$10,000 Trash Can Mac Pro vs $1299 M2 Pro Mac mini

this is the most expensive version of Apple's previous Mac Pro the trash can that was sold from 2013 all the way through 2019 and this is the least expensive version of the most expensive version of Apple's least expensive desktop did that make any sense at all anyway this is the double Bend version of the M2 Pro Mac Mini it's got the 10 core CPU 16 core GPU 16 gigabytes of unified memory and half a terabyte of storage and it costs 1 299 this will the other hand is a fully loaded trash can Mac Pro it's got the 12 core CPU dual d700 Graphics how much RAM does this have actually [Music] 128 gigabytes of RAM that's the most that you can put in this thing and it's got a two terabyte SSD so this thing if you had bought it anywhere from you know four to ten years ago would have run you more than ten thousand dollars so the question for today is how does this ten thousand dollar high-end Mac Pro from the previous generation compared to a lower middle mid-range desktop of today let's see is there any hope for a trash can Mac Pro like this or should you just be completely ignoring it and buying Apple silicon I'll tell you one thing if you are looking to buy one of the new Apple silicon Macs one of the best ways to do it is through today's video sponsor Best Buy and their new upgrade plus program upgrade plus is an affordable way to get your favorite device today pay for it over time and upgrade to a new model after 36 months monthly payments are low you can get the new M2 Pro 14-inch base model with the same specs as this Mac Mini for 43 dollars per month then at month 37 you have a number of options you can pay the remaining cost of the Mac to own it outright you can trade it in for a brand new one without paying the remaining balance or you can return it and also not have to pay the remaining balance this allows you to own a new Mac every three years without a large upfront payment or having to go through the hassle of selling your computer when you want to upgrade upgrade plus gives you an affordable way to own a modern Mac so if you're interested in learning more check out the link in the description below again a big thanks to Best Buy for sponsoring and now let's get into this really interesting comparison shall we okay so let's jump straight into this comparison with a real world test Final Cut Pro this is my tried and true 30 minute 4K 60fps 10 bit clip and we're going to render a color correction on it now as soon as we set things on our way you probably already noticed that the M2 Pro is pulling out a significant lead and if we speed things up a little bit wow it's not close at all in fact even now standing here after this Mac Mini has been done for about 15 minutes we're still at 40 percent on the Mac Pro that's that's pretty crazy so so why is this happening because when you look at other areas you don't see this same you know massive massive disparity I mean take a look at cinebench for example in cinebench our double Bend M2 Pro scores 11 716 whereas the trashcan Mac Pro is 811 and that's honestly not terrible for a 10 year old CPU remember this thing is Ivy Bridge like a unibody MacBook Pro so this is an old architecture but you know this 12 course so in multi-core tasks it does pretty okay it's not that far behind the M2 Pro Mag mini so why is it still chugging along in Final Cut Pro here well there's a couple of things going on number one of course is the Apple silicon dedicated media encoders they are there specifically to accelerate this task and they do that pretty darn well another thing this Mac Pro is using a Xeon chip and if you have a Mac with an Intel Xeon chip your score is going to be lower that's just the way that it works because Xeon chips don't have dedicated graphics now I know what you're thinking why would I care about having integrated Graphics when I've got dual AMD graphics cards in this thing that what's the point well Intel uses their igpus to accelerate tasks like this it's called Intel quick sync and if you don't have it like on a Xeon chip it makes things really really slow even my 18 core iMac Pro was pretty slow at rendering because it didn't have an igpu so when you're talking about a video editing scenario like this one apple silicon is almost always going to be the way to go unless you have like a 50 000 Mac Pro with an afterburner card that's the only way you're going to have any chance of catching Apple silicon but is the trashcan Mac Pro just something to point and laugh at or is there potentially some angle where the thing kind of makes sense so bear with me for a second but I think I found one what you're seeing now is both of these machines running the shadow of the Tomb Raider 1080p medium Benchmark and obviously the M2 Pro is absolutely smoking the trash can overall it's about twice as fast 34 FPS average versus 67 FPS average but if we go back to the beginning and speed up the footage the Mac Pro is loading everything significantly faster and this is a benefit of the trash can Mac Pro as ironic as it seems given that Apple killed this thing because of its lack of upgrade ability it is comparatively quite upgradable and as a result of that I've actually got mine with a two terabyte OWC Aura X2 SSD in it so originally I think this thing had 256 and I've gone from 256 to 2 terabytes and it's now faster faster even than a modern Mac so while it's not very powerful it does at least have a lot more versatility than what we have now in fact this kind of goes across the board if you really wanted to you could buy a base model trash can Mac Pro that comes with a quad core Xeon 2 D300 graphics cards and like 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage that is nothing but you could take that machine and upgrade it all the way which is actually what I've done to the 12 core 128 gigs of RAM 2 terabyte SSD and you can even upgrade the graphics cards if you so choose although you only have three options the D300 the d500 and the d700 and none of them are very fast so that is an undeniable benefit that the trashcan Mac Pro has over Apple silicon however I think that also comes with a limit because you can do what I've done and max out every single spec on this Mac Pro and it still is not going to be as fast as the entry level M2 Pro remember this is the double Bend one we're missing two CPU and 3G pu course so it gets faster than this but this does not get any faster and we can really see that if we fire up some more benchmarks in the gfx bench 4K Aztec off-screen test we're looking at 78 FPS compared to 28 on the trash can and in the Manhattan test we're at a thousand fifteen compared to 283. if we pop over into blender the classroom CPU test also reveals the differences in these architectures we're looking at 10 minutes and 38 seconds on the trash can compared to 7 minutes 40 on the M2 Pro switch over to the GPU and we see a similar story 2 minutes 28 for the classroom test compared to 3 minutes 10 on the trash can and in the BMW GPU render you're looking at 47 seconds on the M2 Pro compared to a minute 24 on the trash can now interestingly when you compare these results to what we saw over in Tomb raid later they look a little bit different in Tomb Raider the M2 Pro is scoring double the FPS but it's not taking half the time in blender now we can probably chalk that up to optimization because blender doesn't run that well on Apple silicon as we saw in my comparison between the RTX 4090 and the M2 Max the M2 Max does very good but Optics on Nvidia just absolutely trashes anything that Apple has right now what does surprise me though is how well this performed in Tomb Raider considering that that is an application running through Rosetta it's pretty crazy that even with that translation layer involved we're still getting double the FPS and with a lot less power consumption I might add yeah this thing is a thirsty boy as you would expect for a 12 core Intel Xeon with an ivy Bridge technology this thing's sucking down 150 to 200 watts compared to this guy which is like you know know 30. so yeah apple silicon absolutely mental however what you might not expect is a slight deviation from my usual comparison because at this point I would be saying wow look at Intel consuming all this power and then I would Play a clip of how loud the computer is so let me do that now wait a minute this doesn't sound like a Boeing 747 at takeoff what's going on here well Apple was actually a little clever with this design as much as it was hated for six years before it got replaced they did do one thing right and that is this this is all fan the entire diameter of this machine is fan there's just one big boy and it sucks all of the air in through the bottom through this massive heat sink and then shoots it out the top it's it's like a chimney really there's so much heat coming out the top of this thing that you could heat your entire room but it's very quiet and the CPU sits at about 70 degrees when you're running cinebench which is what this does too this is actually one of the better cooled machines well at least in terms of the CPU these gpus had a tendency to die which is not ideal but I guess that also brings us on to why this thing failed it's these gpus that's really what killed this machine it's a nice design but these gpus are for one dual cards which Apple was completely wrong about and they didn't really get iterated on so even though they are technically swappable you only have these three options there wasn't anything newer that you could install and it just kind of kept this machine stuck where it was for six years and that's why this machine is actually only like four years old it was bought at some point in like mid 2019 but setting all of those things aside this is a really interesting comparison because what we're looking at here is Apple's biggest failure versus what I would consider to be one of their best moves to date this is a very very compelling product at 12.99 you can get yourself a very powerful machine that is smoking a Mac Pro from a couple of years ago that would have been ten thousand dollars but what actually is surprising is I sort of framed this video as a comparison between a thirteen hundred dollar machine and a ten thousand dollar machine because that's what you would have paid if you bought this thing new but nowadays these things are dirt cheap Apple drops support for them in Ventura so they can only run Monterey and and that alone has dropped the prices quite a bit if you set up an eBay search for dual d700s as well as the 12 core CPU you can find these things with 64 gigs of RAM and a bunch of storage for the same price as the entry level M2 Mac Mini now do I think you should buy it probably not I I think the Mac Mini is a better investment in the long run I mean this has already lost support I don't know how many more years you're going to be able to get out of it but at the very least if you do need an Intel machine for whatever let's say you want to dual boot Mac OS and windows a bunch of x86 stuff these things are now cheap enough that strangely they're not a terrible deal as surprising as it is to say there is actually a scenario where it might make sense to buy one of these machines and that is if you go on eBay and you find these things in their base configuration you can get them for like three hundred dollars and you can buy the 12 core Xeon CPU for anywhere between 40 and 70 dollars and that means that you could buy a quad core upgrade it to a 12 core and be all in for less than 400 bucks now I don't want to say that that's you know better than buying a Mac Mini because it's not the the M1 M2 M2 Pro Mac minis are undeniably better but when you're talking about a sub 400 Mac this is not bad at all I mean honestly I would I would spend 400 just to have this thing I mean look at it this is to this day one of my favorite looking Apple Computers it is absolutely gorgeous even if it's a little controversial so I'm curious to hear what you guys think of this comparison it's not as cut and dry as I was expecting in so far as while the Apple silicon absolutely toasts it this is still not a terrible machine I'm very conflicted so I'm interested in hearing your guys thoughts on the subject let me know down in the comments below and of course a huge thanks to everyone for watching this video make sure to get subscribed and I will see you guys in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Luke Miani

Views: 170,787

Keywords: apple, mac, m2, m2 pro, apple comparison, apple buying guide, macos, mac vs pc, mac vs mac, apple tips, ios, iphone

Id: cy2s30SZkTs

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023