M1 Mac Mini vs Intel - Is Intel ACTUALLY Better?

this is the brand new m1 mac mini and i know it kind of looks identical to the 2014 mac mini but it's actually fully fully new this is also the most affordable mac that you can buy right now and also possibly the most powerful mac ever made like really is this a thing now yeah it seems so you see we've already done crazy detailed videos on the new m1 macbook pro as well as the new m1 macbook air where we tested benchmarks real world use gaming battery and so so much more but in this video it is all about the mac mini and seeing how it compares against the intel equivalent which apple still sells by the way to this very day so get our snacks ready sit back relax and let's see if you're better off just buying the m1 mac mini or if the intel model still stacks up quite well okay daniel from a different time here with an important announcement from our sponsor surfshark surshark offers you an 83 discount plus three months for free when using the coupon code zone of tech what is serp shark 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ios android pc mac linux smart tvs amazon fire stick apple tv chrome firefox xbox and playstation simply use the coupon code zone of tech to get an 83 discount plus three months for free and thanks again to surfshark for sponsoring this video okay so taking a look at these two machines unlike the macbook pro and the macbook air where they pretty much look identical to the intel models the mac mini actually does have a lot of visual changes the first one being the color the intel one came and still comes in space gray whereas the m1 model only comes in silver which kind of makes me think that apple is targeting this model at entry-level users and then next year they might have a mac mini pro model that replaces the intel model and then also comes in space great that is my guess come back to this video in a year and i don't know leave a thumbs up if i'm right but aside from that the mac mini also drops two thunderbolt 3 ports as we only have two instead of four now which i think is a massive downgrade and then it also drops the 10 gigabit ethernet ports in favor of just a one gigabit ethernet port another massive downgrade for pro users and also another reason why i generally think that there is a mac mini pro coming next year at some point other than that the new m1 mac mini has considerably more empty space inside as the logic board is quite a bit smaller now it then consumes 60 less power and while it still has a fan it mostly runs silent and the entire machine runs very cool as well as opposed to the intel counterparts which well you'll get to see in just a second now in terms of the specs on these two machines our intel model is almost entirely maxed out so it has the top of the line six core intel core i7 processor 8th gen um 32 gigabytes of ram and 2 terabytes of storage and then on top of that we also have an rx 5700 xt egpu connected to this mac mini using a razer core x external graphic enclosure and we will be using the gpu for a few benchmarks testing the graphical performance on this mac mini as well now the m1 mac mini this is literally the baseline model with 8 gigabytes of ram and no gpu as unfortunately it does not support it okay benchmarks time so we first ran a boot test to see if there was any difference and uh yes there was quite a major one so the intel model put it up in 32 seconds while the m1 model booted up in 19 seconds yeah pretty major difference between the two and the time it took to wake from sleep was also improved by not as much as the macbooks were but we still got to see an improvement so the intel mac mini took four seconds to wake up from sleep while the m1 model took three seconds however the macbook pro m1 and the macbook air they only took 0.5 seconds and the reason why the mac mini actually took longer was because it also had to power the external display which itself you know took a while to turn on uh so there you go the actual wake from sleep time is likely very similar to the macbook pros in reality next up we tested the cpu performance using geekbench 5 running natively on both of these machines and here the intel model got 1073 points in the singular performance while the m1 got 1717. that's a 60 improvement not only that but in the multi-core performance while the intel model got 5418 points the m1 got 7581 a 40 improvement now if you guys have seen the macbook pro and the macbook air videos you probably remember that those had an even higher improvement the macbook air for example had a 267 percent improvement over the intel air and that's mostly because uh well the macbook air intel only has two cores and the m1 has eight cores the unsold mac mini has six cores and the m1 mac mini has eight so the difference isn't as massive in terms of the core count as compared to the macbook air then we tested cinebench which runs a continuous test which stresses out the cpu over a longer period of time rather than the spiky tests that geekbench runs and here the intel model got 7175 points while the m1 got 7764 a much smaller difference than i was expecting here to be honest of just eight percent now in terms of clock speed the intel model was running at 3.49 gigahertz while the m1 was running at 2.988 what was even more surprising though was the fact that the intel model was drawing 64.83 watts of power when rendering the cinebench benchmark while the m1 was just drawing 12.75 watts and it even scored higher and when it came to the temperatures the intel model was running at 97 degrees celsius while the m1 was running at 60 degrees and you almost couldn't hear that fan at all on the m1 model whereas the fan on the intel was spinning like crazy we also measured the chassis temperature with our high-end floor thermal camera and the insole model was at 41 degrees celsius while the m1 was sitting at 33 degrees next up we wanted to do some real world testing starting with lightroom so we imported 228 raw photos on both of these machines which included.tiff and dng files up to 50 megapixels in size from different cameras the intel mac mini took 40 seconds to import while the m1 interesting actually took longer at 44 seconds then we applied some edits and we copied and pasted all those edits onto all the other 227 raw photos and the intel model took one minute and three seconds to paste these edits while the m1 actually took longer at one minute and seven seconds now you should be aware that lightroom has not been optimized uh for the m1 chip just yet so everything is running through rosetta on the m1 mac mini so it's pretty impressive that we got almost the exact same numbers now the fact that the m1 got lower could be due to the fact that it has less ram than the intel model we have eight gigabytes on the m1 versus 32 on the intel but even then there wasn't as much of a difference as i was expecting now when it came to the fluidity of scrolling through the lightroom library they were both pretty much identical so the experience was very very smooth on both then we wanted to see how fast both of these machines would open up a few native macos apps so here we have final cut pro compressor motion calendar notes safari settings and text edit and opening all of them at the same time took 14 seconds on the intel mac mini compared to just nine seconds on the m1 mac mini interesting enough this was actually two full seconds faster than what it took on the m1 macbook pro and the m1 macbook air maybe an evidence that the cooling system is quite a bit better on the mac mini compared to the air which doesn't even have a fan and even the macbook pro but you'll get to see that in some of the upcoming tests we then ran a disk speed test to see if the ssd speed has been improved or not from the intel model and here the intel model got 2446 megabytes per second in terms of the write speeds compared to 2804 on the m1 mac mini only a 358 megabyte per second difference which i honestly don't think that people will actually notice now in terms of the read speeds the intel model got 2638 megabytes per second while the m1 got 2742 faster but again nothing too significant here so what about some actual real world usage tests well here we have our actual iphone 12 pro camera comparison timeline so this is a 4k30 timeline but we also have 4k 60 clips in it we have five actually picture and picture clips color grading on my clip as well as titles and effects like the animated background behind me and on top of that the length of this entire project is 33 minutes long so overall this is honestly our most demanding project ever and the intel model took 5 hours and 24 minutes to export his full project that's insane now as a comparison my 2020 13-inch intel 10th gen macbook pro that one took 4 hours and 30 minutes as that model does have a newer and more powerful integrated gpu the g7 graphics from intel however the m1 mac mini only took 50 minutes to export this so that was almost 6.5 times faster absolutely incredible performance on the m1 model now with the intel mac mini you can also connect an egpu and we connected the rx 5700xt which is really one of the very best gpus that is compatible with the intel mac mini and with the gpu connected we got a much better result of only one hour and 17 minutes so much faster than before but still almost half an hour slower than the m1 mac mini without any gpu next up we took the exported file and we converted it into an 8.265 file using compressor now the difference here is that when converting into h.265 the intel mac mini would actually be using that t2 processor which should be faster than just using the integrated intel graphics when you're exporting in hi264 and here the intel mac mini converted the file in just 20 minutes and 24 seconds while the m1 mac mini converted it in 18 minutes and 58 seconds so actually a very small difference between the two so it seems that as long as the intel mac mini is using that t2 chip for a video rendering the differences between the two are quite small we then connected the 5700 xt egpu to the intel mac mini and interesting enough we got the exact same result as compressor wasn't actually using the gpu at all so you can probably tell that if you have any gpu which obviously costs extra it really depends on the apps that will have to be optimized to take full advantage of the gpu which compressor doesn't do it and final cut kinda does it but still not as well as we would have wanted now in terms of the timeline fluidity in the very same final cut pro 10 project surprisingly the intel mac mini was way more fluid in performance mode than the m1 model so you're probably thinking that this is because the m1 only has 8 gigabytes of ram well we also tested the 16 gigabytes of ram m1 macbook pro and air and the intel mac mini played this project back better than all the m1 max very very strange now i gotta say this was a very complex project indeed with five picture-in-picture 4k clips but still i was not expecting the m1 to lose to the intel models here and when it came to the playback in quality mode this was more similar but the intel model was still a bit better here we then wanted to see how well both of these machines would handle 8k video playback using chrome which has now been optimized for the m1 soc and here as you can probably tell the m1 does play it back quite a bit better now the intel stopped a few times as it couldn't keep up but the m1 was not slightly more fluid so what about some actual gaming now well here we have world of warcraft which is actually running natively on the m1 mac mini yes this is the only aaa game that runs natively to my knowledge at least now on the intel mac mini at a resolution of 2560 by 1600 and with all the settings maxed out we got 9 frames per second so pretty much unplayable at those settings at least however on the m1 mac mini with the same graphical settings and a resolution of 2560 by 1440 as for some reason the game didn't let us select 2560 by 1600 which was indeed a 16 by 10 asset ratio but on the intel mac mini we could actually select it to that for some reason but anyways at this resolution 2560 by 1440 on the m1 and also maxed out settings it got 35 frames per second so fully playable and of course that you could also turn down some of the settings and easily bring that up to 60fps or even higher we then connected the gpu to the intel mac mini with the same 5700 xd graphics which was connected to a monitor for the best possible performance and this time we got a constant 60 fps experience so there you go if you do plan on using an egpu and you also plan on you know gaming on your mac then the intel model is a far better option than the m1 is and not only that but the intel model also supports windows through bootcamp which the m1 does not this means that you can actually run for more games and windows with an egpu if you decide to go that route but i do have to mention that at the moment egp support in windows is broken the only laptops that i've seen to be working fine with the gpus are razer laptops and dell xps laptops anything else from what i've been researching and testing is broken at the moment due to a windows update so do keep that in mind code 12 is is real so at the moment egpus don't work that well on windows unfortunately next up we wanted to do a graphical benchmark with gfx bench and see if we would get similar results to what we got in world of warcraft these benchmarks were also running natively on the m1 max and running the manhattan benchmark the intel mac mini got 10 frames per second while the m1 model got 51 guys 51 frames per second that's more than a five time difference so we connected the gpu again to the intel model and this time surprise surprise the intel model got 60fps higher than on the m1 mac but the m1 still performed incredibly well considering that this was just an integrated gpu and we didn't have any gpu connected now we've been running all these tests with the exact same 4k display connected to these mac minis so now let's see what happens if you run the same benchmark but off screen this would simulate the gpu performance that you would be getting when exporting a video or when using some apps that don't display the result in real time on the screen and here the intel model got 27 frames per second while the m1 got 131 which was 4.85 times faster however when we connected the egpu the intel mac mini actually got 416. almost 3.2 times faster than the m1 so in the end which mac mini should you guys get because you know you can actually buy both of them right now well it's a tricky one because it fully depends on what you want to do if you play games and have an egpu connected then definitely go for the intel model as egpus are not supported on the m1 max at least not at the moment maybe when amd releases optimized drivers for arm processors and macos of course maybe we will be getting a gpu support but at the moment egps do not work on the m1 max not only that but being able to run windows and also run windows games with that egp connected once that's up and running again of course is a major plus for the insole model and same goes for if you i don't know want to run graphic intensive apps such as maya or any 3d intensive app uh that would be gpu intensive and that would make full and good use of that egpu then again go for the intel model if you need 10 gigabit ethernet then again get the intel model if you need four thunderbolt 3 ports then again go for the intel model uh if you want to be able to upgrade the ram yourself then go for the intel model if you want the space free model then you get the idea so why would you get an m1 mac mini then well anything that you do that is cpu intensive is going to be much faster on the m1 model and anything that uses the integrated graphics is again going to be much faster on the m1 compared to the intel model without the gpu so yeah long story short if you don't have an egpu and you don't plan on getting any gpu then definitely go for the m1 model fun fact i believe that for the price of one of these intel mac minis and an egp you can actually buy two baseline m1 mac minis then if you're a video editor that uses final cut pro 10 compressor and motion again go for the m1 model not only that but just using the m1 max they all feel significantly more fluid and more responsive than using the intel models so if i were you i would honestly just get the m1 as it's so much more future proof but if you're not sure i would suggest waiting until next year as i really do believe that apple will have a mac mini pro with more ports 10gb ethernet as well and hopefully even a spacecraft caller next year let me know which one would you go for and why don't definitely subscribe hit the bell icon if you want to see more end of tech videos like this one hopefully was this has been zoftac i'm daniel and i'll see you guys in the next one so now tech signing out cheers you

Channel: ZONEofTECH

Views: 130,979

Keywords: Mac Mini M1, mac mini m1 review, Mac Mini m1 vs Intel, mac Mini m1 egpu, Mac Mini M1 gaming, Mac Mini M1 vs Macbook Pro, Mac Mini M1 vs MacBook Air, Mac Mini 2020, Mac Mini Intel vs M1, mac mini m1 video editing, Mac Mini, mac mini m1 unboxing, apple mac mini m1, mac mini m1 gaming, mac mini m1 2020, m1 mac mini, apple silicon, apple silicon mac mini

Id: OKn3nUQ4tPU

Length: 19min 47sec (1187 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020