Flipping eck look at this this is as tall as a PlayStation 5. so today guys I'm gonna do
something a little bit unusual today I'm actually going to do a comparison of a Windows desktop
small factor to the M2 Pro Mac Mini and what I bought is one of these this here is a Mini's
Ballroom desktop computer but it's a really really Slim machine and actually in this machine here I
know it looks a bit like a PlayStation 5 and I'll get onto that this machine actually houses inside
of it a Nvidia 3060 and also holes inside it a I5 Intel chipset inside it a mobile variant and also
it also holds 60 gigabytes of RAM and I thought to do a fair comparison like I said I'm going to
compare it to the M2 Pro Mac Mini and see what the differences are between both of these machines now
this machine that you see here is called the knock X i5 and it is quite special I really really love
the design of this machine you can see here in the comparison compared to my PlayStation 5 and
also to the M2 Mac Mini you can see how the design is very striking and looks really really awesome
from both sort of angles you can see how thin it is and also it is particularly long now the main
reason why it is particularly long it's actually what's it housed inside this machine it's actually
a laptop motherboard and inside that we actually have upgradable RAM and also we can also upgrade
the SSD inside this machine now what I decides to do or why I decided to pick this machine is
I thought it would be a fair comparison compared to the Mac Mini with the M2 Pro chipset inside it
the price here as you can see on Mini's Forum I specs out with 512 gigabytes and also as you can
see here I've got the 16 gigabytes of RAM and I thought you know this is probably the best sort
of machine you can get on your desk what looks quite smart has a dedicated graphics what's
probably going to be very comparable to what we have in the Mac Mini and I want to see what the
differences were between both of these models and that if it's worth getting yourself say a Windows
device and what would be the main advantage of either getting the Mac Mini or either this
Nook X I5 device instead from Minnie's Forum so first of all I did an unboxing so as you
can see here the unboxing sort of process was a very very simple indeed nice good box inside
I've got everything out and also you do also get a stand to stand on so you can either have
this device landscape or you can either have it portrait it's up to you basically how you
want to have it you have it standing up or lying down as I showed you a bit earlier on it comes
with Windows 11 pre-installed and everything was quite easy to set up with this machine and that
was very very impressed one of the first things I actually noticed about this desktop was actually
to do with calling and the amount of vents that are on it you can see here you've got a massive
vent on the back of this device and also you've got multiple vents all around it to keep it nice
and cool and we'll do some thermal tests a little bit later to show what that is all about and how
well that actually worked but it looks very very positive indeed to start with so to start with
the comparisons the first thing I've decided to do is do a geekbench sort of scoring so here and
as you can see here I started off a geekbench on this Windows 11 device here and it's got an Intel
11th generation i5 and also at the same time like I said 16 gigabytes of RAM and so on so forth and
as you can see here the single core performance is quite powerful but the multi-core performance
inside this obviously is quite low it's nowhere near what we get with say the M2 Pro as you can
see here what I also run on a geekbench 5. you can see here it is far higher in fact
I'd actually argue that the geekbench score that I got here on this machine is more comparable to
say the advantage of saved a sort of lower end sort of M1 but then having said that we've got
to remember this is also an 11th generation chipset inside this device where Intel are on
their 13th generation right now but I'm thinking that we're going to get gains probably in sort of
the GPU power inside this machine definitely that it's got this dedicated Nvidia 3060 inside it I
next of all decided to run as cinebench score so as you can see here comparing both of them
so for single core scores on cinebench they're quite close the 11th generation Intel got 1450
and the M2 Pro got 1 648 and do remember that single core is the same cores that we have in
the normal M2 M2 Pro and the M2 Max but again it's not really that much difference as we can see here
it's quite close like in geekben but moving over to multi-core score things do change a fair bit
here remember with that Intel chipset we do have far less cores in it so we only got 8867 whereas
the M2 Pro we have all those additional cores in size it's a much more of a beastier machine and it
got us one well it actually got us 14 698 that's about a 40 speed difference but overall as you'll
see in a minute this might not mean a lot too much of when we're doing video editing and also playing
game aims to do with actual CPU performance running this cine bench and remember this cinebowl
I decided of cinebench on both of these devices and the main thing I wanted to see was to do with
the actual cores and how hot they get inside them now quite surprising as you can see here
on the Mac Mini running into doing this test on cinebench the cores got really really hot
we're talking about 90 degrees and things like this whereas on the actual Mini's forums machine
here actually the temperature only got into the 70s as you can see here so it was actually much
more cool though the chipset inside it now I must admit the fan did wear up a little bit
inside this minis Forum as a compared to apple but it does seem like apple do allow their chips to go
much hotter before they start kicking in with that actual fan and as you can see here the fan didn't
really kick in at all the RPM sort of stayed low with doing this 30 minute sort of cinebench that
I did here The Benchmark testing and just in case you wanted to hear what the difference
was with the fan noise here's the Mini's Forum with the fan on when it was doing the cinebench
foreign noise on the Mac Mini M2 Pro
so as you can see the Mac Mini M2 Pro no noise at all where there's a slight little hum with
a mini sporum and it's really really good and I think the main reason is like I said it's to do
with all of these vents that are on this device so that is pretty pretty impressive in my opinion for
what we're getting but the main thing you probably want to see is to do with actual thermals on the
outside of the casing how hot do these actual devices get well let me show you right here so
the outside of the device here you can see that the temperatures are around about 34 35 degrees
on the Mini's forum and funny enough on the Mac Mini it's also around the same the calling on
the actual outside of the cases is about on par with each other so you're not really going to see
much differences here both these devices are not going to melt their way through into your desk
even though they're running say something hardcore like the cinebench sort of 30 minute test the next
test what I decided to do after this was to do a black magic and this is to test out the app sort
of hard drive space the SSD drives and how fast they are inside both of these devices so I ran
them on both of the devices as you can see here and straight away you can see the Mac Mini is
doing quite a good performance even though we've had sort of some Nan chips sort of removed here
but it's doing quite well for what it is for an M2 Pro and then comparing it here to the minis
Forum you can actually see that obviously yep it is a bit more slower inside this device but
I guess the main sort of difference what we've got to actually see is to do with Premiere Pro
so what I've decided to do is do an export of videos on both of these devices to see what the
difference is going to be Premiere Pro and things like DaVinci are like the only sort of main sort
of tools that we can use out there because obviously Final Cut Pro cannot be used on say
the Windows device so I decided to do something in Premiere Pro I've decided to export the same
sort of 10 minute video and here are the results so straight away as you can see the Intel 11th
generation with that 3060 even though earlier when we're doing those geekbench and that cinebench
that dedicated graphics means a lot and that's the main reason why you know you could consider
this machine for video editing because that dedicated graphics helps it actually exported
this file in 194 seconds whereas the M2 Pro the Mac Mini did it in 183 seconds now obviously that
is 11 seconds faster but in the grand scheme of things if you just look at this chart it's very
very close 11 seconds is not a lot and especially with the 3060 this is also a gaming machine too
well I'll talk about a little bit further on into the video and the M2 Pro chipset is not
really a footy sort of Graphics sort of machine for gaming it's mainly for sort of video editing
and photo editing so yeah it's quite interesting to see that both the results are very very close
so as you can see those results are pretty impressive to have with both of these devices so
that is quite cool especially that dedicated GPU and what that's doing for the mini forums device
after this what I decides to do was actually do a bit of gaming now this is where I think the main
differences where you can have both of these devices both of these devices as you've seen
are more than capable of sort of being able to do sort of video editing but I want to see what
gaming is like and let's have a look here first of all with the Mac Mini so I'm using here shadow
of the Tomb Raider and what I decided to do was want to do one of those sort of geekbench sort of
built-in sort of scores inside it and I ran this and everything looks quite smooth and quite good
and as you can see here on the end screen you can see the minimums and you can see the maximums and
the average here as well of 30 frames per second but what happens now if I run this on the mini
forums machine this device like I said has that Nvidia 3060 what is a laptop variant of the chips
set but let's see what happens here now as you can see here I'm running shadow of the Tomb Raider
again and obviously everything is set to ultra high what's exactly the same on the Mac Mini and
let's have a look at the results that came back in the end you can see here look at that we're
in way into the hundreds here of the minimum and the maximums this is absolutely just blows away
the Mac Mini and even the average frames per second you know yeah that's completely blown
away the M2 Pro Mac Mini so for gaming no surprise here whatsoever we knew the mini forums device was
going to absolutely smoke that M2 pro at the end of the day Apple just don't design their
devices to be gaming devices yet they can play a bit of games on them you know very moderately and
everything and obviously they have to be tweaked to work with it but if you do want a device that
is going to be sort of more hardcore for gaming yeah the mini forums device is definitely more
than worth it now the next thing I want to actually talk about out is to do with ports on
the actual design and what you're getting on this device here compared to the Mac Mini so on this
mini forums device the nut X I5 yeah you do get some USB 3.2 ports on the front you also get an
SD card and also a headphone Port but then moving on to the back things are a little bit different
you don't get any USB ports traditional one you do get one Thunderbolt Port here on the back you also
get a HDMI and also you get a one gigabit gigabit Port there too and that is all the ports that you
get But there again compared to the Mac Mini M2 Pro ports are a very different situation and what
you get here the ports to me on here are a little bit more updated you get two USB 3.1 ports here
on the back but you also get four Thunderbolt ports HDMI 2.1 but we also get the choice of a
one gigabit or 10 gigabit option for what we can have inside this Mac Mini M2 in my opinion I think
here that the Mac Mini M2 Pro does win out here I do actually prefer the ports on here the only
one thing that I do wish there were some there were some ports maybe on the front because like
with the Mac Studio for example we get that and I think that's really really handy to have those
so I think we've come down to our conclusion guys this brand new Minis Forum NOFX I5 is a fantastic
device a great buy and I would definitely recommend getting one of these especially if
you are loving gaming and also you are a Creator too they're really really good to get especially
if you know like Premiere Pro for example and also you know your way around windows it is definitely
worth buying one of these but there again the Mac Mini M2 Pro is really really good and also if you
get apps that actually have been configured to be used with the lights of the M1 or the M2 sort of
chipsets the Apple silicon chips out there you're really going to see the advantages out there for
this Mac Mini especially like me where I use Final Cut Pro I prefer Final Cut Pro to Premiere
but that's just my preference and for that it's definitely better for me in doing my creative
things but there again having said that if I was to do gaming oh yeah it'd be the Mini's Forum
device all the way but those are my opinions guys what are your thoughts on both of these devices I
would love to know would you pick the Mac or would you pick the mini forms of ice let me know in the
comments below and on that note as well guys it's time to wrap up this video so if you have enjoyed
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also hit that notification Bell until next time guys I will see you really soon take care bye bye