for the bang, for the dollar for a true 3840 by 1440 panel is pretty much unbeatable. Now i’ve actually paired the ultra wide with a portable wimax. It 1080p monitor this is going to act as kind of an accompanying monitor for extra screen real estate.
I can throw up my social media, feed twitter or anything like that, as well as just look at different files, and it’s just going to act as a secondary monitor in the portrait position. The cool thing about the monitor is that it’s rated for 98 of the srgb color spectrum, so it’s fairly accurate in terms of color representation. It’S an ips panel, so you can easily view it at any vantage point and all the data as well as power gets transferred through the usb c connection, which is easily connectable to one of the thunderbolt ports on the mac mini now.
The monitor also has a inboard capacitive touchscreen, so with devices that utilize uh touchscreen external display interfaces like the samsung dex set up on the note, as well as other galaxy smartphones, you can utilize the external display with the touch interface. Of course, this feature is not going to be utilized in this setup, because os 10 doesn’t officially support touch screen interfaces at this point. Furthermore, since i only have two usb type-a connections on the mac mini, i’m gon na have to address on getting more of those. So i’m gon na connect this multiple port usb 3.0 hub, and that way i can connect multiple different, usb accessories, which will be definitely needed in the future, including this western digital black one terabyte external, solid state, hard drive. This is one of the fastest external solid state. Hard drives on the planet.
Right now is actually uses usb 3.2 gen 2×2 interface, which will get you read and write performance up to 2 gigabytes a second. Unfortunately, the mac doesn’t support usb 3.2 gen 2×2. It only has a usb 3.1 gen 2 interface, which will get you a read and write sequential data performance at around or under a gigabyte, a second which is perfectly reasonable by the way. According to the blackmagic speed test, the read and write a sequential performance on the 256 gigabyte version of the m1 mac mini is well over two gigabytes, a second in terms of right and over two and a half gigabytes.
A second in terms of sequential readers, which is pretty darn fast now for the peripherals, i’m a huge fan of mechanical keyboards and although most people using a mac desktop setup, will go for a low profile, quiet keyboard setup. I prefer something loud and mechanical, something that feels a little bit more tactile, and one of my favorite keyboards of 2020 was the corsair k100. The chassis is fully redesigned. It still uses a high quality, durable aluminum frame construction. It has 44 different rgb lighting zones as well as corsair’s new axon processor that delivers polling and key scanning rates up to 4 000 hertz delivering theoretically a response time. That’S less than 0.5 milliseconds, while delivering simultaneously 20 layers of rgb lighting effects and executing multiple different macro commands. Moreover, on the top left hand, side you’ll find the iq control wheel. Here you can change a whole bunch of different settings and commands to either the function of the keyboard or through whatever application you’re using.
So you can actually set up the brightness of your rgb lighting on the keyboard. You can do a bunch of different media settings, including volume going forward or behind a track, and you can even set app or game specific commands for the wheel depending upon what specific application or game you’re using at the time. Now. The great thing is now: we have the corsair iq software available on mac os 10, so you can actually utilize this keyboard, as well as the corsair mice and other accessories on the os 10 platform, which is excellent if you’re going to be creating a setup like This, by the way, the switches on the k100 that we have right over here are the cherry mx speed, which are a fast linear style, switch like a cherry, mx red, but a little bit more snappier in terms of their response time.
They are definitely optimized for competitive gaming applications, but are great for just general day-to-day use as well. Based on my experience now for the mouse, i went with something a little bit more different, i’m a huge fan of a trackball mice. I think they’re definitely underrated, and these days i’ve been kind of suffering with a little bit of carpal tunnel and it’s nice to have the wrist in one position to eliminate any kind of tendonitis issues, especially these days when we’re on the computer. For such a long time and having the thumb do a little bit more dexterity, work is definitely an important skill that a lot of us are definitely lacking and a few years back we had the logitech mx ergo. It was a little bit more of a premium product, but recently logitech has made a budget friendly version of the mx virgo called the m575. It basically is the same overall shape size and the feel of the trackball is very similar as well. The materials on the mx ergo are a little bit. More premium is using kind of a rubberized soft touch, finish which isn’t here on the m575, but it actually is made out of 50 recycled material.
If you get this graphite version, which is pretty cool and the trackball has this kind of grippy texturized finish, which gives you a nice satisfying, feel when you’re actually using the trackball, you could set up the sensitivity of the ball specific to your thumb and once you Get used to it, it actually is really comfortable to use for a prolonged period of time. The battery life is also sensational two years with a single double a battery, which is amazing. Furthermore, the price of the ergo m575 is about half of the mx ergo at around 50. So it’s a great entry level point if you want to try out a trackball mouse now, although some crazy people do use the trackball mouse for a gaming, it’s definitely super difficult to do so, and in that scenario i would definitely recommend getting a traditional optical mouse.
I’M using the guitar pro wireless from corsair, which is an ultra lightweight mouse, uses their corsair slipstream technology, which will get you a response time sub 1 millisecond. It also has fairly low latency bluetooth inboard, as well as a 10k dpi optical sensor. And lastly, even though the mac mini has a small speaker built inside which is convenient, you probably don’t want to use it for day-to-day listening experience and for the usb audio interface, i’m using the focusrite 2i4, it’s a usb as setup. It can easily attach to any kind of phantom powered microphones, as well as really any kind of audio input that you want to hook up into it.
It also has outputs for studio monitors, whether passive or active, i’m actually using some active adi fire studio series. R1280T. Bookshelf speakers, these speakers have a four inch main driver, as well as a calibrated flared base, reflex port that delivers fairly good low end frequencies. The overall high end and mid-range is kind of lacking in terms of detail, but for under 100 they’re, probably one of the best speakers you can get on amazon right now.
Now. The cost of this particular setup is just under 2 000, which is definitely a decent amount, but you can typically get the mac mini for 699. The m1 baseline configuration and add, maybe a two to three hundred dollar – monitor a cheap mouse and keyboard combination be well under a thousand dollars for an awesome, very, very capable setup.
But it really depends on your personal needs and preferences, but all in all the big takeaway over here is that the m1 mac mini is probably the best bang for the dollar desktop pc that you’re going to get from apple. It certainly puts the imacs in their current lineup and kind of a shame. I’M sure they’re, eventually going to switch over uh to the m1 silicone pretty soon, but generally speaking, if you’re looking for a budget friendly, desktop os 10 experience, the m1 mac mini at this point is kind of unbeatable either guys and that’s really, it definitely check out The description down below for detailed product information links about everything we’ve talked about big. Thank you to you guys for supporting the channel, making this content possible and definitely make sure you have post notifications turned on. So you get our videos once they become available, like the video, if you haven’t done so already and subscribe to this website, thanks again for watching we’ll see you real soon in the next one. Take care. .