M1 Mac Mini vs Intel i7 Mac Mini + eGPU for Pro Apps!

hey guys it's max today i'm super excited to compare apple's brand new m1 powered mac mini against their previous intel powered one this is the i7 6 core model that they in fact are still selling on their website and not only is this video going to be very interesting because this one the m1 has 16 gigs of ram the max it can have and this one has 64 gigabytes of ram but i'm also tossing in an external graphics card unit this has a 5700 xd in it and only the intel based ones support egpus at least for now this is gonna get a little bit crazy we'll be taking a look at photo editing logic xcode video editing gaming performance and more both with and without the egpu and then i'm going to talk about some differences between these two systems now before we jump in let's talk about prices this mac mini right here believe it or not costs three thousand dollars if you just go and pick it up from apple whereas the m1 powered mac mini in my hand is 900. now of course not everything is lined up right here you'll see that this mac mini has a 2 terabyte ssd this one has a base 256 gig and we're gonna see this performance difference which would be interesting but along with that this mac mini the ram 64 gigs came straight from apple which they charged a lot of money for and we also have 10 gigabit ethernet which costs another 100 which you cannot get on this mac mini which is a bummer for people that use servers network attached storage things like that now along with that the intel mac minis allow you to upgrade your ram yourself and you can save a ton of money so if we match up these systems and we upgrade our ram ourselves for only 250 dollars get rid of that 10 gigabit ethernet and match up 512 gigs of ssd which is the lowest the i7 intel powered mac mini can get you'll see that the price difference is much smaller it's still about 500 bucks more to get the intel one and with the apple one we are spending a lot more per dollar for that extra eight gigs of ram which now we have to because it is soldered in let's jump into performance starting out with cinebench r23 which is going to max out the cpus in these systems the great thing about this mac mini when it came out is people love that six core cpu it was a great deal and a small system and here we see that the overall score isn't that different the m1 mac mini is only eight percent faster than the intel one so that's a very small difference now what you don't see on these charts is the fan noise the intel mac mini was running super loud the fan was maxed out whereas the m1 powered mac mini was silent the fan was running at the lowest speed it possibly can run at and with that this cpu here was about 30 degrees cooler than this one with its fans maxed out now not only that there's also a difference in wattage this intel mac mini actually spiked over 100 watts at the start of the test for the cpu and then settled in at about 75 watts the apple powered mac mini was using just 12.6 watts to achieve this performance so although the performance difference isn't that big the amount of power used the amount of heat that's output and the fan noise differences are massive the next test i tested was geekbench 5 which runs a bunch of different workloads and as far as single core performance the mac mini was 58 faster with a score of 1753 that score is absolutely insane no other cpu even ones that cost thousands of dollars can match up and opening things up and daily use tasks are incredibly fast on the m1 powered macbook pro now as far as multi-core performance we have a difference of 32 percent so with mixed workloads not 100 cpu workloads like in cinebench there is a much bigger difference now let's get into graphics performance my first test is geekbench 5 using metal and well you guys see the difference right here it is massive the m1 powered mac mini is more than four and a half times faster or four and a half times better graphics performance and that is the weakest link of the intel powered mac minis which is why a lot of people use external graphics card units which we'll talk about in just a bit now i also tested opencl which for apps have not yet been optimized here the difference is smaller but the mac mini m1 powered one is still more than three and a half times faster now of course this is for compute type workloads so what about gaming performance we used gfx bench to test out the bra gaming performance between both of these with metal optimized games and once again as you can see the difference is shocking we're going from 13 frames per second to 78 that is 5.8 times higher frames per second for gaming and you're going from a system that really can't game unless it's something very simple with low graphics to a system that can actually game and with that it can game silently instead of fan kicking up fairly loud now before we get into professional applications i wanted to test out the ssd speeds because as i mentioned we have a two terabyte ssd in here the best one and as you go up in the storage your performance does get faster where with the new m1 powered mac mini i have the base 256 gigabyte option for us we connect to external ssds an external server over thunderbolt 3 so that is fine for us but looking at the difference in speeds as far as right the intel powered one is faster and then as far as read the m1 powered mac mini is faster now before if you would get one of these with the base uh storage or maybe even the 512 it would be quite a bit slower in some cases half the speed as far as ssd so it's nice to see that even if you get the base option you're still getting really good ssd speeds with these new mac minis now let's get into the pro apps we're going to start out with logic and we're running a benchmark called the new logic pro benchmark and the i7 powered mac mini handled 76 tracks which is really good much better than the previous lower end macbook pros those handled less than 10. now the new m1 powered mac mini handled 90 tracks and keep in mind we have a big difference in ram as well so not only did it handle about 18 more tracks but it ran silent compared to this one running super loud and that is a big deal for people that are working with audio files next let's jump into xcode and we are running a benchmark that was made for us we compiled this project and the intel mac mini took 205 seconds compared to just 120 seconds on the m1 powered mac mini now that is about a 41 difference in performance and it's much greater than you would expect going off of cinebench which also maxes out the cpu and that is because of the extra efficiency you get with the updated xcode program that's optimized for arm and not only is the m1 mac mini so much faster as you guys see by these charts but it is silent compared to very loud with the intel one sounding kind of like a blow dryer now i'm gonna stop saying the difference in the noise of these two machines and pretty much all these tests this thing is just running loud and this is silent so just keep that in mind going forward and now submit to photo editing using lightroom classic now i want to point out that lightroom has not yet been optimized for apple silicon it's optimized for the intel processor and this was the biggest concern with this transition these legacy programs that we need a lot of professionals need not working at all or being super slow now as far as the editing performance it is identical i really can't tell a difference and exporting it the i7 mac mini took 3 minutes to export 50 42 megapixel raw files compared to 2 minutes and 37 seconds so yes even though this program is optimized for intel the mac mini is still faster now before we get into video editing and then attaching the egpu i wanted to do one more test something that all of us do and that is web browsing i'm testing out the new safari that has been updated for arm and we're using the web-based speedometer to check the web browsing performance and here the intel mac mini scored 146 compared to 236 on the m1 powered mac mini that is 62 better web browsing performance so everything is really nice and snappy getting into video editing i'm going to start out with bruce x which is going to test the rendering performance of these systems now exporting this project took only 15 seconds on the m1 powered mac mini compared to 104 seconds that is almost seven times better rendering performance and this matters when you're editing as you apply effects you're playing back this one's going to slow down start stuttering and glitching whereas the new one even though it's a lot less expensive a lot less ram it's going to be much smoother and that is evident with our next test here playing back 4k footage with color grading applied film grade applied the intel mac mini is stuttering it is glitching up whereas the new apple silicon one is playing back perfectly smoothly thanks to that much better graphics performance and here i guess apple wasn't over exaggerating as far as the performance difference they actually understated it there is a massive difference for this task now what happens when we export this project the m1 mac mini is four times faster taking just three minutes instead of 12 minutes now in this test both of these were very quiet almost silent but there was a difference in temperatures this one at the end of the export was at just 50 degrees celsius which is insane very cool a lot of systems idle higher than that whereas the intel one pretty much the whole time it was at or above 90 degrees celsius next i applied stabilization to a one minute 4k file that's h.265 and a lot of new cameras are starting to use this kodak and a lot of people want smooth footage at least we do and here the intel mac mini took 43 seconds compared to just nine seconds on the m1 it is crazy to think that a one minute clip could be stabilized in just nine seconds that is getting close to my mac pro it's absolutely crazy and now let's jump into the much more difficult tests i'm going to start out with canon raw this is c-log 10-bit 422 footage that is super hard to play back on pretty much anything other than these new m1 powered macs as you guys could see in the timeline the m1 powered mac plays it back perfectly smoothly compared to a stuttery mess on the mac mini and not only on the mac mini even on my mac pro which costs fifteen thousand dollars i went ahead and exported a five minute project and this is without any color grading or luts which would make it even tougher on this week graphics chip and the m1 powered mac mini was close to seven times faster three minutes compared to over 20. that is incredible now most people have to transcode this footage to be able to edit it smoothly and then it will work fine if you're giving this mac mini prores file so i went ahead and transcoded a one minute clip and here the m1 mac mini took just 26 seconds compared to three minutes on the intel base system so that is a massive difference in time now of course you're gonna have more than one minute of footage you're gonna transcode so if we bump this up to 30 minutes of footage the i7 will take an hour and 30 minutes compared to just 13 minutes on the m1 powered mac mini now just to give you guys a little bit of perspective my 15 000 mac pro that takes 30 minutes to transcode 30 minutes of footage one to one this is three to one an hour and a half for 30 minutes of footage and this is i don't even know what one to three i guess maybe uh pretty much two two and a half three times faster than my mac pro at transcoding this footage i mean if i'm somebody that's working with this footage and you have an imac a mac pro whatever i would just buy one of these the base model and just to transcode this footage it's going to save you that much time if you're a professional and now jump into raw video editing with some red 4.5 k raw now as far as playback both of these systems don't play it back perfectly but the m1 powered mac mini does way way better you guys could see the difference here and if we export a five minute project that is color graded the difference is massive 12 minutes and 50 seconds for the m1 mac mini compared to 39 minutes with the i7 mac mini absolutely incredible difference there and now it is time to take out the egpu and see what kind of performance we get when we are no longer limited by this graphics card a lot of people love the mac mini to use it with any gpu get great graphics performance have better cooling accessible for that cpu so the cpu is cooled using the internal cooling of course the graphics card has its own cooling and extra fans in the enclosure let's start out by talking about the difference in prices now i'm using the razer core which is 300 bucks and the 5700 xt which is about 400 bucks maybe 450. so if we take a look at the prices and make sure everything is matched up as best as we can we're comparing a system that is eleven hundred dollars for the m1 powered mac mini compared to 2250 for the i7 with the egpu if you go ahead and you upgrade the ram yourself and then you don't have 10 gigabit ethernet let's start out by comparing the raw graphics performance using geekbench 5 and here you can see that adding that egpu with the 5700 xt made the intel mac mini about 12 times faster than using the integrated graphics the massive difference in performance and with that it's close to three times more powerful in terms of graphics compared to apple's 8 core gpu in the new apple silicon mac mini so that's a huge difference in performance with that said i want to mention two things first off e-gpus are loud unless you buy the much more expensive blackmagic ones which i think they discontinued now this thing is running really loud compared to silent and with that the graph performance doesn't always equate to actual professional performance and applications because there's different bottlenecking which is going to make this very interesting now if you're into gaming the egpu scored 194.7 frames per second in gfx bench compared to 78 so that's roughly two and a half times better gaming performance under metal that's a pretty massive difference now as far as logic performance there is really no difference because that's all cpu based and the same thing goes for xcode there's no difference adding that egpu now one area where there is a difference that i wasn't expecting is photo editing at least when you're rendering these really large 42 megapixel images instead of taking three minutes it took us two minutes and 44 seconds with the egpu so the difference was minimal but it is there and with that said the m1 powered mac mini was still faster at 2 minutes and 37 seconds now i got to mention two things again one this has 16 gigs of ram compared to 64. and we know that lightroom loves ram from our previous tests and along with that this application is optimized for intel max not apple powered mac so it's gonna be very interesting once it's optimized now let's jump into video editing and this is going to blow your mind for multiple reasons let's start out with bruce x which is all graphics based for rendering all your effects and color grading and everything else and instead of taking 104 seconds with a gpu it took just 14 seconds that's a massive difference with that said the mac mini took 15 seconds one second longer now what's going to blow your mind is that not only is this silent compared to a super loud external graphics card unit but this mac mini with the m1 graphics 8 core chip was running only 5.6 watts of power that's all that needed to do this task in 15 seconds 5.6 watts the egpu uses over 200 watts of power in a windows pc it's actually 275 watts i don't know exactly what it is on a mac but definitely over 200 watts of power compared to 5.6 that is just insane now of course you do have to keep in mind that there are bottlenecks using an external graphics card unit over thunderbolt 3. if i took the same graphics card and put into my mac pro that would take 8 seconds instead of 14. so we are losing quite a bit of performance having this card be in the egpu and based on your task in some cases there's less difference in some cases there's more of a difference in this case this is the most performance loss that you'll get when we're maxing out the graphics card so now let's jump into 4k video editing and as you guys saw before the mac mini couldn't play back 4k footage with some color grading done with the egpu it is playing it back perfectly and the mac mini with the m1 chip can also play it back perfectly without needing that unit now let's go ahead and export this five minute project again and here instead of taking 12 minutes it took just four minutes and 21 seconds so that's getting close to three times better performance but that is still not touching the three minutes in six seconds that we got with the m1 powered mac mini now of course this is fairly easy footage this is what most people on youtube are working with but what about for professionals that are working with much tougher footage so here is that same 10-bit hevc footage from the new canon cameras and as you can see even with the egpu the intel powered mac mini is not playing it back smoothly like the apple silicon mac mini is and that is because all these new graphics cards including the brand new 3080s and the 6080 series or the 6000 series from amd none of them have special decoding for this new type of footage that canon is using whereas the mac mini does and that's why i can play it back super smoothly now when i go ahead and export this footage instead of taking over 20 minutes when we add the egpu it took 10 minutes and 55 seconds still more than three times slower than the three minutes with the m1 powered mac mini that's way less expensive and silent now i also wanted to test canon raw that's from the c200 c300 those kind of cameras but unfortunately it's not yet working on these new mac mini so i wasn't able to test it but once again i could test out the red raw and the 4.5 k red raw now with the egpu it plays back smoother than the mac mini instead of worse but it's still not perfect they're a lot more close now and then when we go ahead and export a five minute graded project instead of taking 39 minutes it took only nine minutes and 35 seconds with the egpu and for the first time ever the i7 mac mini with any gpu was faster than this m1 powered mac mini that cost me 900 and this one took 12 minutes so we're starting to see a difference there and even there it's not really worth paying that extra money and dealing with all these extras to get that better performance at least in my opinion now i want to take this a step further and take a look at ak footage on an ak timeline here in final cut and as you guys could see neither of these machines are playing it back perfectly even with the gpu but the egpu mac mini is a little bit smoother and then i went ahead and i exported this not to 4k h364 but to 8k prores and the difference was only two and a half minutes here wow i was expecting to see a massive difference and there wasn't so there you guys go i am just absolutely blown away because of how fast this runs for the price and the noise and the heat it is incredible and for most people it is still better just to get one of these instead of getting one of these external graphics card units with their old mac mini so if you're somebody that has an old one you're contemplating should i just sell it and buy a new one or should i add it on egpu there you guys go let me know your thoughts down in the comment section below now i will mention a couple other differences the intel powered mac mini once again you can have 10 gigabit ethernet you also have four thunderbolt 3 ports so you can connect more devices and along with that you can connect more displays the the new m1 powered mac minis you're only at 16 gigs of ram which is actually roughly 32 gigabytes performance wise from my testing if you're comparing it to an intel based system and you can have two external displays one hdmi and one thunderbolt you cannot have 10 gigabit ethernet and so those are some limitations with this system i do expect apple to make a higher end one to replace the six core model that's gonna have four thunderbolt three or and usb4 ports and 10 gigabit either an option to match it up and then i'll have even better graphics and cpu performance that is going to be absolutely insane alright guys let me know your thoughts once again down in the comment section and if you want to see this mac mini go head to head against my mac pro click that circle above enables notifications below you guys can see a couple other great videos right over there i have all the links linked in the video description to the ram egpu this mac mini thanks for watching so max and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Max Tech

Views: 1,027,548

Keywords: M1 Mac Mini Review, M1 Mac mini vs intel mac mini, apple silicon mac mini egpu, M1 Mac Mini eGPU, i7 Mac Mini vs M1 Mac Mini, Thermal throttling, Performance, video editing, final cut pro, Premiere Pro, davinci resolve 17, Photoshop, photo editing, logic, xcode, after effects, cinebench r23, geekbench 5, gaming, gfxbench, 5700xt, amd 6080 xt, 8gb vs 16gb ram, fortnite, multitasking, 3 displays, 6k xdr, 5k, rendering, transcoding, ssd, cpu fan noise, winodows 10, bootcamp, parallels

Id: 59gAjXT7qyw

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/boinzy]

Who won?

[u/Advanced_Path]

Jesus Fucking Christ. An Intel Mac mini + eGPU needed over 200w of power to achieve the same performance as the M1, which only require 5.6w. That is insane. What's even the point of Intel anymore. Apple won. Let's close this up.

[u/That_Guy_in_2020]

Man I would love an M1X Mac Mini.

[u/Bassguitarplayer]

5 hours into playing WoW on M1 and it’s still same temperature as if it’s off. Pretty impressive

[u/mrsxfreeway]

MacOS + M1 is why I'm switching from Windows as my daily driver

[u/JD3iGamer]

There’s a ton of errors in this video and it’s very distracting.

[u/QuadraQ]

Very good comparison. Wintel is screwed.

[u/Mongostein]

I’m going to use this post as an opportunity to ask a GPU related question for my Mac mini. It’s the 2018 3.0 GHz 6-core i5 model. It has the Intel UHD 630 1536 MB GPU.

Now.. can I get a housing put in any old GPU to increase performance? Like, will it use the built in GPU in addition to the eGPU?

Or would I need to get a more powerful GPU to get more performance? Like, the internal one stops being used and it exclusively uses the eGPU.

[u/BryantX58]

how long will my Mac Mini give me max trade in value? Bought this one in March currently it says on the the web site I can get $300 off. And when are they going to launch in space Grey?