16GB vs 32GB RAM M1 Pro MacBook - Multitasking RAM TEST!

i don't understand this how could we be getting these results is 32 gigabytes really worth the extra 400 for your m1 macbook pro well today we will find out because i have the same exact macbooks in front of me other than one being a 16 gigabyte model and the other being a 32 gig model and i'm gonna test a wide variety of applications with different background tasks running and different amounts of web browsing tabs to find out do we see a difference in performance and is it worth the extra money once in for all this video is brought to you by squarespace the best way to make an amazing website i'm going to start out by restarting both of these machines that way we have no background ram usage or any swap on the ssds and as we go through these tests i will show you guys the activity monitor to show you how much ram is being compressed what is being written to the ssd and all of that let's start out by opening up five safari tabs this is fairly normal for me that way we have a little bit of ram used here i also have some background applications open i have my fan controller i have istat menu that shows me temperatures and other info along with adobe creative cloud running here as well checking out the activity monitor both of these have cache files and seven and a half to eight gigs used so let's go ahead and open up lightroom classic i have 50 42 megapixel images opened up right here all of them have effects to the raw files and i'm going to start out by getting a reading on the export speed here now i'm using lightroom because it is a program that definitely is very ram intensive the most ram intensive let's hit that export there and in the past we have gotten faster speeds with higher amounts of ram without even other background apps open whereas with all the other programs if you don't have a bunch of stuff open the speeds were the same so let's see what we get interesting as we're doing this export look how much memory pressure we have on the 16 gig model this just shows how tough it is on the memory so we have a lot more pressure here and we're writing already over three gigs to the ssd using 14 gigs of ram compared to the 32 using almost 22 gigs of ram and we have nothing written to the ssd now this year the ssds are twice as fast and the memory bandwidth is twice as good as the m1 chips so uh it's less of a difference when you have to write so let's see if we actually have any performance differences now i want to let you know that we're also going to test a 32 gig against a 64 gig m1 max macbook pros and in that video we're going to test windows 11 with parallel so if you guys want to see that make sure you guys enable those notifications and while you're at it you might as well subscribe and comment below if you want a chance to win a 2500 m1 macbook pro all you have to do is comment on our launch week videos each video gives you another chance to win and we will be choosing one of you guys no matter where you are in the world alright guys we do have a difference and it's only two seconds one minute and 23 seconds compared to one minute and 25. so right in the gate we do see a difference but it is literally only two seconds if you spend an extra 400 and even if you had 500 of these huge images that's only like 20 seconds saved and even though we did have to write to the ssd on the 16 gig model you see the performance hit is almost non-existent now if i'm working in lightroom i'm often working in photoshop as well so let's open up five of these high resolution images and then we all know that chrome is a ram hog but i still do like to use it just like many of you guys i went ahead and i opened 10 tabs in chrome i have multiple tabs that have auto loading ads and stuff open i have an auto loading video in the background here i have a couple tesla tabs open youtube with an excellent video running if you guys didn't see the macbook air compared to macbook pro video you guys should check it out i also have a spreadsheet open a long script and then my google drive which has a ton of files open in it so let's just go ahead and keep scrolling we're going to load up a bunch of stuff there don't forget we still have five tabs open in safari and this is pretty much the max amount of stuff that i have open if i'm doing photo editing photoshop and lightroom open up instantly on both swapping through photos are equally fast we're getting no lag no delay and with all of that the 32 gig still has no swap used even though we have multiple applications that are professional open we have 15 tabs two auto playing videos whereas we have eight gigs of swap on the 16 gig model now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go ahead and do that export one more time to see if all those additional things in the background are gonna slow the 16 gig model down all right wow both of them actually got slower this time but the difference is only three seconds now instead of two a minute and 28 compared to a minute and 31 i was expecting a much bigger difference now now before we get into video exporting let me give a shout out to the sponsor of this video squarespace if you've been thinking about making your website squarespace is seriously the best way to go you can build a great looking website like we did with literally no web making experience it doesn't matter if you want a portfolio a blog e-commerce or anything else you just choose from one of their great templates and easily customize blocks of text and images it's incredibly simple it's affordable and ours have been running flawlessly for years now bringing in tons of traffic thanks to its built-in seo tools start your free two-week trial with no credit card required by go to squarespace.com maxtec or by using the custom link down below and when you're ready to launch you will save 10 off your first purchase of a website or a domain let's go ahead and open up final cut pro even though i would never have photoshop and lightroom and final cut open let's just test it out here i have a 5-minute 4k pro res raw project open it's set to better quality on both not better performance so we're getting full playback and right now as you guys can see both are playing back perfectly smooth i do have color grades applied to these let's play this back in double time and i'm still not seeing any skipping or dropped frames at all and now let's export this five minute project i am using prores that way we're not limited by the h.264 encoders and with that said you guys know that the ram that are in these systems this is shared with the graphics and as you see our graphics are pinned so having all those applications open in the background can definitely affect the amount of ram that the graphics card has in order to do this export but if we zoom in look at that they are almost neck and neck and both just blazing through this 4k pro res raw looking at our activity monitor both of them actually have swap used one is at 15 and a half gigs the other 32 gig model is at six gigs so both of them have to write to the ssd with lightroom and photoshop and all those tabs open wow right at the end there we had some little spikes you see those lines in there and then we had a slow down on the 16 gig model because of that the 32 gig model was faster i finished in a minute and three seconds compared to one minute and nine seconds so there you guys go with all of that open and those spikes in memory pressure the difference was only six seconds and right after that our 16 gig model cleared out a bunch of stuff from the ram look how much lower that dip got so more of that is in the swap and we're only using eight gigs of the physical ram compared to 18 on the 32 gig model so it's gearing up for more work what i want to do now is go back let's go ahead and open up photoshop on both bam they both open at the same exact time so it doesn't look like we have to read from the ssd or if we did it was incredibly fast let's switch photos here same exact time switching over for both that's crazy and what about opening lightroom bam they both opened at the same exact time that is crazy and flipping through these photos i'm not noticing any slowdowns on the 16 gig model let's zoom in here super responsive on both now those of you guys that use lightroom you'll know that when you have a lot of stuff open brushes can really slow down let's see if we notice a difference at all between these i don't know guys to me they both look really really smooth guys if this is an intel based macbook pro these would be chugging along right now super slow that might be because even the best i9 it had a memory bandwidth of around 42 gigabytes a second compared to these machines that have 200 meaning you can clear ram and you open up stuff much much faster and of course the ssds are twice as fast as well so we have lightroom open there we have photoshop open we have final cut open of course we still have those safari tabs open let's go ahead and see how those are performing i'm going to switch over to the verge which is very heavy bam it was instant there let's switch over to my little house plan site man that is still loaded let's open up the ram hog chrome here wow the google drive is still open scroll down nothing got cleared here at all what about our youtube video that's actually playing in the background still man that is ready right there how about ign with the background video still open let's go to their home page still open on both this is crazy the performance here with the unified memory is incredible everything is instant no slowdowns at all even if some of this is from the ssd from the swap that is crazy alright guys i would never push a system this hard i would never be able to multitask with photo editing lightroom video editing and all this craziness but for this video we are gonna do that because this is a multitasking stress test so i'm gonna go ahead and open logic pro let's play this benchmark that has 50 tracks with a bunch of stacked instrumentals open let me turn on the speakers for a sec that's a hot piece of gear that's a hot piece of gear you were brent wow high school with brad we got those two videos still playing back there this is loaded up in the background and now let's open up xcode as well just in case you want to work on an audio project a programming project and photos and videos at the same time both are pre-indexed and let's go ahead and build this i'm going to set my timer it looks like both of these failed i'm not sure why i'm not really a programmer so let's just go back to the standard way where we have the terminal command that maxum marimenko created for us along with this benchmark bam we are off our cpus are maxed out right now compiling the code we still have lightroom open photoshop opened chrome with a bunch of background tasks and final cut open and logic open and look at that guys the memory pressure is slightly higher on the 16 gig but the 32 gig still has pressure and it's still using five gigs of swap compared to 16 gigs of swap on the 16 gig model so literally it's acting like a 32 gig system now for those of you guys that want to avoid swap and you want to spend you know an extra 400 bucks to avoid it well if you're pushing the systems enough to maybe see a difference you're going to be using swap anyways and even on my mac pro with 192 gigabytes of ram it still sometimes uses swap even though it doesn't need to which is absolutely crazy oh look at that our 16 gig model just dumped extra ram um and i don't know what it did with it because it's not in the swap maybe that means our chrome tabs were just closed down we'll go ahead and see all right guys we are done pushing these systems to their limits what is the result of this compile test well our 16 gig model took 137 seconds compared to 115 seconds on the 32 gig model so this compile was 22 seconds faster with a 32 gig that's not that much time that is 19 faster so if you have a crazy crazy project you'll have a 19 difference if you have all those other applications open in the background but with that said these apple silicon systems are insanely fast at compiling code so most projects are really quick let's go back to google chrome and let's see if any of these have to be reloaded because we saw that big ram dump on the 16 gig model nope we're watching snazzy labs on both without a hitch every website seems to be fully loaded more background video here if you guys saw my previous comparisons against intel systems also with the m1 comparing eight gig and 16 gig even before we pushed it this hard when we go back to chrome we would have to reload tabs on the 8 gig model but it looks like 16 gigs of faster ram and having the much faster ssd we're literally seeing no differences at all and nothing is noticeable when it reloads if it even does guys i don't even know what else to throw at it i guess let's open this 8k prores raw final cut project we have four 4k clips in an 8k timeline basically the same exact kit on the system as an actual 8k video with color corrections applied to all of these clips they're both playing back perfectly smooth all right let's go in double time this is basically twice 8k and geez okay with pro res it doesn't care it's playing back perfectly smooth how about this i opened up a whole different library and let's open up an ak project that is not prores so the encoders and decoders can't work for that this is canon 8k footage from the canon r5 let's play it back on both and look at that well neither one of them are playing this back perfectly smooth and how about this very tough r5 10 bit 422 footage look at that i saw glitches on both at the start which i don't blame them i can't believe either one of these systems are doing this good with all that background stuff open and both these are playing back perfectly actually on this model i even have a lut applied which i don't on this one so let's make it fair and enable it on both of these systems and just this project alone in this footage make intel macbooks just stutter even my fifteen thousand dollar mac pro stutters with this and look at this they're playing back perfectly so the last video expert i'm gonna do is with this really tough footage this is a five minute project and i'm going out to h.265 to allow the graphics to have the biggest hit possible with fast encoding they are both exporting at the exact identical time dang since this is gonna finish at the same time let's just push this to the absolute extreme i would never do this in my life ever let's go ahead and export with lightroom at the same time with all those background applications open as well just in case you're absolutely insane and check this out guys we're using 14 gigs of swap on the 16 gig model and about eight on the 32 gig model neither of them are maxed out on the pressure yet i do not believe this our graphics card usage did go down to 56 percent 60 that's because we don't have enough cpu resources to give enough work to the graphics our final cut export slowed down dramatically because of that but what is this the 16 gig model is ahead it's slightly ahead now instead of being at the same exact time i don't understand this how could we be getting these results oh actually the 32 gig model caught up there at the very end and it beat out the 16 gig model by one second three minutes and 54 seconds for a five minute project compared to three minutes and 55 and wow lightroom is done on both of them as well i didn't even catch that um i don't know if one was faster than the other but it didn't seem to be the case at least maybe by only a few seconds okay guys if this does not answer your question on 16 gigs versus 32 i don't know what will we have these 50 edited raw files open these are large 42 megapixel images we still have photoshop open on both look at that no delay to load that up and switch between the photos look at that instant the exact same time we also still have logic pro open with this project bam there you guys go we're playing this back we still have those background videos multiples playing at that same time of course we showed you guys final cut pro open right here all of our tabs are still there in google chrome even at this point look background videos working none of this is being delayed or slowed down on an intel mac it would be crazy look at that no difference at all same thing goes for safari that is just absolute insane performance well as you guys see i would never have all that open and be doing a video export and a photo export at the same time with logic open and photoshop open and all these tabs and oh geez yeah i gotta be honest with you guys i thought there was gonna be a bigger difference than this at least with all of that open i was for sure thinking the 16 gig would finally slow down but it doesn't and that's thanks to the double the speed of the ssd and that crazy 200 megabit per second gigabit per second bandwidth of the ram and as far as swap if you're worried about your ssd you know having 16 gigs loaded instead of eight that's not going to make a difference and either way there is going to be some swap and even like 10 years ago with the first ssds that were rated for like 60 terabytes written when they did endurance tests they actually wrote i think between 600 and 1000 terabytes between those before those gave out in this case these are way better the latest and the best and i would say for almost everybody even with this torture test it would just be worth getting a 16 gig and spending that extra money on more ssd space because when you double the ssd you also double the terabytes written capacity the life rating of your ssd i think that is a much smarter investment or if you just want to save some money save that 400 if you're not going for the m1 max that requires 32 gigs and you know spend it somewhere else there you guys go uh once again if you guys want to win a 14-inch macbook that's 2500 you guys could do so by commenting down below um and with that click that subscribe button you guys need to be subscribed above and you guys can help us reach our goal of 1 million subscribers we would definitely appreciate it check it one of those great videos over there we'll also have 32 gig versus 64 gig on that one max this is max and i'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Max Tech

Views: 576,411

Keywords: apple, apple macbook pro, macbook pro, macbook, m1 pro, m1 pro chip, m1 pro macbook pro, 16gb m1 pro macbook pro, 32gb m1 pro macbook pro, 16 vs 32 m1 pro macbook pro, 16gb vs 32gb macbook pro, 16gb vs 32gb m1 macbook pro, 16gb vs 32gb m1 pro macbook, how much ram macbook pro, how much ram 16 macbook pro, how much ram 14 macbook pro, 16gb vs 32gb, 16gb vs 32gb macbook, 16gb vs 32gb macbook pro stress test, 16gb vs 32gb multitasking test, 16gb vs 32gb m1 pro, max tech

Id: gqiYSt4nAFs

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/grahamr31]

TLDW: even throwing everything at it at once, there wasn’t much difference in performance. Save the $400 on an m1 pro, or use the 400 to bump the ssd capacity.

Skip to 16:50 or so.m for the conclusion.

Max Tech built one of the best Xcode benchmark tools that we use to evaluate everything from apple patches, software updates, AV impact and new models - this video is on point.

And if you haven’t seen the new chart with the new macs hitting that Xcode benchmark check it out

https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark

[u/thisispointlessshit]

You can’t add more RAM to these later.

Everyone told me 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD would be enough for me in a 15” MBP a few years ago. Really kicking myself for at least not getting more storage. I get system overload messages constantly and my SSD cannot keep up with large Ableton sessions when I’m performing live. Hell, it can’t even keep up with song project files and audio mastering projects in Logic. Between the memory swap and lack of storage it really puts pressure on things. I have to hold my entire live performance on an external SSD for it to be usable. Going 16”, M1 Pro, 32GB and 1TB SSD this time so I don’t have to slam my system. I canceled my order for the 14” after seeing that heat/fan and battery tests posted. I’m tired of hearing fans while doing really nit picky mixing and mastering projects. Can’t have a fan ripping in my face in an acoustic treated and calibrated room. A little headroom will be great for the present and when it gets pressured down the road it’ll be able to handle it with ease. Hoping to get more than 4 years out of this new MBP or else it’ll be hard for me to justify the price tag.

[u/mojo276]

How does this relate to longevity? When I bought my last MBP 8 years ago it was all "upgrade the RAM to make sure it lasts longer." Is this still true? If I'm going to use this for 6-8 years would it be worth it to upgrade the RAM even if I'm not doing anything too extreme now?

[u/allnitediner_]

I have 16gb on M1 Mac mini and I am maxxed on memory multiple times a day.

[u/PussySmith]

After seeing the what kind of swap Lightroom uses with 16gb I was looking at returning and upgrading to the 32.

Well, fuck, after doing some more reading apparently Lightroom will just keep requesting more and more ram until it runs out.

Fucking Adobe.

[u/saintmsent]

I'm still gonna push my workplace to buy 32 gigs. Xcode swaps like crazy, with a large project and other stuff open, I'm looking at 10-15 gigs swap memory on a regular M1 with 16 gigs of ram

[u/Blowe313]

I had ordered the M1 max with 32GB of ram and a 512GB SSD. I mostly want to get into editing photos and videos. I'm thinking should I cancel this order and just get an M1 pro with 16GB and call it a day.

[u/PresidentZer0]

DONT FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE!!!!!!11111

[u/fel2012ktl]

Makes me feel good I got the base 16in with 16gb of ram