I'm looking at replacing my PC Editing Workstation with a Mac. I have always owed Macs but the last 7 years my main editing machine is a PC. I think the M4 Pro 64GB 2TB is a posibility once I work out the connection of 2 NAS systems and all the peripherals, audio interface, 3 card readers etc. 2 questions: do you use the internal SSD for a scratch drive? and how does the M4 Pro handle the playback of 10 bit 4.2.2 FX3 vision? Cheers from Australia.
davinci and general use, would rather spend the extra $400 and get the base pro, as opposed to the (2x$200) I would need to spend on the base m4. $1,000/$1,400 is worth it to me for the pro performance. I do not need max or ultra, but i need more than base, it seems.
I was thorned between the Mac Mini M4 and M4 Pro (both in the 24GB RAM/512GB SSD versions), but after watching this stress test review, I think I've made my choice and will go the M4 Pro model. The main reason is that I like to keep my devices as long as I possible can and have the budget for the Pro model. I would like to start using it for DaVinci Resolve video editing of my holiday movies shot with with my iPhone 14 in 4K@60fps and Adobe Photoshop editing. I might want to use it to play Cyberpunk 2077 as well as soon as the optimised version for Apple Silicon comes out. But the most important thing for me is that it works smoothly together with the Apple Studio Display when I have to work from home with all our M365 applications from work including Teams video conferencing and screen sharing sessions. It is extremely important for me that the Mac Mini M4 pro remains 100% quiet during my Teams video calls. My HP Windows 11 laptop starts to make noise when doing Teams meetings with video and screen sharing and I find this really annoying.
I truly appreciate your effort! I waited so long that someone on TH-cam will talk more about fan noise for the pro version and won’t just mention it for 2-3 seconds during the video. Tnx!
I got the Mac Mini Pro M4 with 24/512. Lovely toy!. Now I saw another video a few days ago where they tested the speed of the SSD of the base model. So, I did the same with my Pro, and the result was that the Pro was double the speed
@ Good sign! Haha…I wanted to go with the Pro 14/20 , 48GB, 1TB, 10Gbit but then I realized that I don’t really need all of that power and I can just buy the base Pro model with 10Gbit Ethernet and another base model to have at my parents house when I’m going there (trading stocks so I have a monitor there etc) and still have around 600$ left in my pocket haha..
I upgraded to M4 Pro, probably dont need it but man its quick! Another great video, thanks Mark! Imagine how the M4 Max chip will perform, bet you it will be very very fast.
Great review, that is the exact model I'm looking at, 14 core, 20 core GPU 64GB 2TB drive. I'm still concerned with thermals, not the noise, but the opposite, the lack of fan ramp up, Apple loves to push high temps to avoid noise, I like less heat more fans. Would love to see a temperature test on basic use and then temps when stressed with all the apps, power consumption is another good review option.
I was looking for that spec exactly and then got worried about the fan noise. I can breathe a bit easier now. 😊 Thanks a lot for your wonderful review Mark.
Benchmarks? Is this the Mark2Ellis channel? Lol, great job Mark. I'm using my newly acquired Mac Mini M4 Pro for Lightroom and Final Cut and I love it!
I appreciate the reference to the "pub test" which is a phrase quite common here in Australia! My Pro is the exact same specs as yours and also doesn't skip a beat having resource-hog apps running simultaneously like Acrobat Pro, MS Office (especially Excel), a silly number of Safari tabs, etc. I also played Civ 6 on it which is very CPU intensive. This game quickly causes my 2017 iMac to beg for mercy with thermal throttling and a screaming fan, and while the M4 Pro got very warm on the top surface there was no noticeable throttling effect on gameplay or significant fan noise.
There is an energy mode option to switch in the settings. After switching to "high power" the fan is going to turn on and the efficiency is going to go up. Try this test with this option turned on.
Great video. Given I'm running a 2016 MBP 13" that creaks now (especially since I upgraded the SSD to a 1TB using a 3rd party SSD company which Apple hates, hence boot time is now about 15 minsutes), I'm defo looking at getting one of these as my computer at home. I'm not a big content creator, etc, but want something I can watch movies with, do some light work on, and this looks to be an amazing deal at the base model.
Wow! I'm waiting for mine to arrive, I spec'ed it up just like yours but with the 512GB storage. I've been watching these videos like crazy, the hype is real!
Mr Ellis. You've done it again. Thank you for the relevant info for a down the pub type of guy. 1 mini pro and 1 mini 16/512 on their way. the basic is to try using it as a portable solution(for those longer stay away from home. Cheers keep up the good work Mark
Thanks for the review, very good information. If you had to chose 1 upgrade: Memory upgrade to 48gb or the chip upgrade to 14 CPU, 20GPU & 16 neural, which would you pick and why? Thanks a milllion
I’m debating whether or not to buy the standard M4 or go with the M4 pro chip in the mini. The comparison between these two in these tests help me decide if I should spend all the extra money on the M4 pro or not
And thank you so much for your videos. You are one of the few who makes real videos that we can use to make our purchasing decisions. Not just relying on canned benchmarks, but actual real world scenarios.
Thank you for the fan noise(less?) review, i run a recording studio and it's time for me to upgrade from an old windows machine, the supposed fan noise on the M4 Pro was a big drawback for me. If you notice some changes in the noise level could you notify me about it in reply to this post please? Thank you
Fab video. Pleased to hear about low fan noise on the M4pro Mini in your “murder test”. Others have got them hot and noisy, probably some software updates needed for particular apps - some have found Resolve a bit underwhelming for render times atm. But this will no doubt be ironed out. I’m an FCP guy anyway 😉
I’m looking forward to M2 Pro vs M4 base especially when it comes to things like FCP new magnetic mask and other intensive effects and also what time line performance is like.
Apple publishes the BTUs of their Mac minis and the M4 Pro BTUs (478 BTU/h) than the Mac mini 2018 (417 BTU/h) which is was the previous hottest machine. I used to sit my external hard drive on top of my Mac mini and even with the M4, because the power supply is now at top, the mini was getting really hot. I put these metal external drives on top as the mini would help dissipate heat from the NVMe enclosures, but due the smaller form factor the internal fan cant cool the external shell as well as before. This only happens with Blender 3D rendering since it taxes the CPU and GPU which for a 10+ minute will absolutely get those fans revving and the outer shell warm.
I'd be curious about games that are optimized for Mac. I have the same M2 Pro Mac Mini that you're comparing to here, and I can definitely get the fans going if I fire up Death Stranding at 1440p on high settings, with some noticeable frame drops as well. Dropping down to 1080p smooths out the frame rate, but still pushes the GPU to its max, which definitely gets that fan cranking. I believe the M2 Max gets about 2x the FPS of an M4 Pro based on what I'm seeing as well, just due to all those extra GPU cores. Not that anyone really buys a Mac to game on primarily, but we are getting there! Cyberpunk coming next year!
Using a macbook m3 pro binned pro chip, this suprises me a lot!, however maybe the internal ssd is too slow, perhaps it will soon be upgradable since you can remove the sdd, companys are in a race to make them for cheaper than apple does.
Great review, as I'm targeting the same spec 14c/20c/64GB/2TB. Perfect timing. Regarding fans, I'm used to my MBP 14" M1 Pro. Can fans on the Mac Mini really be completely OFF at 0rpm, similar to the MBP M1 Pro, below certain temperature, or is the fan on the Mini always ON, but simply at low rpm, noise-wise not noticeable? Thanks a lot!
The Max chip has 2 encoder/decoder FPGAs on the chip so maybe it can allocate rendering to 1 and screen recording to the other? Just a theory. But maybe you could screen record with OBS using the CPU in a pinch since OBS is now actually supporting MacOS really well compared to pretty poor support in years past.
Thanks for the cool review! How much of a difference you think would be in the "real life" daily work use with the M2 Pro Mac mini? Without comparing the benchmarks, just how responsive the system feels by itself and for someone that has amateur workflows in Lightroom, music software and video editing from time to time. That I think would be an interesting idea for a video! Thanks and greetings from México.
I still remember some years ago how it was impossible to edit video in real time so we have to buy a 2000 euros card to have that and wait all night to have a render of a shortfilm. Good times now for creativity.
@MarkEllisReviews thank you so much for this review. This gave me exactly the answer that I was looking for. Could you maybe in the near future also elaborate or make a separate review on the possible advantages of the higher disk speeds of the Mac Mini M4 Pro and the advantages of the Thunderbolt 5 ports (in comparison with the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the Mac Studio M2 Max/Ultra and Mac Mini M4 base model)? Is the new Thunderbolt 5 really worth it?
TB5 will in theory give you double the speed file transfers, and enable high refresh rate 5K and 6K monitors. TB5 enclosures will likely be pricey at first, so if you don't need blazing fast you'll likely just use TB4 or even USB storage.
Need to test the M4 pro with AI that is what is so slow on the Mac can it compete with nivida for making AI images. I had to build a PC to make and use AI. Can the M4 pRO do it now and to what amount.?
Excellent work. Impressive, a clear and very thorough video. Thanks so much. I do plan to buy the Pro version of the Mac Mini. It is more than I need at the moment but the sheer power of it almost certainly means that it will be a computer that will last a really long time. The Thunderbolt 5 ports the CPU performance are a big thing. One point however: (for a video aimed at people who buy the Pro version of the MacMini especially for video and photos) forget SD! It is equivalent to USB A. It is on the way out. (Too slow, too limited, fragile etc.) Move on. It is NOT worthy of a comment. For video, photos cameras and the foreseeable future Compact Flash Express (type B or A) is the relevant SSD standard. You should definitely know that by now. For the standard Mac Mini maybe an SD card is relevant, but for the pro version which lots of people will buy with the future in mind, it is sort of …. irrelevant.
Thank you for the lovely words about the video! I'm afraid I'll have to agree to disagree with you on the SD card side of things. In my industry, it's still by far the most commonly used type of media for video work - we're a long way from that not being the case (largely because of cost and how long we hold onto our cameras). There's a reason Apple deems this a higher end feature for the Mac Studio and MacBook Pro and it's the one thing I'm really missing having switched from the former in my studio.
Apple did really again innovate here, in accredited laboratory for climatic and environmental conditions while testing some critical safety equipment we used the chance of testing it. We ended up keeping notes and photos on how M4 mini behaves in terms of thermal and temperature management. The M4 and M series processor is like alien technology compared to intel ones used in safety critical solutions
@@paulwoodward8265 Is it worth upgrading from my M2 Base Pro to a M4 Base Pro? Define the metrics for crushing. In my case it probably comes down to using Final Cut Pro. I create a few videos a month on average. The M2 Pro is great for that task. The only benefit I will see is on export/render times. How much of a time difference is worth the upgrade price? If buying new the M4 is the obvious choice. My videos are pretty short, the longest being ~ 15 mins. I recently put together a video that was an hour forty-five and the M2 Mini Pro handled it like a champ.
I probably should have explained a little more about what I did (although it is detailed in the vlog on the other channel). I basically grabbed random audio, midi parts, and AI drummer stuff from the Apple Loops library and threw them into that project, and then copied and pasted everything so that it was four minutes long. There was _no_ musical effort put into this at all. This means that there were all sorts of musical keys in play, and an utterly horrendous jumble of instruments, effects, and recordings. Trust me - it was totally unlistenable 😉
Cheers, Mark! I went for the Mac mini M4 Pro 12 Core CPU with 48GB unified memory, 2TB storage - using it with me Vision Pro and just enamoured by Mac Virtual Display. 🤩
Great video mate. You have confirmed I was right to upgrade from my M1 Max studio to the M4 Mac mini with 24 gigs of RAM and 512 gig hard drive. It is in no way downgrade and is more than enough for Final Cut Pro.
Outstanding value and shame that games are still going to be an issue because developers won't put in the extra headspace.......maybe time for perhaps Sony??????? ......just my wish list.......Jonn
SD card slots are highly likely to fail over time (bent , broken, loose, or corroded conductors). I’d rather replace a dongle than have too take the whole computer in for service. 👍🏻
There is a new 27" 5K display announced by BenQ but no pricing yet. I also did some research but for me the Apple Studio Display 27" is by far the best option available at the moment. Depending on your needs of course.
if you want crisp text, e.g. you write code, 27" 5K is the only great option, and there are very few screens with that pixel density apart from apple studio display. If you can handle imperfect text rendering, there are lots of 4k 27" monitors than can do a reasonable job. Depends what you're doing with it.
You are correct not to do benchmarks. You don't pick good tests. As you point out, none of your tests stressed the CPU or GPU. The Video export is mostly dependent on the HW encoders, so doesn't really test the CPU, or GPU. You'll always get similar results on Apple silicon, unless you're using a Max or Ultra, because they have more encoders onboard. The M4 hardware encoders are a bit better than previous generations. You'll likely get a similar result on the base M4. The photo export speed is mostly dependent on RAM - having more RAM will make that particular test go a lot faster. 64GB vs 16GB is far far more important than M4 Pro vs M2 Pro. As the M3 Max (also 64GB) result proves. Logic doesn't really push this hardware too hard either. Others have done tests that do max out the CPU, GPU, or both, and in those cases, the thing can get quite noisy and it does throttle. Probably won't ever affect you, since you may not do things like that. Other people who really care about noise _might_ be better off with the M2 Pro because it is far quieter under full load. Compiling code, blender, large language models, gaming, probably some Adobe apps too.
Not necessary, nobody with a Mac uses the off switch because its sleeps so well with minuscule power draw. Also the device is light, you can feel and press it easily
Almost all tests here either didn't load the CPU fully or just parts of the Media Engine of the GPU. Of course that won't make any fan spin. If i export Videos on a 4090 fans don't spin either. Hit it with some real load where it can't offload to hardware, Cinebench or Software-Transcoding of video files or anything comparable or some other artificial stress test. This here is not stress-testing anything, its testing parts of the media engine.😅
How often do you think my audience sits down and uses Cinebench for hours on end? They edit videos, make music, process photos, and do the exact kind of stuff demonstrated in this video. I would rather connect my man vegetables to the mains than run meaningless stress tests that have the sole intention of proving the presence of fans in a computer. What _my_ audience (and there are lots of different audiences out there) wants to know is how this thing copes with real world stuff, and for that, the M4 Mac mini is simply outstanding. That's the point of my tests, mate - as made abundantly clear throughout this entire video.
@@MarkEllisReviews I can totally understand this, but if the point is to "stress" something that doesn't mean its a real world test. How often do pilots fly their passenger airplanes like a military jet ? Not at all i'd say but still the wings get tested for 18m excursions. I just made my point based on the title not that your point is not valid for the general audience. :) To clarify: i was looking for a video related to how much noise the lil box makes under maximum stress. So i was a bit disappointed with this here - its nothing against you personally, hope that explains what i said a bit.
It does, and I appreciate your reply, but from my side, it's not much fun reading comments like that when you've spent two days working intensely on the testing part of a video. 'Stress' is a subjective word, as we've illustrated here, and I know my audience pretty well after nearly five years of doing this. This is the wonderful thing about TH-cam - there are so many different creators on here, and you'll find one or two who give you exactly as you want 👍
@@MarkEllisReviews I can totally understand and i really tried not to be a dick about it. The older i get the more i think about how the creator behind the scenes will feel about what i say. If i sounded too harsh then probably because i'm not a native speaker. I really appreciate the work you and all the other ppl on YT put into it. AND i got 90% of the info out of your video anyway: in normal scenarios you can't hear it and if its high stress it makes "some" noise but nothing annoying.
@@MarkEllisReviews I love your channel and have moved on, but I did spend $4,500 based on a number of reviews which now seem perfunctory (not you, but many other channels). That's a lot of money to us little guys. I am hoping that your channel will be one of several who really test these computers with meaningful stress tests. And, maybe some viewers should also know that lots of early buzz may be superficial. Thanks for listening. Its greatly appreciated.
at 6:31 why screen recording doesnt work is because these macs compare to nvidia NVENC dont have hw encoders for video recording . so they try to use the cpu which is 100% used for exporting ... why would you pay 3000 euros for a machine who doesnt even have a capable hardware encoder . . a 15 y old gtx980 can do this with ease at 4k !! 60 fps recording
Oh my. I've had so many of these comments, but I must confirm, once again, that we have _nothing_ to do with these dubs - it's a TH-cam feature. I will relay your concern to them.
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Ok, who's going for the M4 Pro Mac mini... and what are you going to do with it?
I will use mine for the Adobe Suite & general use.
I'm looking at replacing my PC Editing Workstation with a Mac. I have always owed Macs but the last 7 years my main editing machine is a PC. I think the M4 Pro 64GB 2TB is a posibility once I work out the connection of 2 NAS systems and all the peripherals, audio interface, 3 card readers etc. 2 questions: do you use the internal SSD for a scratch drive? and how does the M4 Pro handle the playback of 10 bit 4.2.2 FX3 vision? Cheers from Australia.
davinci and general use, would rather spend the extra $400 and get the base pro, as opposed to the (2x$200) I would need to spend on the base m4. $1,000/$1,400 is worth it to me for the pro performance. I do not need max or ultra, but i need more than base, it seems.
Super nice and super well done! Thnx from Germany!
I was thorned between the Mac Mini M4 and M4 Pro (both in the 24GB RAM/512GB SSD versions), but after watching this stress test review, I think I've made my choice and will go the M4 Pro model. The main reason is that I like to keep my devices as long as I possible can and have the budget for the Pro model. I would like to start using it for DaVinci Resolve video editing of my holiday movies shot with with my iPhone 14 in 4K@60fps and Adobe Photoshop editing. I might want to use it to play Cyberpunk 2077 as well as soon as the optimised version for Apple Silicon comes out. But the most important thing for me is that it works smoothly together with the Apple Studio Display when I have to work from home with all our M365 applications from work including Teams video conferencing and screen sharing sessions. It is extremely important for me that the Mac Mini M4 pro remains 100% quiet during my Teams video calls. My HP Windows 11 laptop starts to make noise when doing Teams meetings with video and screen sharing and I find this really annoying.
That thing handles stress better than I do.
And me. Has more hair than me, too.
🤣
there are meds for that
It also spells better “than” you do 😊.
Eh?
I truly appreciate your effort! I waited so long that someone on TH-cam will talk more about fan noise for the pro version and won’t just mention it for 2-3 seconds during the video. Tnx!
Glad it was helpful!
I got the Mac Mini Pro M4 with 24/512. Lovely toy!. Now I saw another video a few days ago where they tested the speed of the SSD of the base model. So, I did the same with my Pro, and the result was that the Pro was double the speed
What about you, did you notice any fans noise during usage and what type ?
BTW enjoy the new toy 😊
@@NirHason , no fan noise up to now.
@ Good sign! Haha…I wanted to go with the Pro 14/20 , 48GB, 1TB, 10Gbit but then I realized that I don’t really need all of that power and I can just buy the base Pro model with 10Gbit Ethernet and another base model to have at my parents house when I’m going there (trading stocks so I have a monitor there etc) and still have around 600$ left in my pocket haha..
I upgraded to M4 Pro, probably dont need it but man its quick! Another great video, thanks Mark! Imagine how the M4 Max chip will perform, bet you it will be very very fast.
Great review, that is the exact model I'm looking at, 14 core, 20 core GPU 64GB 2TB drive. I'm still concerned with thermals, not the noise, but the opposite, the lack of fan ramp up, Apple loves to push high temps to avoid noise, I like less heat more fans. Would love to see a temperature test on basic use and then temps when stressed with all the apps, power consumption is another good review option.
I got the fan on my M4 Pro base SoC, 48 RAM, 2TB to spin up doing a Handbrake encode. The mini didn't get hot-only warm. I also updated my FCPX to 11.
I was looking for that spec exactly and then got worried about the fan noise. I can breathe a bit easier now. 😊 Thanks a lot for your wonderful review Mark.
No problem 👍
I got the M4 Pro MacBook Pro. I love it. I was back and forth between the MacBook and the mini. This is my first Mac computer
I’m in the same position, but leaning more towards the mini as I can use it with 40 inch monitor and save cash.
Benchmarks? Is this the Mark2Ellis channel? Lol, great job Mark. I'm using my newly acquired Mac Mini M4 Pro for Lightroom and Final Cut and I love it!
I appreciate the reference to the "pub test" which is a phrase quite common here in Australia! My Pro is the exact same specs as yours and also doesn't skip a beat having resource-hog apps running simultaneously like Acrobat Pro, MS Office (especially Excel), a silly number of Safari tabs, etc. I also played Civ 6 on it which is very CPU intensive. This game quickly causes my 2017 iMac to beg for mercy with thermal throttling and a screaming fan, and while the M4 Pro got very warm on the top surface there was no noticeable throttling effect on gameplay or significant fan noise.
So satisfying to have lunch watching your content 😊
Glad you enjoy it!
There is an energy mode option to switch in the settings. After switching to "high power" the fan is going to turn on and the efficiency is going to go up. Try this test with this option turned on.
Indeed there is. I didn't use it in this test because it's yet one more variable - and I'm all for reducing the variables!
Thanks for doing this, it's just what I was looking for.
Very much appreciated ❤
You're welcome 😊
Great video. Given I'm running a 2016 MBP 13" that creaks now (especially since I upgraded the SSD to a 1TB using a 3rd party SSD company which Apple hates, hence boot time is now about 15 minsutes), I'm defo looking at getting one of these as my computer at home. I'm not a big content creator, etc, but want something I can watch movies with, do some light work on, and this looks to be an amazing deal at the base model.
Wow! I'm waiting for mine to arrive, I spec'ed it up just like yours but with the 512GB storage. I've been watching these videos like crazy, the hype is real!
You're in for a treat!
MacMini M4Pro/24GB/1TB here. Only gaming brings the fan on for me. But not so loud as to be annoying.
Mr Ellis. You've done it again. Thank you for the relevant info for a down the pub type of guy. 1 mini pro and 1 mini 16/512 on their way. the basic is to try using it as a portable solution(for those longer stay away from home. Cheers keep up the good work Mark
Means a lot - thank you!
Thanks for the review, very good information. If you had to chose 1 upgrade: Memory upgrade to 48gb or the chip upgrade to 14 CPU, 20GPU & 16 neural, which would you pick and why? Thanks a milllion
Thanks! Depends on your use case, but for me, always memory.
I’m debating whether or not to buy the standard M4 or go with the M4 pro chip in the mini. The comparison between these two in these tests help me decide if I should spend all the extra money on the M4 pro or not
And thank you so much for your videos. You are one of the few who makes real videos that we can use to make our purchasing decisions. Not just relying on canned benchmarks, but actual real world scenarios.
the base M4 is pretty much in line with the M2 Pro at most things. If you don't know that you need the Pro, you probably don't.
What is going to be used for?
Thanks again,,,,BTW doesnt everyone have a Mouse and Keyboard? unless its your first computer
How do you get the CPU and RAM percentage at the top?
iStat Menus
@@MarkEllisReviewsso just search that? I’m new to Mac.
What brand is your iPad mini case.
Thank you for the fan noise(less?) review, i run a recording studio and it's time for me to upgrade from an old windows machine, the supposed fan noise on the M4 Pro was a big drawback for me. If you notice some changes in the noise level could you notify me about it in reply to this post please? Thank you
I'm not sure where those reports of fan noise on the M4 Pro are coming from, but trust me, you're not going to have a problem with this.
@ it’s from people who are running benchmarks on it, but I don’t haha
Which is why benchmarks only tell one part of the story ;)
Fab video. Pleased to hear about low fan noise on the M4pro Mini in your “murder test”. Others have got them hot and noisy, probably some software updates needed for particular apps - some have found Resolve a bit underwhelming for render times atm. But this will no doubt be ironed out. I’m an FCP guy anyway 😉
Thank you! That's exactly my point with these tests - there are so many variables!
I am hoping to get a basic M4 mac mini , as i am just a normal average computer user. I do nothing fancy or hardcore stuff.
You will be happy for sure!
I’m looking forward to M2 Pro vs M4 base especially when it comes to things like FCP new magnetic mask and other intensive effects and also what time line performance is like.
One thing I was pleased with was the weight. It does feel substantial and not light like a toy.
Agreed.
Thanks for your straight forward reviews!
Thank you for such a lovely comment.
Apple publishes the BTUs of their Mac minis and the M4 Pro BTUs (478 BTU/h) than the Mac mini 2018 (417 BTU/h) which is was the previous hottest machine. I used to sit my external hard drive on top of my Mac mini and even with the M4, because the power supply is now at top, the mini was getting really hot. I put these metal external drives on top as the mini would help dissipate heat from the NVMe enclosures, but due the smaller form factor the internal fan cant cool the external shell as well as before. This only happens with Blender 3D rendering since it taxes the CPU and GPU which for a 10+ minute will absolutely get those fans revving and the outer shell warm.
Me Pro. Very glad to hear that there is almost nothing to hear.
I'd be curious about games that are optimized for Mac. I have the same M2 Pro Mac Mini that you're comparing to here, and I can definitely get the fans going if I fire up Death Stranding at 1440p on high settings, with some noticeable frame drops as well. Dropping down to 1080p smooths out the frame rate, but still pushes the GPU to its max, which definitely gets that fan cranking. I believe the M2 Max gets about 2x the FPS of an M4 Pro based on what I'm seeing as well, just due to all those extra GPU cores. Not that anyone really buys a Mac to game on primarily, but we are getting there! Cyberpunk coming next year!
considering the Mini......looks like a good one...
Hello Mark! Thanks for the video. Question: What's the name of the application you use to check CPU, RAM, etc? Thanks.
iStat Menus!
@@MarkEllisReviews Thank you very much Mark. :)
Using a macbook m3 pro binned pro chip, this suprises me a lot!, however maybe the internal ssd is too slow, perhaps it will soon be upgradable since you can remove the sdd, companys are in a race to make them for cheaper than apple does.
Great review, the Mac Mini M4 Pro is very impressive
Great test video Mark. Thank you very much! This new M4 Pro is insane!
Agreed!
Great review, as I'm targeting the same spec 14c/20c/64GB/2TB. Perfect timing. Regarding fans, I'm used to my MBP 14" M1 Pro. Can fans on the Mac Mini really be completely OFF at 0rpm, similar to the MBP M1 Pro, below certain temperature, or is the fan on the Mini always ON, but simply at low rpm, noise-wise not noticeable? Thanks a lot!
How would an external SSD connected thru TB5 (are these available already?) compare to the internal SSD's speed?
No idea at the moment, but when TB5 drives are more readily available, I'll investigate.
Great video... Extremely informative in easy to understand language.
Glad it helped!
The Max chip has 2 encoder/decoder FPGAs on the chip so maybe it can allocate rendering to 1 and screen recording to the other? Just a theory. But maybe you could screen record with OBS using the CPU in a pinch since OBS is now actually supporting MacOS really well compared to pretty poor support in years past.
Thanks for the cool review! How much of a difference you think would be in the "real life" daily work use with the M2 Pro Mac mini? Without comparing the benchmarks, just how responsive the system feels by itself and for someone that has amateur workflows in Lightroom, music software and video editing from time to time. That I think would be an interesting idea for a video! Thanks and greetings from México.
Glad you enjoyed it! For everyday tasks, it wouldn't feel any different to the base model M4.
I still remember some years ago how it was impossible to edit video in real time so we have to buy a 2000 euros card to have that and wait all night to have a render of a shortfilm. Good times now for creativity.
Best time ever, I'd argue!
I really want a Mac Studio M4 with similar specs
Great video Mark. Once my local MicroCenter gets some of these in stock, I am going to be spending some money.
@MarkEllisReviews thank you so much for this review. This gave me exactly the answer that I was looking for. Could you maybe in the near future also elaborate or make a separate review on the possible advantages of the higher disk speeds of the Mac Mini M4 Pro and the advantages of the Thunderbolt 5 ports (in comparison with the Thunderbolt 4 ports on the Mac Studio M2 Max/Ultra and Mac Mini M4 base model)? Is the new Thunderbolt 5 really worth it?
Great stuff! And, yep, as soon as there are more TB5 drives, etc, to test it with - I'll be doing just that!
TB5 will in theory give you double the speed file transfers, and enable high refresh rate 5K and 6K monitors. TB5 enclosures will likely be pricey at first, so if you don't need blazing fast you'll likely just use TB4 or even USB storage.
Great video, yeah only tb5 drive I know that's out is owc envoy ultra, link for it below
Can you test out some LLM and coding stuff? Like can you run llama3.2-70B parameter model on your m4 pro device?
looking forward to the baseline comparison.
Not long to wait!
Need to test the M4 pro with AI that is what is so slow on the Mac can it compete with nivida for making AI images. I had to build a PC to make and use AI. Can the M4 pRO do it now and to what amount.?
What is the app that you are using to monitor the hardware stats in the menu bar?
iStat Menus.
Was waiting for this! ❤🙌🏻
Excellent work. Impressive, a clear and very thorough video. Thanks so much. I do plan to buy the Pro version of the Mac Mini. It is more than I need at the moment but the sheer power of it almost certainly means that it will be a computer that will last a really long time. The Thunderbolt 5 ports the CPU performance are a big thing.
One point however: (for a video aimed at people who buy the Pro version of the MacMini especially for video and photos) forget SD! It is equivalent to USB A. It is on the way out. (Too slow, too limited, fragile etc.) Move on. It is NOT worthy of a comment. For video, photos cameras and the foreseeable future Compact Flash Express (type B or A) is the relevant SSD standard. You should definitely know that by now. For the standard Mac Mini maybe an SD card is relevant, but for the pro version which lots of people will buy with the future in mind, it is sort of …. irrelevant.
Thank you for the lovely words about the video! I'm afraid I'll have to agree to disagree with you on the SD card side of things. In my industry, it's still by far the most commonly used type of media for video work - we're a long way from that not being the case (largely because of cost and how long we hold onto our cameras). There's a reason Apple deems this a higher end feature for the Mac Studio and MacBook Pro and it's the one thing I'm really missing having switched from the former in my studio.
9:05 Except for your Stereo Out clipping like a mad dog.. Lol, no stress man, I understand. Great content!
Oh, you should have heard that mix, mate.
Apple did really again innovate here, in accredited laboratory for climatic and environmental conditions while testing some critical safety equipment we used the chance of testing it. We ended up keeping notes and photos on how M4 mini behaves in terms of thermal and temperature management. The M4 and M series processor is like alien technology compared to intel ones used in safety critical solutions
Base M4 Pro vs base M2 Pro is the question I have.
the M4 Pro crushes the M2 Pro. What's the question?? The base M4 is comparable to M2 Pro in overall performance.
@@paulwoodward8265 Is it worth upgrading from my M2 Base Pro to a M4 Base Pro? Define the metrics for crushing. In my case it probably comes down to using Final Cut Pro. I create a few videos a month on average. The M2 Pro is great for that task. The only benefit I will see is on export/render times. How much of a time difference is worth the upgrade price? If buying new the M4 is the obvious choice. My videos are pretty short, the longest being ~ 15 mins. I recently put together a video that was an hour forty-five and the M2 Mini Pro handled it like a champ.
What's the CPU stats app?
You didn't show us the Song! For two years we heard about "music production", surely it was ok.
I probably should have explained a little more about what I did (although it is detailed in the vlog on the other channel).
I basically grabbed random audio, midi parts, and AI drummer stuff from the Apple Loops library and threw them into that project, and then copied and pasted everything so that it was four minutes long. There was _no_ musical effort put into this at all.
This means that there were all sorts of musical keys in play, and an utterly horrendous jumble of instruments, effects, and recordings.
Trust me - it was totally unlistenable 😉
What app are you using to show utilization? Istat?
screen recording and exporting probably use the media engine, the max models have two I think
great review, Mark! what's the utility @12:31?
Likely iStat Menus.
Cheers, Mark! I went for the Mac mini M4 Pro 12 Core CPU with 48GB unified memory, 2TB storage - using it with me Vision Pro and just enamoured by Mac Virtual Display. 🤩
Thanks a lot Mark, now i keep wondering if i should have ordered the standard M4 instead of the M4 Pro Mac Mini. Don’t show this review to my wife 😉😂
lol
Great video, thank you for this!
My pleasure!
Love love love this video :)
Thank you!
It’s a beast and hungry for more ❤❤
Another fantastic video!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Bro you tested stress on it but it didn't lose any hair but after paying the price of it we gonna lose more hair i think !!😂
Interesting. Look forward to the 599 video comparison
Coming this weekend!
12:35 How do you show the stats like that?
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!
Great video mate. You have confirmed I was right to upgrade from my M1 Max studio to the M4 Mac mini with 24 gigs of RAM and 512 gig hard drive. It is in no way downgrade and is more than enough for Final Cut Pro.
Glad I could help!
Where’s the video you promoted at the end? Not published yet?
For some reason, I can get the fans getting kicked on in M4 Pro Mac mini while working in After effects and Doing some editing in Da Vinco Resolve.
Outstanding value and shame that games are still going to be an issue because developers won't put in the extra headspace.......maybe time for perhaps Sony??????? ......just my wish list.......Jonn
I would like to hear that "horrendous" song 🤣
You really wouldn't.
I'm willing to bet the likes of Satechi are already redesigning shrunken bases, to have SD card support and external NVME or 2.5 SSD enclosure.
SD card slots are highly likely to fail over time (bent , broken, loose, or corroded conductors). I’d rather replace a dongle than have too take the whole computer in for service. 👍🏻
I've ordered the Mac Mini M4 Pro, does anyone have any recommendations for a display other than the Apple one?
There is a new 27" 5K display announced by BenQ but no pricing yet. I also did some research but for me the Apple Studio Display 27" is by far the best option available at the moment. Depending on your needs of course.
if you want crisp text, e.g. you write code, 27" 5K is the only great option, and there are very few screens with that pixel density apart from apple studio display. If you can handle imperfect text rendering, there are lots of 4k 27" monitors than can do a reasonable job. Depends what you're doing with it.
I've made my mind up and I'm going for the Apple display. I heavily rely on Adobe suite, indesign & illustrator. Can't be doing with imperfections 😆
Nice video
Wow….incredible. Thank you
At that price I’d be waiting for an updated Mac Studio
You should start your videos in Monty Python's fashion...crawling from under the table......"It's...................................................."
You are correct not to do benchmarks. You don't pick good tests. As you point out, none of your tests stressed the CPU or GPU.
The Video export is mostly dependent on the HW encoders, so doesn't really test the CPU, or GPU. You'll always get similar results on Apple silicon, unless you're using a Max or Ultra, because they have more encoders onboard. The M4 hardware encoders are a bit better than previous generations. You'll likely get a similar result on the base M4.
The photo export speed is mostly dependent on RAM - having more RAM will make that particular test go a lot faster. 64GB vs 16GB is far far more important than M4 Pro vs M2 Pro. As the M3 Max (also 64GB) result proves.
Logic doesn't really push this hardware too hard either.
Others have done tests that do max out the CPU, GPU, or both, and in those cases, the thing can get quite noisy and it does throttle. Probably won't ever affect you, since you may not do things like that. Other people who really care about noise _might_ be better off with the M2 Pro because it is far quieter under full load. Compiling code, blender, large language models, gaming, probably some Adobe apps too.
Stop ruining Christmas.
re power button on bottom . hmm there no reason why you cant have the mini upstand down? Then power button on top.
Not necessary, nobody with a Mac uses the off switch because its sleeps so well with minuscule power draw.
Also the device is light, you can feel and press it easily
Soooo anxious to see the comparison with the base model.
Apple raises the bar just enough to get folks to think they need to do a trade in!
Almost all tests here either didn't load the CPU fully or just parts of the Media Engine of the GPU. Of course that won't make any fan spin. If i export Videos on a 4090 fans don't spin either. Hit it with some real load where it can't offload to hardware, Cinebench or Software-Transcoding of video files or anything comparable or some other artificial stress test. This here is not stress-testing anything, its testing parts of the media engine.😅
How often do you think my audience sits down and uses Cinebench for hours on end? They edit videos, make music, process photos, and do the exact kind of stuff demonstrated in this video.
I would rather connect my man vegetables to the mains than run meaningless stress tests that have the sole intention of proving the presence of fans in a computer. What _my_ audience (and there are lots of different audiences out there) wants to know is how this thing copes with real world stuff, and for that, the M4 Mac mini is simply outstanding. That's the point of my tests, mate - as made abundantly clear throughout this entire video.
@@MarkEllisReviews I can totally understand this, but if the point is to "stress" something that doesn't mean its a real world test.
How often do pilots fly their passenger airplanes like a military jet ? Not at all i'd say but still the wings get tested for 18m excursions.
I just made my point based on the title not that your point is not valid for the general audience. :)
To clarify: i was looking for a video related to how much noise the lil box makes under maximum stress. So i was a bit disappointed with this here - its nothing against you personally, hope that explains what i said a bit.
It does, and I appreciate your reply, but from my side, it's not much fun reading comments like that when you've spent two days working intensely on the testing part of a video. 'Stress' is a subjective word, as we've illustrated here, and I know my audience pretty well after nearly five years of doing this.
This is the wonderful thing about TH-cam - there are so many different creators on here, and you'll find one or two who give you exactly as you want 👍
@@MarkEllisReviews I can totally understand and i really tried not to be a dick about it. The older i get the more i think about how the creator behind the scenes will feel about what i say.
If i sounded too harsh then probably because i'm not a native speaker. I really appreciate the work you and all the other ppl on YT put into it.
AND i got 90% of the info out of your video anyway: in normal scenarios you can't hear it and if its high stress it makes "some" noise but nothing annoying.
That's refreshing to hear - thank you!
There have been some updates for video.
Apple SOC so good that you don't need to upgrade until your system die on you.
Very well done...ty
None of you folks figures out that the 16 inch 2019 MBP with the i9 gets super hot. Im not sure how that went by all of you!!
Eh?
@@MarkEllisReviews I purchased after the great reviews. It gets very hot. I’m puzzled why that did not come up in any reviews.
Oh, ok. Well, we've all moved on a bit since then, haven't we!
@@MarkEllisReviewsOnly 6 years, I’m sure you still remember what you ate for breakfast that day 😅
@@MarkEllisReviews I love your channel and have moved on, but I did spend $4,500 based on a number of reviews which now seem perfunctory (not you, but many other channels). That's a lot of money to us little guys. I am hoping that your channel will be one of several who really test these computers with meaningful stress tests. And, maybe some viewers should also know that lots of early buzz may be superficial. Thanks for listening. Its greatly appreciated.
at 6:31 why screen recording doesnt work is because these macs compare to nvidia NVENC dont have hw encoders for video recording . so they try to use the cpu which is 100% used for exporting ... why would you pay 3000 euros for a machine who doesnt even have a capable hardware encoder . . a 15 y old gtx980 can do this with ease at 4k !! 60 fps recording
It's crazy when you realize the one tiny little SD card slot is what protects the sale of mac studios.
your dubbing is not good upgrade it or change it? editor forget to put room tone.
Oh my. I've had so many of these comments, but I must confirm, once again, that we have _nothing_ to do with these dubs - it's a TH-cam feature. I will relay your concern to them.
Actual footage o fine fan noise would have been useful.
It wouldn't, I'm afraid - you could barely hear it.
@@MarkEllisReviews other videos say different
@@gagsmedia well, I’m sure they were testing more vigorous stuff than me, mate.
I'm sure if I boot up blender or aftereffects it will die
mark are you rich? How do you afford all this tech!?!?!
I'm running a business.
Do you really need that 64GB RAM? Most of the time its usage is around 20% or less!
Nope!
@@MarkEllisReviews It makes photo exports far far quicker.
software developers needs
@@MarkEllisReviews How much of RAM would be good enough for 4K 10bit video editing?
@ 16GB has dealt with it perfectly for me in the past.
90 gradi ❤😂🎉
Everyone has a a mouse and keyboard. I have several Apple keyboards.
"Everyone"?!