Finally a Mac for This Economy - Mac Mini M4

[LMGcommunity]

Apples M4 Mac Mini on paper seems to be too good of a deal, but are they hiding anything? We build a $600 Gaming PC and a $600 Mini PC to compare in some benchmarks, and sure enough there is some truth to this Mac Mini being a power house, but by just how much?

 

 

[gokhster]

That first title was not it

[jordanbuilds1]

first apple vid without horst, its alr ig

[toasty99]

Worth noting if you just want apple ecosystem for dirt cheap best buy has the M2 Mac mini 8gb/256gb for $295 right now. Obviously 8gb ram kinda sucks, but this is actually for the poors.

 

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/apple-mac-mini-desktop-m2-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-silver/6427500/openbox?condition=fair

[UnawareBlaire]

I have been considering getting one of these to add to my home lab. Keep my NAS relegated to file storage and media server stuff for the most part and put some other services on this (like local LLM as shown here).

 

Supposedly with exo, you can use multiple mac minis to run larger LLMs. Would love to see how the price to performance for that would be

[GreggeryPeccary]

I wouldn't take the blender results or the gaming results seriously from this video. The iGPU was limited to only 2gb.

[Ha-Satan]

I would totally ask IT for a new Mac Mini (maybe with 24GB of RAM) for my work as I don't need much local storage, but I DO need high single-core performance and good transcoding support.

 

But of course, we have one critical piece of software that we're still running from the Windows 98 era that I'm sure has no MacOS version (let alone Apple Silicon compatibility) so I'll be stuck on Windows until the powers that be finally decide to update to the 21st century.

 

(Can you tell I work in the public sector?)

[7charlotte]

I know I wouldn't really get a whole lot of use out of it, but I like expensive toys damnit.

[R3ndevous]

I think a more recent gaming workload like, No Man’s Sky or Death Stranding, which are native to the Apple’s hardware, give a more realistic perspective on its GPU performance for gaming workloads. 

Shadow of the Tom b Raider is running opunder Rosetta2 (which is not as bad ofc, but still some overhead), but it’s actual bottleneck is the use of an older graphics API version of Metal (Metal 2.1). 

Eitherway, apart from its meagre storage and not being able to create a media library on disk. For daily home computing tasks, this machine is welllllll equipped for the years to come. We’ve already seen how bloated browsers have become and generally MacOS has been more efficient, moreover with AV1 and its modern GPU features (it has even advanced features than NVIDIA in some aspects), I don’t suspect many people to require a separate upgrade, but rather replace and sell the unit. 

2 hours ago, GreggeryPeccary said:

I wouldn't take the blender results or the gaming results seriously from this video. The iGPU was limited to only 2gb.

 

That VRAM is just the standard UMA frame buffer allocation for windows. It’ll use more than 2GB of its total available memory as, somewhat like the M4, the APU has unified memory (although not on package). Tomb Raider is well optimised and drivers are mature for that title and chipset, so I assume no issues are encountered. 

 

Compare results here; https://www.notebookcheck.net/Geekom-A7-with-0-5l-case-in-review-Premium-mini-PC-with-AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS-32-GB-DDR5-RAM-and-2-TB-SSD.811438.0.html

[Brian McKee]

That blender benchmark seemed like an outlier to me... Are we certain it was set up properly?

 

I think my Dad has a laptop with a 780m where I'll test it myself when I get the chance.

[R3ndevous]

4 minutes ago, Brian McKee said:

That blender benchmark seemed like an outlier to me... Are we certain it was set up properly?

 

I think my Dad has a laptop with a 780m where I'll test it myself when I get the chance.

 

It depends on what their configuration was, but AMD’s HIP-RT support for Blender is still in out in 4.3, still somewhat experimental its parity compared to others isn’t the same.

NVIDIA and Apple both have hardware acceleration for RT in the classroom benchmark. 

 

Otherwise, you can check; https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&group_by=device_name

[Brian McKee]

41 minutes ago, R3ndevous said:

 

It depends on what their configuration was, but AMD’s HIP-RT support for Blender is still in out in 4.3, still somewhat experimental its parity compared to others isn’t the same.

NVIDIA and Apple both have hardware acceleration for RT in the classroom benchmark. 

 

Otherwise, you can check; https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&group_by=device_name

Yah I think a big problem is how poor Blender's support of HIP-RT is rn.

 

Edit: actually I'm almost certain that's what it is, even my 6800 is laughable.

[GreenLeaf]

5 hours ago, jordanbuilds1 said:

first apple vid without horst, its alr ig

i miss horst

[GreenLeaf]

i actually getting this computer, but i have a good reason

 

i actually use(d) DaVinci Resolve to edit videos, but i got so irritated by windows i switched to Linux, and i fell in love with Linux

and here i am daily driving arch, anyway i tried everything to get DaVinci running on this damn system (performance was already TERRIBLE, just look at my specs)

and i already committed to not let Microsoft take a screenshot on my PC every 3 seconds. so i guess the last resort i have is to buy a mac, f*ck you Tim

[Sir_Alex]

Next tier up for AMD if anyone is interested with modern CPU+iGPU is Ryzen AI 9 HX370, comes with 890M, It's RDNA 3.5
Comes at around $1000 USD. Wouldn't be surprising if it becomes $799 next year.

 

There's also GMK EVO-X1 HX370, which is on sale in China only for now, priced at 5299 CNY (about $735)

[Vinculus]

Why did this review use an outdated version of Cinebench, which means the Mac is running it through Rosetta and not natively, when there is an up to date version of Cinebench that runs natively on Mac?

Not only that, but the game they selected is also running through Rosetta, so it's being converted from x86 to ARM, and from DirectX to Metal (an old version of metal too) both.

If you're going to run things through arm emulation and compare them to native systems, you should mention that in the video!

[pApA^LeGBa]

Instead of recommending a friend a 600$ Mac with only 256GB of Storage and  8GB of RAM where i can´t help them with anything because i have no idea of Apple at all, i would rather build them a 350$ PC (plus like 20$ for Windows) with 1 TB of Storage, 16GB  RAM and install Windows for them. Going small with a 256GB SSD and a single 8GB RAM it´s 310$.

 

Based on a Ryzen 5500GT.

 

Making it ITX, silent and kinda nice looking with a 5600GT plus Win for 560$ still with 1TB SSD and 15 GB RAM. Going 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM for 495$.

 

All new parts.

 

Thinking about knowing nothing about Apple: They can at least use a normal mouse and KB right? Or do you also have to spend extra money for the Apple logo on that?

 

[Penpilot]

is it just me or the pc linus showcased as a competitor kind of sucks?

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3DtQDj

for the cpu, it has better ST, better MT, better everything and the GPU is a 6650xt class one so a lot better than a 3050. and yes arc supports most video editing software. this will beat the mac in everything except cpu ST perf.

 

and this matches the build in the video for $100 less https://pcpartpicker.com/list/FLzkXR

[pApA^LeGBa]

I was thinking about how low can you go for people who want a PC just for E-Mail, surfing, 1080p streaming, light pic editing, light 2D gaming. It´s 230$ all new parts, Win11 compatible incl. Win11 for 15$. If it´s someone coming from an ancient machine with HDD, i know 4 of those only in my family, this is a huge upgrade. Monitor, Mouse/KB are usually still fine to use.

 

R3 3200G, 8GB RAM 3200, 500GB M.2 SSD, Case with 500W PSU.

 

Make it 240$ with a half decent case fan.

 

That´s probably enough for 80% of the people asking for a PC for the use cases that were mentioned. Really no need to spend 600$.

[nhand42]

10 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

Instead of recommending a friend a 600$ Mac with only 256GB of Storage and  8GB of RAM 

16GB of RAM.

10 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

Thinking about knowing nothing about Apple: They can at least use a normal mouse and KB right? 

Yes.

 

[jdogcoder]

What LLM app was that on the mac?

[exoticspice]

19 hours ago, pApA^LeGBa said:

 

Instead of recommending a friend a 600$ Mac with only 256GB of Storage and  8GB of RAM

 

The $600 Mac mini comes with 16GB of RAM.

 

not only did Linus use R23 and not R24 which more optimised for ARM but the game he showed ran thru Rosetta 2. Really fair..