fifteen thousand dollar Mac Pro versus an M2 Pro Mac Mini surely this tiny
thing cannot be more powerful than this system right well the M1 Mac Mini was
already very powerful but the Mac Pro did beat it out in a lot of key real
world hard-hitting productivity tasks but now that we have the Mt Pro
Everything Has Changed we're gonna be going over a ton of different real world
workflows and showing you guys the differences and the few things where the
Mac Pro still does better and why some of you guys might want to buy one of
these now this thing was 15 grand brand new here are the full specs to show you
guys and the specs of the M2 Pro Mac Mini now I did spec this up with one
gigabit Ethernet with extra Ram with extra storage average so it's definitely
not the 599 dollar Mac Mini but the afterburner card that was in this that I
sold that was two thousand dollars by itself and the graphics card was two
thousand eight hundred dollars so there's still such a crazy price
difference starting out with geekbench 5 the 12 core Mac Mini beats out the 12
core Xeon by about 20 until this point no apple silicon
MacBook or Mac beat out the Mac Pro's sheer CPU horsepower but with this new
12 core it finally does now because of this you might expect cpu-based tasks to
be 20 faster but that is not going to be the case now in terms of single core
performance we went from 1100 up to a thousand nine hundred and thirty six
that is 74 fast here and let me tell you you could tell the dear friends even
opening up files and folders this Mac Pro just feels slow and because of that
when you're web browsing everything loads way faster in speedometer 2.0 the
Mac Mini is 2.2 times faster it is so Snappy for web-based applications it
definitely makes a difference and with that it also has Wi-Fi 6E but not only
that even the regular Wi-Fi six five gigahertz is way faster the older Macs
wouldn't let me use the full speed that my internet gave me but with this one I
get 57 faster download speeds and denoising audio files which we do all
the time are not 20 faster it's more than twice as fast now we also compress
and decompress files and I wanted to do a longer test so I used xcode which is
tough and instead of taking 20 minutes the Mac Mini did it in 12. so so that is
close to twice as fast and then for unzipping instead of taking five and a
half minutes it did so more than twice as fast instead of a 20 difference like
we saw in geekbench so now you know you can't just trust Benchmark so that is
the CPU but what about graphics performance that's why we have this
Beast of a card here well with geekbenches metal this thing got almost
a hundred thousand compared to 51 400. the Mac Pro has twice the performance so
it should destroy it right well let's get to the real world test so we do have
a benchmark called gfx bench which is metal gaming performance and here I was
shocked to see that with our Fair off-screen test the Mac Mini actually
scored five frames per second higher so it's beating it instead of having half
the performance because of the optimizations and the unified memory
system now while it was doing so instead of pulling 250 Watts for the graphics
card it only used 30. so it's using less than 1 8 of the power to beat it out in
performance that is crazy now as for professional design using figma this
project was provided to us by 500 designs one of the best in Los Angeles
and the macro disappointed it was glitchy and stuttery
it was running terrible compared to the Mac Mini which runs just as well as the
brand new MacBooks that we have tested the new M2 Pro chips load things up
instantly when you zoom in and then we exported these 12 high resolution layers
and the M2 Pro Mac Mini took a minute and 35 seconds compared to 2 minutes and
25 seconds for the Mac Pro so the Mac Mini is about 57 faster now what happens
when we push the CPUs to their limits and what about fan noise in and heat
well we use cinebench and here for the first time ever the Mac Mini be out the
Mac Pro where in the past even the M1 Max couldn't stand up to this 12 core
Zeon so I am very impressed but what is more impressive is that it did that only
using 33 and a half watts compared to an average of
185 Watts for that Xeon it actually Peaks at 193 so the Mac Pro needs five
and a half times more power to achieve less performance so what about the
temperatures this thing has three large fans in the front these massive heat
sinks both in the graphics and the CPU and it stays silent all the time it's
designed to handle up to 28 cores multiple graphics cards and this thing
is Tiny the cooler in there is super small well the Mac Mini stayed silent
when it was maxing out the CPU in that stress test now it did run at about a
hundred degrees celsius compared to about 70 for the Mac Pros it's a lot
hotter but that is because of Apple's tuning the only run the fans at about
2300 RPMs where they could go all the way up to 5 000
um with the system so they want to keep it quiet now you can go in and use TG
fan Pro we'll Link in the description you can kick that up a bit to have it
run cooler but that's what Apple designed it to do now I also wanted to
see what happens if we max out the CPU and the GPU is this thing going to
overheat with a tiny fan we know the Mac Pro doesn't and surprisingly no it
didn't the CPU ran at 98 degrees Celsius and the graphics at 82 which is coolier
than I thought and the fan wasn't even maxed out so this thing can handle
maxing everything out which is really awesome and now let's get into some real
world productivity tasks other than 3D rendering and what we tested running our
xcode compiling tests the Mac Pro took 125 seconds which is good but the Mac
Mini shocked me at 70 seconds that is 75 percent faster absolutely insane so if
you're a coder this thing flies now if you work with logic we have our logic
Benchmark that tests how much load the system can handle there are some
plug-ins you guys can look that up and although the Mac Mini did not beat out
the Mac Pro it got very close where in the past the Mac Pro was the PowerHouse
for music production now this is a good time to talk about all the PCI slots
because you obviously do not get it with the Mac Mini but what a lot of people
don't know is that you could still use an external enclosure with the Mac Mini
over Thunderbolt and we do have four Thunderbolt ports here and you can put
in Blackmagic deck Link cards you can put in external ssds and they even make
these modules where it can literally hold your Mac Mini in there and then
give you a bunch of connections on the front you can put in a bunch of PCI
cards and then tether Thunderbolt out of that as well so it is super cool now you
can't add external Graphics but everything else from sound cards and
capture cards you can do you can even put it into a rack mount like you can
with the rack mountable Mac Pro now if that's Overkill they have these sets
that can hold three cards externally just a little box or if you're on a
budget they have these ones for 265 bucks they'll hold any PCI slot and then
you can actually take the Thunderbolt and connect something else as well and
these are fun Thunderbolt 4 instead of Thunderbolt 3 so each one of these can
be split out into three Thunderbolts with owc's inexpensive dock so for most
people there's not really a reason to buy a Mac Pro anymore and that's maybe
why nobody wants to buy mine even at four thousand dollars and now let's get
into photo editing 3D rendering and video editing starting out with photo
editing I use the new Affinity 2 which has a built-in Benchmark in here in
terms of CP performance the Mac Mini scored 60 percent higher which I also
didn't expect because in geekbench we saw a 20 difference now in terms of
raster Metal Graphics the Mac Pro did still
etch out the Mac Mini by a bit but then with the combined score the Mac Mini
still did way better almost three times as much and that is just if you have
tasks that can only do the CPU on the GPU and you're combining layers that way
it's a lot harder and the Mac Mini excels now in Lightroom this is one area
that the Mac Pros uh six Channel memory having a ton of ram made it destroy
other systems it was insane I was shocked to see that the mac and mini had
the same exact export time for 50 raw edited high resolution images as the Mac
Pro that has never happened before ever and this tiny thing can do it now I also
tested creating a panorama and the mini beat out the Mac Pro by 21
and then I used Photoshop to create a high quality HDR image from 10 50
megapixel files and the mini was 47 faster so that is another area where the
Mac Pro excelled and it was worth buying it before but not anymore now what about
blender 3D rendering they've made updates so you can actually use Metal
Graphics to render and everything got a lot faster in the sheer horsepower you
guys saw in geekbench metal twice the score allowed it to do very well I
thought the mini was going to get smoked in this department because it's not a M1
Max or an Mt Max it has 19 cores but I was surprised to see that it was only
slightly behind in the simple BMW test now I threw something harder at it which
is the party tug which has a bunch of very very complex lighting and here the
mini was once again slower but not by a huge amount at all and one thing I
noticed is the amount of memory bandwidth at Peak was more than two and
a half times higher on the Mini compared to the Mac Pro and this thing has hbm2
memory that's very fast and that is once again because of unified architecture
there's no duplication that has to happen it's way more efficient and so I
threw our memory test added and this is a blender project that requires a lot of
memory and here the many actually beat out the Mac Pro by almost twice the
amount of time so if you have blender projects and need a lot of memory
these Apple silicon computers are so good at that and now let's talk about
video editing which is the reason why I got this computer it was so much faster
than anything else at the time stabilizing a one minute 4K clip took 14
seconds on the Mac Pro that's fast but the mini did so in four seconds yes four
seconds that is absolutely insane so when you're rendering effects this thing
flies way faster than what the benchmarks will show now when you're
editing simple 4K footage both these systems don't have any issues with it
they play back perfectly even with effects but exporting a five minute 4K
project we see in Final Cut it is very similar the mini is just slightly faster
but then I decided to give DaVinci Resolve a try because they've been
really working on optimizing for these Apple silicon systems in the same exact
test took a minute and 26 seconds but for the Mac Pro it actually took longer
than it did with Final Cut so this shows that Apple isn't really caring about
Final Cut they're not optimizing it at least for the full performance of these
new systems Apple please step it up flipping from that I want to throw the
toughest video editing task and that is denoising raw footage and DaVinci
Resolve I have a lot of denoising here and the Mac Pro can do this at 18 frames
per second where the mini only does seven that shows you the raw grunt of
the graphics cards and these systems clearly this thing is still a beast and
you can add in more but when it comes time to playing back 10-bit footage like
HDR from the R5 the Mac Pro couldn't do so it stutters it cannot handle whereas
the mini could do so perfectly and if you're exporting this type of footage
the mini is more than three times faster so if you're working with this kind of
footage you have to transcode it first to do so on the Mac Pro but not on the
mini and when you're transcoding 30 minutes with the footage it takes 30
minutes on the Mac Pro the mini does that in 8 minutes and it doesn't even
need to do that now there's only two more tests I wanted to do the first one
is with prores which a lot of people use now for the system I had the afterburner
which cost two thousand dollars and it was well worth the money at the time but
the mini has that built in but way better exporting graded prores raw to
prores took 2 minutes and 45 seconds on the Mac Pro and then it went down to a
minute 45 if you spent that two thousand dollars but the midi can do so in 48
seconds
for basically the price of just that afterburner that is insane and making it
even harder I want to test out red 8K footage this does not make use of any
prores encoders or decoders or it's not limited by faster encoders for h0265
it's just super tough it needs a lot of high performance to do so and here the
Mac Pro was faster but by barely anything and this is another category
where this thing used to beat out every other system but not anymore and I will
just say once again I didn't think that this mini could be this close or beat
out the Mac Pro and certain things by this much
for something that costs way less money and it is this small and then the whole
thing with uh having external cards that is no longer an issue too now the Mac
Pro does have more Thunderbolt ports but you can split them off here like I
mentioned nobody needs to buy one of these anymore and nobody is buying mine
and I know exactly why you guys let me know your thoughts down in the comment
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