Bro. I’ve been looking for some reviews and bumped into your channel. You look so sincere and kind so it touches me somewhere inside) subscribed! Wish you more TH-camr’s successes in future, you are definitely worth it)
🍄 Let me know if you see him too! 😅 This video was a labour of love! No sponsors again, but really hope you enjoy it. I took a lot of your feedback onboard for this one, but I am sure it can be improved even more! Have a lovely day 🙏🏼
Could you please give me some suggestions for the best docking stations for the mini M4? A docking station that has an SSD slot and some extra pins can help me pump up the memory of the 256gb mini..
Best one I found without spending a fortune is the Caldigit TS04 - I shared a link down below, it’s great even though it’s TB4, but will also look into the Thunderbolt 5 stuff when they come out
You did great. I will note that some of your stress tests are really about memory, and the simple M4 with 32GB RAM is likely to do much better than with 16GB of RAM. With the base RAM level the Mini will do a lot of swapping with these big programs and that is going to slow you down.
Hats off for giving an amazing well rounded review, this is by far the best mac mini review i have seen so far on the internet, even when compared to big tech reviewers. The community contributions to making this video very relatable and resembling real life use cases was a chefs kiss, extraordinary efforts, i am subscribed to your channel.
6:21 Not all DAWs, but some DAWs including Logic Pro are using only the performance cores for some reason. Reaper on the other hand uses all available cores which is very good and you can actually see a bump in the tracks count or adding more effects etc to the project.
Hey Alex! In settings on Logic the i/o buffer is what really matters for track stuttering! (The lower this number, the less latency there is between hitting play and the daw playing back). This gives the daw time to calculate what the plugins are doing. It's generally a great test to put it to the lowest buffer (32) and see how many tracks you can get. When producing you'll often record/make a basic track with the lowest i/o you can and then crank this number up for adding layers and mixing since you don't need realtime playback. At any rate thanks for all the tests this was great to see! You can watch how L.Dre does his tests in Ableton (or iamamusicmogul in logic pro) for a similar example :)
@@chidorirasenganz I've never had that case. However I would assume maybe a thermal issue might present itself if maybe on the MacBook Air. For example Monster demo file, 1:48 with CPU and GPU, with GPU only 1:58. I ran though all my files and at minimum I see at least a 3%. uplift in render times.I've tried to find the source of what you are bringing up and the only thing I could find is about render tiling, which you would tweak to get scenes to fit in RAM better. As soon as the scene renders and uses tilting then GPU/CPU seems to come into play from my testing.
@ I don’t know if something has changed but previously all the info I’ve seen on using Blender on Mac since the M1 days has been GPU only is faster. I think it was the GPU waiting on the slower CPU to finish rending but I can always try it again on 4.2 but since Eevee Next came out (tbh Eevee in general) I haven’t really care about render times since most of the time it’s 5-10 secs at most
@@AlexGTech Kontakt is a sampler and thus doesn't tax the CPU that much -- just a lot of disk i/o, streaming samples from the ssd. Using a synth like Alchemy (built-in, so free once you have Logic) would give a more interesting result imo. Interesting video nonetheless; thx for making it.
@@Mpthedawn I found that it was still running past 100 but 200 made it slow down and crackle a bit. I’m guessing the limit in these type of tracks is in that range 100/200 but I need more time to find out when exactly it start to slowdown
You're not only going to run out of storage space on that base model, ssds don't work well when more than half their space is used, you're not only going to run out of storage you're going to run out of performance! Add AppleCare memory and storage upgrades and this is really not such an amazing deal.
Excellent testing video and analysis. The M4 Pro is clearly for those high-end professionals with no time to lose. High end pressure news reporting, movies/documentary sets with a tight filming budget, and Machine learning on a professional level. The regular M4 Mac Mini seems to best for those without tight timelines.
on logic or ableton the m4 will really move more than 1000 tracks, in the video you are using only 128 samples (minute 06:03 ), anyone today for mixing or mastering (means load tons of plugins) put more than 2400 samples in order to reduce the cpu usage.
@@AlexGTechI would definitely test with both. Lower sample buffer is necessary for live performances! Larger sample buffer means more time between pressing a key on a piano and actually hearing it. Great video!
Definitely! I tried to enable that via the command line using Apple’s own bloody Metal code, but only steam games worked and wasn’t even Apple’s thing, it was just Steams basic counter. Really annoying. And I ran out of time to get an FPS counter app, but will research into a good one 👊🏼
Excellent video, so great to see you taking on community questions. I have a 2009 Mac Pro, 2 x 6-core 3.46 Xeons, 96GB ECC Ram, 2 TB NVMe, USB 3.2 Gen 2. RX580 8GB. I was waiting for a Mac Studio but don't know if I should just get a M4 or M4 Pro Mac Mini. Looking forward to your next videos on the Mac Mini's. A.
The thing about most music programs, from what I've seen on another TH-camr's (James Zhan) tests along with my own tests too, is that they dont utilize the efficiency cores AT ALL. It kind of made me wonder when I saw Reaper utilizing all the cores, but Logic didn’t.
Yeah, I am glad I am not going crazy! I did wonder for a while, if I had made a mistake in the settings. Will check that James guy out, I am learning so much making these videos! Love it!
@AlexGTech 😂 you're not alone, I thought I was too! And do check him out. He's been doing comparison videos on all the Apple Silicon Macbook Pros since the M1, so his videos will make for great references. Keep up with the great work yourself, too, man! 💪
It's so interesting how different reviewers are getting different results with different configurations. One shows how just bumping the storage to 512gb drastically increased the speed without upgrading the ram on the base model. I struggled with my decision but finally decided to try the same thing while using a fast 2TB external drive to migrate the home folder to so that the internal drive stays relatively open. I guess I'll know if my plan works in a couple weeks. I really wanted the Pro version but the cost was just a few hundred more than my budget allowed so hopefully this config will be second best.
The quality of an LLM's output does NOT depend on the machine running it. Only the speed will differ. If you ran the exact same flavour of Llama (number of params and quantization) on both Macs, then the difference is only down to chance.
Very useful test overall, thanks for the video and all the effort! Two suggestions on the LLM part: - The power of the chip, like M4 vs M4 Pro won't affect the quality, any such result is coincidence :) - The chip's speed will affect how fast the LLM can generate the answer, the usual benchmark for this is in token output / seconds. There is a built in 'randomness'. Answers to the same prompt will be different each time, so measuring completion speed doesn't make sense. Keep it up, great stuff!
thank you for confirming that, I thought it was a bit counterintuitive, and perhaps I had a 'processor' bias while I was doing the tests and my brain played a trick on me! The stable diffusion test was really odd though, how out of 10 pictures prompting for a hot air balloon and birds, the Pro generated 4 including both and the standard M4 only generated 1 picture with a bird, but nothing with hot air balloons. I guess I need to run multiple tests though to really see if it was a 'one-off' or if having a beefier CPU/GPU makes a difference
Really helpful so far. I have been convinced that I needed the Pro MAC Mini to produce, edit and upload professional TH-cam videos. Plus podcasts. But you are making me think I may be able use the base model and save myself some serious bucks. I'm going to enjoy your docking station video too. Great job! I'll end up viewing these videos again. If I'm not able to decide based on videos alone, you've given me a lot to ask people about if I need to shop these in store in person. And that's really meaningful. I'm tired of buying memory I'll never use, or buying the wrong product for my needs. I appreciate this more than you can know. Thank you again for all of your hard work.
My pleasure and so glad to hear thikese videos help! I agree with your approach though, access to external storage is a lot faster than it used to be. I’ve edited nearly 400 videos from external SSDs in the last few years. Saved thousands on local storage
Commenting just because of the efforts it must have taken to create this detailed video. I started TH-cam channel, created just 4 videos and the comparison video between iPhone 14 and 15 took such extreme efforts, even though that was much simpler than this. Hats off. Keep doing the great work
Thanks so much, I enjoyed learning some of these different apps and can see why this machine has such potential! Much more to come, but for now I need a rest 😂
Thank you for running logic with Kontakt! How did the fan sound? Would super appreciate hearing (pun intended:) if the fan turned on in the M4 base / M4 Pro. p.s. logic only utilizes the performance cores
haha yes it did on both! I actually managed to record the audio here, there is a chapter just before After Effects testing I think. Essentially, it is a lot quieter than my M1 Max MBP which is already pretty quiet. I just answered a similar question, but here is what I experienced: When I was going crazy with it (like rendering and trying to play a game at the same time) the fans did start and I noted the temperature get close to 90 Celsius. The fans span at 3,000 RPM for a few minutes bringing the temp down to about 65C which I thought was pretty impressive as a short burst activity. I am not sure yet how that behaves on a sustained load, say for over 10-15 minutes but the cooling at least at this sort of realistic usage level, is working really well!
No matter on what computer you use the LL model. If it's the same models, it will give you the same results. Well, randomly it would be sometimes better, sometimes worse (like in your case). The only real difference is speed. And considering speed, you should've include token tps (tocken per second) metric, because results will vary in volume.
Superb! Thanks a lot! Hey Buddy! Really nice video! I have few queries, right now I am using Windows PC (Ryzen 5 2600x) which is quite old. I do graphic designing (using Adobe apps) and video editing (some time podcast editing which has 3 camera shots of 1080p videos). I was thinking of upgrading my PC and then Mac Mini M4 launched! Considering Mac's performance consistency and durability, I was thinking of switching to Mac Mini M4. Since you are a mac mini user, can you please guide me. - Should I upgrade my Windows PC or switch to Mac Mini M4 or Mac Mini M4 Pro? Which one is better in terms of performance, dependibility and consistency? - My system upgrade cycle is generally at least 5-6 years. - I don't have AC in my work room and when I was planning for PC, I was thinking of putting Liquid Cooler or better CPU fan. - Do you think, Mac Mini M4 or M4 Pro should work fine without AC or it may heat up while editing videos? Does Mac Mini M4 heats up while rendering or opening multiple apps with 100+ tabs open in Firefox (or any browser)? - Also, should I go for M4 or M4 Pro with 24GB RAM and 512GB SSD because I can't upgrade it later? Please share your thoughts Thanks a lot, buddy!
Shockingly, 300-track songs are not uncommon. I regularly get up to the 150-200 range on big rock mixes, but those cinema scoring guys go up to around 1000 tracks! Great video! Did you experience any jank with external USB devices? My M1 Max Studio has been really glitchy with external NVMe and monitors disconnecting sometimes.
Can you test a 32gb 512 mac studio as they arebgoing for just $1299 with full warranty faster media engines sd card more gpu cores ports. Comoared to these with the same specs
it's a issue with how apple implements multi core audio (see my other comment). not well apparently; it causes dropouts if you use both. Ableton; Logic and some other don't use E-cores at all for audio as a result. Hopefully it gets solved at some point but the point is it seems Apple did an horrible job on their implementation (Ableton now uses a dummy load to force the use of E cores because the performances were WORSE for lighter load is it worked on E-cores; which tells me something is seriously f'ed up). Also ableton developper explained that the priority for them is live application (obviously) so you can't have dropouts.
The 70B test was definitely not suitable for these machines, as it was slow due to SSD swapping. If you could follow up with the Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B (which should work on both M4 minis), I believe it would be very helpful for many people. 🧠🍄
Thanks for making this video. You mention in the video that you are running Stable Diffusion (Im guessing that you had speeded up the video at that point, it cant be that quick right?). You said there was a downloadable document of the timings,? it is of huge interest to me, would you kindly link to where this can be found?
Yes the stable diffusion test was at 13:45, I found the Pro to generate slightly more consistent and accurate results. I forgot to screen record the Pro but the M4 base model example is there 👊🏼
This was a great video, you're very humble man. I'd love to see a comparision between m4 mac mini vs a similarly priced windows laptop and how it performs in both gaming and editing
I'm thinking of grabbing a mac mini to use in my audio video setup. I've tested this with an M2 MacBook pro. Using Roon to playback hires audio (I expect mac mini base model will do this quite easily). But I also wish to play back bluray ISO files with full menu functionality. Can this be done with base model mac mini?
Your software testing is helpful. However, will M4 Mini's thermal throttle? I hear Apple has set the M4 Mini to run hot in order to reduce fan noise, but hot-running computers have a shorter life. It would be helpful to report CPU and GPU operating temperatures. I'm waiting for the next Mac Studio with better & quieter cooling. Better to buy one Mac Studio M4 than two Mini M4 Pros over the same time period.
when I was going crazy with it (like rendering and trying to play a game at the same time) the fans did start and I noted the temperature get close to 90 Celsius. The fans span at 3,000 RPM for a few minutes bringing the temp down to about 65C which I thought was pretty impressive as a short burst activity. I am not sure yet how that behaves on a sustained load, say for over 10-15 minutes but the cooling at least at this sort of realistic usage level, is working really well!
im also rocking a similar TB4 enclosure with a 2TB NVME SSD with my M4 Mac mini and before that with my M1 MacBook Air. absolutely good enough for all tasks I have ever been doing ;)
The majority of DAWs don't make use of the efficiency cores. As far as I know, the only ones that use ALL cores are Reaper, Cubase/Nuendo, and the latest version of Pro Tools.
Good stuff Alex…nice to see clear and humble - non shouty - info. As a heavy LogicPro/NI/Arturia user I’m keen to see the music tests of course. Keep it up. JPMusic.
Thank you so much! Man, I am HOOKED! I have no clue what I am doing in Logic, but used to use Ableton back in the day, so there was a little muscle memory in there. Really want to bring some keys into the studio and have a Mac mini setup to mess around with it. I won’t be hitting those track numbers, that’s for sure 😂
Thank you! I’ve been learning a lot making these videos, and fascinated by LLMs! Having worked with computers since the 1990s I am shocked by how much things evolved!
@@kevinclark1466 forgot to screen record that bit 🤦🏽♂️ but it was at least twice as fast. More importantly though, the M4 Pro resulting images were much closer to the prompt.
Good you did a logic test my m2 pro is all I need for audio. It’s normal for logic to not use efficiency cores. If you use some of the alternative DAWs they perform better and use all cores.
Great performance review. Would love to get the base model mini. But could you perhaps include a test video on machine learning tasks using at least YOLOv8 from Ultralytics?
Thanks for the video 👍 What model of Alienware monitor do you use and how do you like it? I’m going to need a solid monitor for my mini pro. Hoping to get one Black Friday under 500 🤞
could you please do an intensive after effects test and premiere pro test with the Pro :). I was actually intending to buy an MacBook Pro max but for the price I can buy the mini and also a camera and Im trying to figure out whether to go for the mini or not :). But it seems actually pretty powerful !
in logic, you can actually "freeze" the tracks and it bakes all the plugins into the flat track, and then you can pretty much do another 3x the tracks ;)
A test missing in all the Mac mini videos is Power consumption. Do you have a power meter and compare the Mac minis power consumption while Browsing the internet, While rendering Files, while editing etc
Great video. Thank you for putting this together. It seems to me that you are using an ultrawide screen with one of Mac Mini you testing. Do you mind sharing a bit about the model and how things are connected? As I am planning to get a Mac Mini to use with my uw monitor. Cheers. Over the course of the video, it looks like an Alienware. :)
Can you post a link to the After Effects template you used for testing? I’d like to try it on my current PC to see if it’s worth buying the mini as an upgrade.❤
Does it make sense that the same model gives better answers on M4 Pro in addition to being faster? I understand there will always be a difference even with two of same hardware but consistently better results?
Only Cubase and Reaper use the efficiency cores. Also when testing tracks in Logic or other you must have something playing on all the tracks. A lot of your tracks had big spaces so only half the tracks were playing.
Can you do a video checking the temperatures at idle and doing different tasks? Interesting that the fans were not ramping as much as your MacBook, I think Apple is letting the chips get pretty hot to save on noise, I assume the the thermal architecture they came up with really pushes the heat out of the case.
I noticed that even when I was doing some extreme stuff (like trying to play a game while rendering Blender) the chip got as hot as 90C, and the fans span for about 2-3 mins at 3,000RPM bringing the temperature overall down to 65C. I thought that was super impressive. Some components were cooled down to about 55C even.
@@AlexGTech Thanks for letting me know. I watched another review but it was a sustained stress test not normal usage and the chip got up to 98C, pretty dang hot. It's good to see it come down so fast for you under normal usage. That was exactly what I wanted to know, really appreciate that.
13:00 - It's not an M4 Pro problem. It's a memory pressure problem. Exit status 2 is a killed process due to the OOM (Out of Memory) Killer closing the process. You can't expect a 38GB LLVM to fit into a 24 GB RAM space. You want to buy the next tier up, for what ever the LLVM size is. So for 38 GB, you'd want to buy the 48 / 64GB M4.
Yeah, now I know 😂 thanks though, I had no idea what that error meant! but I did see the memory pressure immediately go to amber and red when loading the model. It did make me wonder though… how well that 70B model would run on my M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM. But that’s another video 😂
@@AlexGTech Running a 70B in 64GB RAM on the M1 Max, vs it running (or not) on the M4 Pro, would be an interesting. I don't blame you for not knowing about what that error was. Unless you spend a fair amount of time in the unix (or posix) world, that's not something that would be easily known.
Nice video! BTW, apparently (and ironically), Apple's own Logic does NOT take advantage of the economy cores! Maybe on one of their next updates. Pro Tools, Cubase, Reaper and some of the others use them much more. Presonus Studio One not so much.
Crazy right? I wonder why they do that. Even Adobe seems to use all efficiency and performance cores evenly. That was quite noticeable on After Effects…
Great video mate! first time subscribing on the back of a single video, so well done. Looking at purchasing an M4 mini this weekend so timely delivery as well. Keep it up boss. only question I have is both machines are 16gb unified ram yeah? how helpful is the 24gb ram upgrade vs. the mini to pro upgrade?
This is a great video, thank you. I’m curious if the games played much better on the Pro? I don’t game much and mostly older less demanding games but I’d love to be able to replace my PC.
Can you please compare the base mini m4 (with pro chipset) with the base MacBook Pro m4 (with pro chipset)…? They both start with the exact same specs.
Thanks so much for your tests! When purchasing a Mac mini M4 Pro with Blender in mind (to render complex geometries), where would you put some extra bucks between these two options: - Better processor (going from 16-core to 20-core GPU), - or double the RAM (going from 24 to 48GB)?
RAM for me. Blender ran great on both the M4 Pro and M4 base model (I set it to use GPU for rendering) but if you open about 40 tabs at the same time, that’s when RAM will struggle
Same thoughts. I think the faster processor would be faster (obviously) but only to the point when the system has consumed the 24GB, the point at which performance will collapse. 24GB is a lot, but Blender is capable of going that far. 48GB is more comfortable. Thanks!
Also @AlexGTech, I've asked two other youtubers the same question before, but you're the only one who bothered to answer. You've just won a new subscriber :)
@@AlexGTech finally, I made some specs and price comparison, and although the Mac mini M4 base model and M4 Pro without options both seem good, boosting the Mac mini M4 Pro to 48GB RAM and 10Gbit/s Ethernet makes it's price almost on par with the Mac Studio M2 Ultra! When Apple updates the latter to the M4 Max 36GB (assuming they'll keep the same price tag) the insanely faster GPU of the M4 Max (about twice as fast) makes this upcoming Mac Studio a better choice, even with 12GB less memory (because 36GB are already a lot of RAM)
Sir, Have your tried to use M4 Pro Mac mini for render via network ( Ethernet ) , while you edit your file on M4 Mac mini ? . Thanks, I learned about Stable diffusion & llama LLM :) . Nice video :)
The big question for me is not whether it is M4 or M4 Pro, but on the M4 Pro what plus ups work best and are cost effective - unbinned, more memory 48Gb or more. I have a Thunderbolt 4 external 2TB NVME SSD that is fast and I can easily upgrade down the road. But it is options that really help with down the road performance.
As someone who uses a lot of After Effects, I definitely think 24 GB RAM is necessary. Question is, do you think M4 Pro is worth the extra $400 vs. M4 Base with 24 GB RAM, where the only difference would be the chip?
I don't know if I'll go for the pro, or even the base model. But I do know that I appreciate your hard work and "beginner's mind" approach. Kudos. Subscribed. Cheers from overcast Vienna, Scott
Thank you so much! Welcome aboard and I am so glad to hear that. I wanted to really push these bad boys and the help from the community was great! Nearly killed me trying to learn some of this stuff, but I enjoyed that! 😅
For the 70B 3 bit quantized, you'll need 64GB RAM. The architecture allows 3/4 RAM usable by GPU, so the model size needs to be below this plus some margin.
looking at the benchmarks, the 14 core pro model vs 12 core pro model, it seems to be a quite well priced upgrade, in terms of the additional performance you get, if you look at the lowest RAM and SSD of the M4 pro versions (percentage of price added, vs percentage of performance gain). If you do GPU-heavier tasks, it does offer a bit more performance than the price difference suggest. But I would start with upgrading the RAM over going for the 14 core, as that will likely get you over-all better performance (more RAM for the GPU, less use of SWAP of the SSD, more tabs in your browser or more samples loaded in your plugins if you use sample based music software, more RAM for AI models, and more RAM for cueing up tasks for the CPU cores when rendering, thus making the most of the available CPU power). With the M4 pro models, at least you get the 512GB, that I would suggest is the recommended minimum even if you get a nvme based external storage. So while I do not like seeing less than 1TB in a modern computer, you should still consider an external drive because of SSD prices for Macs so at that point 512GB should be enough system storage for on-board only software and future updates of the system, and a fast NVME case + at least 1TB of fast NVME, is less than the difference in price between 512GB and 1TB, and then you get almost 500GB of extra (formatted) storage, you might even be able to get 2TB of external storage for the price of the upgrade (if you shop around). If you are not making orchestral music, I would probably put the 14 core upgrade over going from 48GB of RAM to 64GB. If you do not need extra GPU power however, you will have a greatly performing system with the 12 core, so at this point, it is just if you have the money to spare, and thus would like to get the best performance you can out of the system. But if you do orchestral music, or do a lot of AI stuff, get both upgrades, at that pricepoint it doesn't make a huge difference to the end price.
I agree with RAM over CPU for most cases. The CPU, even in the $600 M4 doesn’t look to get overloaded in most operations. The 512GB in storage is nice, but as you pointed out, a fast NVME is a must for me. And you’re right, there are fast 2TB NVMe SSDs out there for under $200 or just over $200.
@@AlexGTech There are some tasks clearly that overloads the M4 base CPU, but it also takes a lot longer to perform tasks. And for anyone making music, you will be able to overload the base CPU. The biggest issue with it though, is that if you get more RAM and the 512GB SSD, the relative price difference for the Pro, makes it worth it, if your can find room in your budget, the CPU is too good for the configuration Apple offers in the base package, and their upgrade prices are too high to make full use of the CPU, before the upgrade to the Pro version makes more sense. Regarding the number of tracks in songs, many of the chart topping producers can easily get up to 100, but then they also run multiple plugins per track, so they will overload the CPU before that, but use the freeze function to free up processing.
@@dreamhunter2973The Caldigit is a hub that allows you to expand the ports you have for the computer, it is not a storage enclosure device. You’ll need to by an SSD or NVME enclosure and put the NVME 1TB/2TB or whatever you want to use and then you connect that to the mac mini ports or to the Caldigit in case you need those extra available ports
I've been trying to use that this week and found it to behave really well, but my clips are quite short and I am only using a plugin from MotionVFX called mTracker 3D. But I will try it with some heftier clips and use After Effects as well as I know 3D tracking on AE is quite heavy too
Base m4 mini struggles in after effects, and a lot of editors want to know more about it, how is the timeline while working, i mean export times are good but what matters more is that is it usable
It was pretty slow to be honest, that’s what I meant when I said it was slow when rendering. It was literally a few seconds per frame which felt pretty slow to me. I will compare that against a beefier mac but I kinda remember that being faster
Bro. I’ve been looking for some reviews and bumped into your channel. You look so sincere and kind so it touches me somewhere inside) subscribed! Wish you more TH-camr’s successes in future, you are definitely worth it)
Thank you so much! I’ve just spent the last 3 days barely getting any sleep, editing videos so this comment put a huge smile on my face, thank you 🥰
I love the humility and effort put into the LLM topic!
🧠
🍄 Let me know if you see him too! 😅
This video was a labour of love! No sponsors again, but really hope you enjoy it. I took a lot of your feedback onboard for this one, but I am sure it can be improved even more!
Have a lovely day 🙏🏼
Could you please give me some suggestions for the best docking stations for the mini M4? A docking station that has an SSD slot and some extra pins can help me pump up the memory of the 256gb mini..
Best one I found without spending a fortune is the Caldigit TS04 - I shared a link down below, it’s great even though it’s TB4, but will also look into the Thunderbolt 5 stuff when they come out
@@AlexGTech which mac mini version are you keeping?
You did great. I will note that some of your stress tests are really about memory, and the simple M4 with 32GB RAM is likely to do much better than with 16GB of RAM. With the base RAM level the Mini will do a lot of swapping with these big programs and that is going to slow you down.
@@TheDanEdwards
swapping in RAM, i wonder if onboard storage at 512G or more would make it less dependent on the amount of memory?
The amount of work you put to make this video happen is much appreciated. 👊🏻
Thank you so much!! ☺️ much more to come
As a youtuber just starting out I can really really understand and appreciate the amount of effort that you put into these videos. Thank you.
I appreciate that! Yes, it was pretty gruelling this one!
Hats off for giving an amazing well rounded review, this is by far the best mac mini review i have seen so far on the internet, even when compared to big tech reviewers. The community contributions to making this video very relatable and resembling real life use cases was a chefs kiss, extraordinary efforts, i am subscribed to your channel.
What a lovely comment, thank you so much and welcome to the channel!
Wow, twice the performance with the Pro chip! That’s a massive difference! Great job Alex. You’re the only one I know doing these stress tests.
@@MrOrtmeier thank you, yeah the Pro is crazy good!!
Yes because it has double the performance cores lol
@@AlexGTech what ram did you have in the pro? I've got the base pro with 24gb Ram and i'm bit worried whether it's enough for logic.
6:21 Not all DAWs, but some DAWs including Logic Pro are using only the performance cores for some reason. Reaper on the other hand uses all available cores which is very good and you can actually see a bump in the tracks count or adding more effects etc to the project.
DO YOU KNOW HOW PROTOOLS AND CUBASE ARE WITH THE M4?
Now this is the tests all people want to see. Great work.
So happy that it was useful, I enjoyed putting these videos together despite the hard work, so hearing this makes it all worthwhile 👊🏻
Hey Alex! In settings on Logic the i/o buffer is what really matters for track stuttering! (The lower this number, the less latency there is between hitting play and the daw playing back). This gives the daw time to calculate what the plugins are doing. It's generally a great test to put it to the lowest buffer (32) and see how many tracks you can get. When producing you'll often record/make a basic track with the lowest i/o you can and then crank this number up for adding layers and mixing since you don't need realtime playback. At any rate thanks for all the tests this was great to see! You can watch how L.Dre does his tests in Ableton (or iamamusicmogul in logic pro) for a similar example :)
Oh wow, thanks so much! I am learning a lot making these videos! Have a great week ahead 🙏🏼
For Blender 3D you should enable both CPU and GPU it uses both and get even faster results.
Not for Mac, it known to slow render times
@@chidorirasenganz I've never had that case. However I would assume maybe a thermal issue might present itself if maybe on the MacBook Air. For example Monster demo file, 1:48 with CPU and GPU, with GPU only 1:58. I ran though all my files and at minimum I see at least a 3%. uplift in render times.I've tried to find the source of what you are bringing up and the only thing I could find is about render tiling, which you would tweak to get scenes to fit in RAM better. As soon as the scene renders and uses tilting then GPU/CPU seems to come into play from my testing.
@ I don’t know if something has changed but previously all the info I’ve seen on using Blender on Mac since the M1 days has been GPU only is faster. I think it was the GPU waiting on the slower CPU to finish rending but I can always try it again on 4.2 but since Eevee Next came out (tbh Eevee in general) I haven’t really care about render times since most of the time it’s 5-10 secs at most
100+ tracks with VST’s on the base model is impressive af. Thanks for this
Right?! Especially with all the 3rd party plug ins (about 60 in that example as I duplicated the original project with 20 Kontakt 8 3 times)
@@AlexGTech Kontakt is a sampler and thus doesn't tax the CPU that much -- just a lot of disk i/o, streaming samples from the ssd. Using a synth like Alchemy (built-in, so free once you have Logic) would give a more interesting result imo. Interesting video nonetheless; thx for making it.
when does he mention that 100 tracks is the limit of M4 base model ?
@@chaosme1ster there is a lot of Alchemy in those tracks too!
@@Mpthedawn I found that it was still running past 100 but 200 made it slow down and crackle a bit. I’m guessing the limit in these type of tracks is in that range 100/200 but I need more time to find out when exactly it start to slowdown
You're not only going to run out of storage space on that base model, ssds don't work well when more than half their space is used, you're not only going to run out of storage you're going to run out of performance! Add AppleCare memory and storage upgrades and this is really not such an amazing deal.
Wow this is nice! As a developer mostly working with LLMs I needed to see the LLM usability for this machine. Thank you so much!
My absolute pleasure! I am enjoying learning this stuff! Much more to come, for sure 🙏🏼
Excellent testing video and analysis. The M4 Pro is clearly for those high-end professionals with no time to lose. High end pressure news reporting, movies/documentary sets with a tight filming budget, and Machine learning on a professional level.
The regular M4 Mac Mini seems to best for those without tight timelines.
Very well put! I am still amazed at how much can be done on the base model M4
on logic or ableton the m4 will really move more than 1000 tracks, in the video you are using only 128 samples (minute 06:03 ), anyone today for mixing or mastering (means load tons of plugins) put more than 2400 samples in order to reduce the cpu usage.
Thank you, I left that setting alone as I wasn’t sure what it would do, will give that a go for the next test! 🙏
@@AlexGTechI would definitely test with both. Lower sample buffer is necessary for live performances! Larger sample buffer means more time between pressing a key on a piano and actually hearing it. Great video!
Yet again, fantastic video dude, love watching your videos. Keep up the fantastic work my friend!
Cheers mate, I need some rest now 😂
How about displaying frame rates on your gaming tests? Also would love to see a max RAM configuration LLM comparison (32gb base/64gb pro) 🧠
Definitely! I tried to enable that via the command line using Apple’s own bloody Metal code, but only steam games worked and wasn’t even Apple’s thing, it was just Steams basic counter. Really annoying. And I ran out of time to get an FPS counter app, but will research into a good one 👊🏼
Excellent video, so great to see you taking on community questions. I have a 2009 Mac Pro, 2 x 6-core 3.46 Xeons, 96GB ECC Ram, 2 TB NVMe, USB 3.2 Gen 2. RX580 8GB. I was waiting for a Mac Studio but don't know if I should just get a M4 or M4 Pro Mac Mini. Looking forward to your next videos on the Mac Mini's. A.
The thing about most music programs, from what I've seen on another TH-camr's (James Zhan) tests along with my own tests too, is that they dont utilize the efficiency cores AT ALL. It kind of made me wonder when I saw Reaper utilizing all the cores, but Logic didn’t.
Yeah, I am glad I am not going crazy! I did wonder for a while, if I had made a mistake in the settings. Will check that James guy out, I am learning so much making these videos! Love it!
@AlexGTech 😂 you're not alone, I thought I was too! And do check him out. He's been doing comparison videos on all the Apple Silicon Macbook Pros since the M1, so his videos will make for great references. Keep up with the great work yourself, too, man! 💪
I salute you for all the effort you put into these videos. Outstanding work. Keep it up. Definitely a subscription for me.
Welcome aboard! And thanks so much, means a lot hearing that 🥰
Excellent testing. Well done and thanks for sharing
Thank you very much! I need some sleep now 😂
Unparalleled test! Awesome job.
Thanks brother this the first video of yours that i watched you are great and i can feel the amount of work you have put in this video❤
It's so interesting how different reviewers are getting different results with different configurations. One shows how just bumping the storage to 512gb drastically increased the speed without upgrading the ram on the base model. I struggled with my decision but finally decided to try the same thing while using a fast 2TB external drive to migrate the home folder to so that the internal drive stays relatively open. I guess I'll know if my plan works in a couple weeks. I really wanted the Pro version but the cost was just a few hundred more than my budget allowed so hopefully this config will be second best.
The quality of an LLM's output does NOT depend on the machine running it. Only the speed will differ. If you ran the exact same flavour of Llama (number of params and quantization) on both Macs, then the difference is only down to chance.
Was looking for this comment.
Incredible video great content Alex well done on your hard work 😊😊
Very useful test overall, thanks for the video and all the effort!
Two suggestions on the LLM part:
- The power of the chip, like M4 vs M4 Pro won't affect the quality, any such result is coincidence :)
- The chip's speed will affect how fast the LLM can generate the answer, the usual benchmark for this is in token output / seconds. There is a built in 'randomness'. Answers to the same prompt will be different each time, so measuring completion speed doesn't make sense.
Keep it up, great stuff!
thank you for confirming that, I thought it was a bit counterintuitive, and perhaps I had a 'processor' bias while I was doing the tests and my brain played a trick on me! The stable diffusion test was really odd though, how out of 10 pictures prompting for a hot air balloon and birds, the Pro generated 4 including both and the standard M4 only generated 1 picture with a bird, but nothing with hot air balloons. I guess I need to run multiple tests though to really see if it was a 'one-off' or if having a beefier CPU/GPU makes a difference
Really helpful so far. I have been convinced that I needed the Pro MAC Mini to produce, edit and upload professional TH-cam videos. Plus podcasts. But you are making me think I may be able use the base model and save myself some serious bucks. I'm going to enjoy your docking station video too. Great job!
I'll end up viewing these videos again. If I'm not able to decide based on videos alone, you've given me a lot to ask people about if I need to shop these in store in person. And that's really meaningful. I'm tired of buying memory I'll never use, or buying the wrong product for my needs. I appreciate this more than you can know. Thank you again for all of your hard work.
My pleasure and so glad to hear thikese videos help! I agree with your approach though, access to external storage is a lot faster than it used to be. I’ve edited nearly 400 videos from external SSDs in the last few years. Saved thousands on local storage
Commenting just because of the efforts it must have taken to create this detailed video. I started TH-cam channel, created just 4 videos and the comparison video between iPhone 14 and 15 took such extreme efforts, even though that was much simpler than this. Hats off. Keep doing the great work
Thank you so much!! Yes, this one nearly killed me 😅 I was editing non-stop for like 4 days
You really tried with this video Alex and wow! It payed off! A fantastic effort! Well done!
Thanks so much, I enjoyed learning some of these different apps and can see why this machine has such potential! Much more to come, but for now I need a rest 😂
Thank you for running logic with Kontakt! How did the fan sound? Would super appreciate hearing (pun intended:) if the fan turned on in the M4 base / M4 Pro.
p.s. logic only utilizes the performance cores
haha yes it did on both! I actually managed to record the audio here, there is a chapter just before After Effects testing I think. Essentially, it is a lot quieter than my M1 Max MBP which is already pretty quiet. I just answered a similar question, but here is what I experienced:
When I was going crazy with it (like rendering and trying to play a game at the same time) the fans did start and I noted the temperature get close to 90 Celsius. The fans span at 3,000 RPM for a few minutes bringing the temp down to about 65C which I thought was pretty impressive as a short burst activity. I am not sure yet how that behaves on a sustained load, say for over 10-15 minutes but the cooling at least at this sort of realistic usage level, is working really well!
Wow! That was a very good and informative review. Thank you very much.
No matter on what computer you use the LL model. If it's the same models, it will give you the same results. Well, randomly it would be sometimes better, sometimes worse (like in your case). The only real difference is speed. And considering speed, you should've include token tps (tocken per second) metric, because results will vary in volume.
Great video Alex
Thank you! Enjoyed making this one!
Thanks for your incredible job Alex..Really appreciated and made things clear 😍😍
So happy to hear that! More to come 👊🏼 have a lovely week ahead
ngl one of the few creators that produces the best video in youtube
Thank you so much, what a lovely comment!
knocked out of the park with your last two vids. Congrats, man!
Thank you so much! Loved putting these together! More to come for sure, but I need to make some easier videos for a little while 😂
Superb! Thanks a lot!
Hey Buddy! Really nice video! I have few queries, right now I am using Windows PC (Ryzen 5 2600x) which is quite old. I do graphic designing (using Adobe apps) and video editing (some time podcast editing which has 3 camera shots of 1080p videos). I was thinking of upgrading my PC and then Mac Mini M4 launched! Considering Mac's performance consistency and durability, I was thinking of switching to Mac Mini M4. Since you are a mac mini user, can you please guide me.
- Should I upgrade my Windows PC or switch to Mac Mini M4 or Mac Mini M4 Pro? Which one is better in terms of performance, dependibility and consistency?
- My system upgrade cycle is generally at least 5-6 years.
- I don't have AC in my work room and when I was planning for PC, I was thinking of putting Liquid Cooler or better CPU fan.
- Do you think, Mac Mini M4 or M4 Pro should work fine without AC or it may heat up while editing videos? Does Mac Mini M4 heats up while rendering or opening multiple apps with 100+ tabs open in Firefox (or any browser)?
- Also, should I go for M4 or M4 Pro with 24GB RAM and 512GB SSD because I can't upgrade it later?
Please share your thoughts Thanks a lot, buddy!
Shockingly, 300-track songs are not uncommon. I regularly get up to the 150-200 range on big rock mixes, but those cinema scoring guys go up to around 1000 tracks! Great video! Did you experience any jank with external USB devices? My M1 Max Studio has been really glitchy with external NVMe and monitors disconnecting sometimes.
Appreciate the effort. Impressed that you’ve included ollama 👏
thank you! Not gonna lie, it's been a journey learning some of this stuff, but I am so glad I did - and all from the help of the community here 🥰
Can you test a 32gb 512 mac studio as they arebgoing for just $1299 with full warranty faster media engines sd card more gpu cores ports.
Comoared to these with the same specs
Logic was made. Not to use effeciency cores on tracks.
Cubase Pro tools and Reaper do.
Studio one and albelton need more optimisation
interesting! I did wonder about other DAWs. Cubase sounds interesting, hope I can give that a whirl soon
it's a issue with how apple implements multi core audio (see my other comment). not well apparently; it causes dropouts if you use both. Ableton; Logic and some other don't use E-cores at all for audio as a result. Hopefully it gets solved at some point but the point is it seems Apple did an horrible job on their implementation (Ableton now uses a dummy load to force the use of E cores because the performances were WORSE for lighter load is it worked on E-cores; which tells me something is seriously f'ed up). Also ableton developper explained that the priority for them is live application (obviously) so you can't have dropouts.
The 70B test was definitely not suitable for these machines, as it was slow due to SSD swapping. If you could follow up with the Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B (which should work on both M4 minis), I believe it would be very helpful for many people. 🧠🍄
Thanks, great suggestion! I did wonder about a 13B or similar size so thanks for that! And noted on the fine tuning, will give this a proper go soon!
🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠
THANK YOU!!!
🧠 An LLM test would be great! For people trying to use the mac mini for more academic work :)
Thanks for making this video. You mention in the video that you are running Stable Diffusion (Im guessing that you had speeded up the video at that point, it cant be that quick right?). You said there was a downloadable document of the timings,? it is of huge interest to me, would you kindly link to where this can be found?
Yes the stable diffusion test was at 13:45, I found the Pro to generate slightly more consistent and accurate results. I forgot to screen record the Pro but the M4 base model example is there 👊🏼
This was a great video, you're very humble man. I'd love to see a comparision between m4 mac mini vs a similarly priced windows laptop and how it performs in both gaming and editing
Thanks so much, glad you enjoyed it! I will be doing a comparison with another Windows mini PC very soon, but I like the laptop idea too!
I'm thinking of grabbing a mac mini to use in my audio video setup. I've tested this with an M2 MacBook pro. Using Roon to playback hires audio (I expect mac mini base model will do this quite easily). But I also wish to play back bluray ISO files with full menu functionality. Can this be done with base model mac mini?
I would like to try rendering that After Effects project and compare it with my old setup. Can you please put the link to the project file, please?
Your software testing is helpful. However, will M4 Mini's thermal throttle? I hear Apple has set the M4 Mini to run hot in order to reduce fan noise, but hot-running computers have a shorter life. It would be helpful to report CPU and GPU operating temperatures. I'm waiting for the next Mac Studio with better & quieter cooling. Better to buy one Mac Studio M4 than two Mini M4 Pros over the same time period.
when I was going crazy with it (like rendering and trying to play a game at the same time) the fans did start and I noted the temperature get close to 90 Celsius. The fans span at 3,000 RPM for a few minutes bringing the temp down to about 65C which I thought was pretty impressive as a short burst activity. I am not sure yet how that behaves on a sustained load, say for over 10-15 minutes but the cooling at least at this sort of realistic usage level, is working really well!
im also rocking a similar TB4 enclosure with a 2TB NVME SSD with my M4 Mac mini and before that with my M1 MacBook Air. absolutely good enough for all tasks I have ever been doing ;)
The majority of DAWs don't make use of the efficiency cores. As far as I know, the only ones that use ALL cores are Reaper, Cubase/Nuendo, and the latest version of Pro Tools.
I beg to differ - the majority of DAWs seem to DO use the e-cores, while Logic pretty much is the odd one out...
Reaper Cubendo PT are the best anyway 😅
@@nukenoly8751 At least, that's true for one of them. 😉
Good stuff Alex…nice to see clear and humble - non shouty - info. As a heavy LogicPro/NI/Arturia user I’m keen to see the music tests of course. Keep it up. JPMusic.
Thank you so much! Man, I am HOOKED! I have no clue what I am doing in Logic, but used to use Ableton back in the day, so there was a little muscle memory in there. Really want to bring some keys into the studio and have a Mac mini setup to mess around with it. I won’t be hitting those track numbers, that’s for sure 😂
🧠Looking forward to use your videos to get started with LLm's
Thank you! I’ve been learning a lot making these videos, and fascinated by LLMs! Having worked with computers since the 1990s I am shocked by how much things evolved!
What were the results of the Stable Diffusion Test on the M4 Pro? The Google Doc link only has a result for the base model.
@@kevinclark1466 forgot to screen record that bit 🤦🏽♂️ but it was at least twice as fast. More importantly though, the M4 Pro resulting images were much closer to the prompt.
Oh buddy, making me want this now.
Would you replace your Macbook pro with a air and use a Mac mini m4 pro as your main?
M4 Mac mini with 13 inch M4 iPad Pro on the go. Remote Desktop to the Mini from the iPad if you need to.
Mate! This is legit. If you get one, let's collab!
Subscribed. Good detail video
welcome aboard!! Thank you 🙏🏼
Good you did a logic test my m2 pro is all I need for audio. It’s normal for logic to not use efficiency cores. If you use some of the alternative DAWs they perform better and use all cores.
Great performance review. Would love to get the base model mini. But could you perhaps include a test video on machine learning tasks using at least YOLOv8 from Ultralytics?
Great suggestion! Thank you, will do!
Thanks for the noise update, really missed that in the previous vid.
Cool, thanks for noticing it - very rare to hear the fans but when they come on it’s very gentle
Thanks for the video 👍 What model of Alienware monitor do you use and how do you like it? I’m going to need a solid monitor for my mini pro. Hoping to get one Black Friday under 500 🤞
I shared a good one that’s under 500 in my Black Friday video today. This Alienware is the 34DW model, 1440p
could you please do an intensive after effects test and premiere pro test with the Pro :). I was actually intending to buy an MacBook Pro max but for the price I can buy the mini and also a camera and Im trying to figure out whether to go for the mini or not :). But it seems actually pretty powerful !
in logic, you can actually "freeze" the tracks and it bakes all the plugins into the flat track, and then you can pretty much do another 3x the tracks ;)
Oh nice! I’m learning so much doing this! Thanks for sharing that
A test missing in all the Mac mini videos is Power consumption. Do you have a power meter and compare the Mac minis power consumption while Browsing the internet, While rendering Files, while editing etc
Thanks for picking up on that, I did try to find something but ran out of time. Will give it a go for the next one 👊🏻
Great video. Thank you for putting this together. It seems to me that you are using an ultrawide screen with one of Mac Mini you testing. Do you mind sharing a bit about the model and how things are connected? As I am planning to get a Mac Mini to use with my uw monitor. Cheers.
Over the course of the video, it looks like an Alienware. :)
Yeah it’s the 34” Alienware, I left a link in the description- I also used an LG at times, both linked in there for you.
@@AlexGTech Thanks. Are they connected just via HDMI or a dock?
Your videos are very helpful
So glad to hear that!
Can you post a link to the After Effects template you used for testing? I’d like to try it on my current PC to see if it’s worth buying the mini as an upgrade.❤
Hiya, it’s in that google sheets doc 👊 link in the description
@@AlexGTech Much appreciated, Thanks!
Does it make sense that the same model gives better answers on M4 Pro in addition to being faster? I understand there will always be a difference even with two of same hardware but consistently better results?
Only Cubase and Reaper use the efficiency cores. Also when testing tracks in Logic or other you must have something playing on all the tracks. A lot of your tracks had big spaces so only half the tracks were playing.
Crazy isn’t it, considering it’s Apple software? And thanks for the tip on the tracks, will fix that for the next one!
oh woah, the thumbnail made me think they were like a deep-ish blue colour - looks really nice !
They’re very photogenic, lovely machines
Can you do a video checking the temperatures at idle and doing different tasks? Interesting that the fans were not ramping as much as your MacBook, I think Apple is letting the chips get pretty hot to save on noise, I assume the the thermal architecture they came up with really pushes the heat out of the case.
I noticed that even when I was doing some extreme stuff (like trying to play a game while rendering Blender) the chip got as hot as 90C, and the fans span for about 2-3 mins at 3,000RPM bringing the temperature overall down to 65C. I thought that was super impressive. Some components were cooled down to about 55C even.
@@AlexGTech Thanks for letting me know. I watched another review but it was a sustained stress test not normal usage and the chip got up to 98C, pretty dang hot. It's good to see it come down so fast for you under normal usage. That was exactly what I wanted to know, really appreciate that.
13:00 - It's not an M4 Pro problem. It's a memory pressure problem. Exit status 2 is a killed process due to the OOM (Out of Memory) Killer closing the process. You can't expect a 38GB LLVM to fit into a 24 GB RAM space. You want to buy the next tier up, for what ever the LLVM size is. So for 38 GB, you'd want to buy the 48 / 64GB M4.
Yeah, now I know 😂 thanks though, I had no idea what that error meant! but I did see the memory pressure immediately go to amber and red when loading the model. It did make me wonder though… how well that 70B model would run on my M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB RAM. But that’s another video 😂
@@AlexGTech Running a 70B in 64GB RAM on the M1 Max, vs it running (or not) on the M4 Pro, would be an interesting. I don't blame you for not knowing about what that error was. Unless you spend a fair amount of time in the unix (or posix) world, that's not something that would be easily known.
Nice video! BTW, apparently (and ironically), Apple's own Logic does NOT take advantage of the economy cores! Maybe on one of their next updates. Pro Tools, Cubase, Reaper and some of the others use them much more. Presonus Studio One not so much.
Crazy right? I wonder why they do that. Even Adobe seems to use all efficiency and performance cores evenly. That was quite noticeable on After Effects…
I like your passion and humility.
Could you conduct tests for the proxy media renders in Final Cut Pro?
Great video mate! first time subscribing on the back of
a single video, so well done. Looking at purchasing an M4 mini this weekend so timely delivery as well. Keep it up boss. only question I have is both machines are 16gb unified ram yeah? how helpful is the 24gb ram upgrade vs. the mini to pro upgrade?
Nice! Thank you so much 😊 The Pro in this video is the 24GB RAM version, but the M4 Mac Mini is the £599 one, 16GB RAM 👊🏼
Great video. Very thorough.
Glad it was helpful! Nearly killed me 😂 But happy this is helping 👊🏻
This is a great video, thank you. I’m curious if the games played much better on the Pro? I don’t game much and mostly older less demanding games but I’d love to be able to replace my PC.
Can you please compare the base mini m4 (with pro chipset) with the base MacBook Pro m4 (with pro chipset)…? They both start with the exact same specs.
This is exactly what I needed to see!
Thanks mate! These are powerful little beasts!
Leaving the like before watch! GREAT CONTENT!!!
You're the best, thank you!!
Awesome Video, much appreciated for the LLM benchmarks. Would like to see the spreadsheet containing the comparisons
My pleasure! I’ve put a link in the description to it. Still updating some results but the LLM ones are there 👊🏼
Thanks so much for your tests! When purchasing a Mac mini M4 Pro with Blender in mind (to render complex geometries), where would you put some extra bucks between these two options:
- Better processor (going from 16-core to 20-core GPU),
- or double the RAM (going from 24 to 48GB)?
RAM for me. Blender ran great on both the M4 Pro and M4 base model (I set it to use GPU for rendering) but if you open about 40 tabs at the same time, that’s when RAM will struggle
Same thoughts. I think the faster processor would be faster (obviously) but only to the point when the system has consumed the 24GB, the point at which performance will collapse. 24GB is a lot, but Blender is capable of going that far. 48GB is more comfortable. Thanks!
good question
Also @AlexGTech, I've asked two other youtubers the same question before, but you're the only one who bothered to answer. You've just won a new subscriber :)
@@AlexGTech finally, I made some specs and price comparison, and although the Mac mini M4 base model and M4 Pro without options both seem good, boosting the Mac mini M4 Pro to 48GB RAM and 10Gbit/s Ethernet makes it's price almost on par with the Mac Studio M2 Ultra! When Apple updates the latter to the M4 Max 36GB (assuming they'll keep the same price tag) the insanely faster GPU of the M4 Max (about twice as fast) makes this upcoming Mac Studio a better choice, even with 12GB less memory (because 36GB are already a lot of RAM)
Hi Alex. It would be great to see Comfy UI running Flux on the Minis 🧠
Great suggestion! Will take a look at that for sure !
Sir, Have your tried to use M4 Pro Mac mini for render via network ( Ethernet ) , while you edit your file on M4 Mac mini ? . Thanks, I learned about Stable diffusion & llama LLM :) . Nice video :)
Great suggestion !! Haven’t tried that tbh, but it gave me ideas 👊🏼 and yeah stable diffusion is awesome
The big question for me is not whether it is M4 or M4 Pro, but on the M4 Pro what plus ups work best and are cost effective - unbinned, more memory 48Gb or more. I have a Thunderbolt 4 external 2TB NVME SSD that is fast and I can easily upgrade down the road. But it is options that really help with down the road performance.
As someone who uses a lot of After Effects, I definitely think 24 GB RAM is necessary. Question is, do you think M4 Pro is worth the extra $400 vs. M4 Base with 24 GB RAM, where the only difference would be the chip?
In what settings did you export in after effects?? Thanks for the video
I don't know if I'll go for the pro, or even the base model. But I do know that I appreciate your hard work and "beginner's mind" approach.
Kudos. Subscribed. Cheers from overcast Vienna, Scott
Thank you so much! Welcome aboard and I am so glad to hear that. I wanted to really push these bad boys and the help from the community was great! Nearly killed me trying to learn some of this stuff, but I enjoyed that! 😅
Thanks for telling us the average fan speed. I use iStatistica Pro and wanted to know the fan speed of the M4 Pro Mac mini.
I rarely comment any videos, but I am just sincerely impressed by the amount of effort you put into these videos! Hats off to you sir!
Thank you very much! That really means a lot. These were brutal to create in terms of effort but I’m glad it’s been useful. Have a lovely day
get the 4 bit MLX version for apple (smaller and almost lossless compression) , and tokens per second is a good metric , for llm performance
For the 70B 3 bit quantized, you'll need 64GB RAM. The architecture allows 3/4 RAM usable by GPU, so the model size needs to be below this plus some margin.
Thank you! Makes sense, I did realise it was probably RAM as 19GB swap is crazy 😂
looking at the benchmarks, the 14 core pro model vs 12 core pro model, it seems to be a quite well priced upgrade, in terms of the additional performance you get, if you look at the lowest RAM and SSD of the M4 pro versions (percentage of price added, vs percentage of performance gain).
If you do GPU-heavier tasks, it does offer a bit more performance than the price difference suggest.
But I would start with upgrading the RAM over going for the 14 core, as that will likely get you over-all better performance (more RAM for the GPU, less use of SWAP of the SSD, more tabs in your browser or more samples loaded in your plugins if you use sample based music software, more RAM for AI models, and more RAM for cueing up tasks for the CPU cores when rendering, thus making the most of the available CPU power).
With the M4 pro models, at least you get the 512GB, that I would suggest is the recommended minimum even if you get a nvme based external storage. So while I do not like seeing less than 1TB in a modern computer, you should still consider an external drive because of SSD prices for Macs so at that point 512GB should be enough system storage for on-board only software and future updates of the system, and a fast NVME case + at least 1TB of fast NVME, is less than the difference in price between 512GB and 1TB, and then you get almost 500GB of extra (formatted) storage, you might even be able to get 2TB of external storage for the price of the upgrade (if you shop around).
If you are not making orchestral music, I would probably put the 14 core upgrade over going from 48GB of RAM to 64GB.
If you do not need extra GPU power however, you will have a greatly performing system with the 12 core, so at this point, it is just if you have the money to spare, and thus would like to get the best performance you can out of the system.
But if you do orchestral music, or do a lot of AI stuff, get both upgrades, at that pricepoint it doesn't make a huge difference to the end price.
I agree with RAM over CPU for most cases. The CPU, even in the $600 M4 doesn’t look to get overloaded in most operations. The 512GB in storage is nice, but as you pointed out, a fast NVME is a must for me. And you’re right, there are fast 2TB NVMe SSDs out there for under $200 or just over $200.
@@AlexGTech There are some tasks clearly that overloads the M4 base CPU, but it also takes a lot longer to perform tasks. And for anyone making music, you will be able to overload the base CPU. The biggest issue with it though, is that if you get more RAM and the 512GB SSD, the relative price difference for the Pro, makes it worth it, if your can find room in your budget, the CPU is too good for the configuration Apple offers in the base package, and their upgrade prices are too high to make full use of the CPU, before the upgrade to the Pro version makes more sense.
Regarding the number of tracks in songs, many of the chart topping producers can easily get up to 100, but then they also run multiple plugins per track, so they will overload the CPU before that, but use the freeze function to free up processing.
Which is the best docking stand for the mini ? Please let me know which docking station is the best and has an SSD slot.
The one I showed here, the Caldigit - there’s a link to it below
@@AlexGTechyes, but does it have SSD upgrade slots? How much can I upgrade on it?
@@dreamhunter2973The Caldigit is a hub that allows you to expand the ports you have for the computer, it is not a storage enclosure device. You’ll need to by an SSD or NVME enclosure and put the NVME 1TB/2TB or whatever you want to use and then you connect that to the mac mini ports or to the Caldigit in case you need those extra available ports
@@dreamhunter2973 He just pointed you to the link. Click on it, read, done.
Esse vídeo e o anterior não seram publicados no.seu canal BR?
Can we do heavy 3d editing (like 3d camera tracking 4k editing) easily on mac mini m4 pro ?
I've been trying to use that this week and found it to behave really well, but my clips are quite short and I am only using a plugin from MotionVFX called mTracker 3D. But I will try it with some heftier clips and use After Effects as well as I know 3D tracking on AE is quite heavy too
Base m4 mini struggles in after effects, and a lot of editors want to know more about it, how is the timeline while working, i mean export times are good but what matters more is that is it usable
It was pretty slow to be honest, that’s what I meant when I said it was slow when rendering. It was literally a few seconds per frame which felt pretty slow to me. I will compare that against a beefier mac but I kinda remember that being faster
Thank you so much for this video! It was really helpful as I've been considering buying a Mac Mini. I truly appreciate your detailed review.
You are so welcome! These were hard work to produce but I’m glad I helped 😊
Thank you for this quality video, sir