does 24 gigabytes supercharge the m2 chip that is in the new m2 macbook air
and macbook pro well nobody has actually tested it side by side so today we will
find out once and for all with real world productivity apps and tests now
you previously had to jump up to 32 gigabytes but now if you're already
getting the 16 gigabyte which has a huge speed improvement over the 8 gig model
you only have to spend 200 more to jump up to the
gigabyte and will the extra ram and the different bandwidths help a lot let's
take a look now right out of the gate we are using close to 5 gigabytes of ram
with nothing open other than our creative cloud uh application that's
small in the background so that's why some people don't want to get the eight
gig model already because you dump into swap like we showed before by just even
opening up web browsing and a lot of people want to avoid swap so they can
extend their ssd life and maybe the 24 gig model is going to really help with
that and even if we open up pro applications it will stay out from using
the ssd now the first thing i'm going to do is open up some web browsing tabs
because if you're using a system like this and you're upgrading the ram you're
definitely going to be having some stuff open honestly i think everybody does now
i only opened up five tabs i have my email my google drive loaded up a
youtube video playing in the background like i often do either music or podcast
or something and then i have um ign opened up right here which does have a
lot of media and then the verge which does have some auto playing ads in the
background that refresh just like a lot of websites do so this is a pretty easy
scenario now i want to get some baseline performance numbers uh when we just have
one application open just a few web browsing tabs i'll start out with
speedometer 2.0 which is going to test the snappiness for web-based
applications and just general browsing it looks like the performance is very
similar here with chrome with just that open and we'll check back later once we
have more things going now like many apps lightroom classic can now use the
gpu to accelerate your photo editing and when you're using that it's sharing the
same ram with the cpu because it's all in one chip and we saw that the 8 gig
model was a lot slower than the 16 gig model even when we had nothing open but
lightroom so let's see if 24 gigs can make it faster now as far as editing the
files switching between them and these here have all the effects already
pre-added so it has to render all of that on the fly there is really no
difference now let's go ahead and hit export i'm going to start my timer and
we'll see if we notice any gains or differences now opening up the activity
monitor here wow even now we have swap used on both of these that is crazy i
wonder if it's using that for maybe faster performance we have 4.6 gigs of
swap on the 16 gig model and 2.4 on the 24 gig now maybe if we didn't have
google drive open or the youtube video then maybe it would be a little bit
better but mac os doesn't shy away from using swap even on my mac pro that has
192 gigabytes of ram it will still use swap even though it's not all maxed out
bam we are done and we actually had a difference the 16
gig model finished in a minute and 18 seconds which was already super fast but
the 24 gig did it in a minute and eight seconds so that's a difference of over
10 percent which is you know pretty impressive if you're already spending a
lot of money on the system now keep in mind that if you're gonna be exporting a
lot of images say 300 for portrait shooters family shooters or a thousand
or more for wedding photographers that will add up and now let's test out xcode
we are compiling our project right now and as you see the memory pressure and
the swap used went down dramatically once we closed lightroom and it's very
low right now and honestly it's interesting that it's actually there
because our memory used is very low we're only using about nine gigs out of
16 or 24 and mac os is still wanting to use a tiny bit of swap all right we are
done and the export time was basically identical
119 seconds on each one so we're not seeing a difference i think our previous
test even when we loaded stuff up we saw barely any variance for xcode the same
thing goes for blender where most of our projects they would be pretty much
identical in rendering and it didn't really max out the memory now there are
some projects that will use a ton of memory and if you work on those you'll
know it so let's see what the difference is all right very interesting now last
time the 8 gig model took 37 seconds compared to 6.6 for the 16. this time
this also got the same exact time here but the 24 gig just got
6.69 slightly longer basically the same so we're not seeing any difference now
this render right here we're using cycles because it's faster and it's over
a six gigabyte image that is rendered here so there's a
lot of data but i guess that's not enough to make a difference so let's
make this a little bit tougher and now it looks like we are running into swap
on the 16 gig model but not any more than we had before in the 24 gig and
look at that we have 22.9 seconds basically 23 for the 16 and
19.13 for the 24. that's still not a very big
difference and this project right here this render is over 15 gigs in size so
personally i would say for blender it's not worth spending that extra 200 bucks
and now let's test video editing with final cut pro now for simple 4k
compressed footage even with effects there is really no difference even with
the 8 gig model it did great because of the media engines and how little ram it
actually uses now when it comes to tougher footage like this prores raw and
we're encoding to prores those new encoders in the m2 chip definitely need
some extra ram especially if you are gonna be multitasking let's go ahead and
export this and i do have some color corrections applied a lot and look at
that we are seeing no difference whatsoever they're exporting exactly the
same on both opening up the activity monitor we did get a boost in memory
pressure on both but only the 16 gig added some swap compared to before but
the times are practically identical in fact the 16 gig model took a minute and
37 seconds compared to a minute and 39 seconds for the 24 gig now i'm gonna run
that one more time but i want to test out multitasking performance usually
when i'm rendering video and this is just a short project
i will do some multitasking i'll go do some email
some other things so let's see if we have any difference in responsiveness
first off let's go ahead and open up google drive bam instant on both
open up youtube instant on both no difference
we have our ign we have the verge we are having no issues whatsoever here
let's run speedometer as far as if you're opening up maybe some google
docs or other web-based services both are just flying through this and keep in
mind we are still exporting here at the same exact time here we go it did slow
down because we're exporting but the results are the same actually the 16 gig
did a little bit better uh this is what i love about mac os that you could still
do fast responsive tasks while you're multitasking bam both of these got done
now this time around they did take a little bit longer because we were
opening up things in the background and this really hammers the cpu and the gpu
and our 16 gig model took a minute and 40 seconds compared to a minute 39 on
the 24 gig so very good results and the 16 gig is holding up great and now let's
make it more difficult i'm going to start out by opening up more web
browsing tabs i have 15 opened up right here in chrome including a second email
some other websites i'm gonna go ahead and open up safari here where i have
five additional tabs opened up here with a google sheets as well a lot of you
guys said that you have 20 or 30 tabs open so here is 20 and it's interesting
that both these are still using a little bit of swap but our 24 gig is using a
lot more actual memory i have final cut still opened up here in the background
with a small project and it's not taking up that much ram and i'll go ahead and
open up photoshop and i have this open often with images while i do video
editing and multitasking and it looks like both of them opened it up at the
same time so there's no extra benefit let's go ahead and drag in these nine
images here and now let's create an hdr that was practically identical taking 25
seconds whereas before the a gig would definitely slow down let's go ahead and
open up lightroom classic once again and let's export these and see if we get any
slowdowns
now as this is starting to export let me open up our activity monitor wow both of
these are using a lot of swap we have 13 gigs over here and 11 gigs over here so
only a difference of 2 gigabytes even though we went from 16 to 24. and we
have a difference of only 7 seconds 1 minute and 11 compared to 1 minute and
18. so that is very impressive for the 16
gig model so if you're wondering if the 16 will slow down with a lot of swap it
doesn't really with all of that open this video file is playing back
perfectly smoothly without any issues still even though the ram is hit
pretty hard and exporting this they are both chugging along at practically the
same speed in fact
for a second there the 16 gigabyte was ahead now as this is going let's go
ahead and open up google chrome once again where we have 15 tabs open and
let's see if we see any kind of difference let's open up the verge at
the same time all right there you go you guys saw
that uh it opened up slower meaning it's in swap here on the 16 gig the next tab
now the 24 gig opened up slower let's open electric
all right slightly ahead on the 24 gig the same here
how about we open up our google drive which does take a lot of memory
a little bit faster on the 24 gig what about our youtube video
practically the same both are still playing ign here which has a lot open
there's actually a video playing in the background slightly faster than the 24
but nothing like the difference we saw with the 8 gig model and as you guys saw
there both of those exported at the same time a minute and 47 seconds so both
slow down a little bit but the performance is practically the same
while we're rendering maxing everything out and using a lot of swap i have to
say i am very impressed with the 16 gig model
how close it's keeping up and the fact that the 24 gig isn't really doing much
of a difference that's kind of sad when you're spending the extra money now we
have to throw some kind of a torture test at it i don't think this is
realistic uh but everything else so far has been great i'm gonna go ahead and
hit share we're gonna hit export file once again let's hit save here i'm gonna
start my timer and i'm gonna go ahead and open up lightroom classic now the
first i'm gonna do is just switch between these images
okay there you go you guys can see
actually now it's about the same now the 16 gig was faster so they're
kind of trading blows here so they're acting practically the same sometimes
one is faster sometimes the others faster we're slowing down a bit because
that is a tough export and let's go ahead and run this at the same time so
now we're exporting that prores raw to prores file in
final cut and at the same time exporting photos as well while having 20 tabs open
and using a ton of swap now it does feel like the 24 gig is a little bit more
responsive when i'm opening this stuff up but we're not using that much more
swap on the 16 gig compared to the 24. now you see the 24 gig actually finished
the export uh really quickly i mean we're talking
about a minute and 10 seconds and now lightroom is starting to actually work
fast because our export is finished whereas here lightroom is literally
locking up it's not doing much and let's open up final cut oh there you go that
one got finished that took a minute and 50 seconds compared to a minute and 10
while we're exporting at the same time and now it's starting to take off here
so it's almost like the 16 gig model waited for that before lightroom took
off our lightroom export is done on the 24 gigabyte and now on the 16 gigabyte
so the 16 gig took three minutes and 50 seconds to export these 50 images of
course it waited for a final cut to be done whereas this one
it started doing lightroom right away but very slowly and that took two
minutes and 45 seconds so still not a massive difference and of course who
would be doing both of those exports at the same time and as you guys saw when
we were exporting and actually using lightroom the performance was very
similar so what is the verdict well i have to say that 24 gigs did not help
much at all and this is on the m2 macbook pro which does have fans if
you're using the m2 macbook air that will also start throttling if you're
trying to do stuff like this two programs at once and then so the ram
difference will be smaller just because you are throttling so overall for most
people unless you're doing something like crazy like this you're not really
gonna notice much of a difference and i don't think it's really worth spending
that extra money unless you know specifically that for your task you need
a ton of ram and in that case you're probably not even watching this video
because you know you need it but for most people even if you're doing stuff
like this where we have a ton of stuff opened multiple pro applications ton of
web browsing tabs the difference was a lot smaller than i personally expected
so if you're buying an m2 chip i don't think it is worth that extra cash now on
the m1 pro or m1 max we've done videos on those where we push them even harder
and we start to see some more differences uh but here my
recommendation would be stick to that 16 gigs of ram and spend that 200 on
something else like maybe upgrading the storage or maybe buying an accessory or
just saving it so there you guys go if you want to see another great video
check out one of those right over there click that circle above to subscribe
thank you for watching it's been max with max tech and i'll see you in the
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