this is cinebench running on a single thread and I think it's one of the purest CPU benchmarks out there you know how fast is just one of your CPU cores here the new Apple M4 chip absolutely dominates beating both of AMD and Intel's latest CPUs by like 25% the crazy thing is though that score is coming from this the new Apple Mac Mini [Music] so I've got this setup here at the studio which I'm actually using quite a bit almost every day I would say I'm coming in plugging in my 16-in MacBook Pro and getting
some work done generally doing a bit of Zer Mouse admin stuff doing some 3D modeling getting some 3D prints ready and lately a little bit of 3D scanning as well but nothing super super heavy here definitely no video editing no blender animations or anything like that and definitely no gaming that stuff happens with my Overkill 490 PC which I leave at home and for this setup the new Mac Mini is honestly kind of perfect you know I would prefer to have a system here that's always ready to go rather than always bringing my laptop in
and out and you know sometimes I forget it but then I want to use this setup so being able to have this it's super tiny very affordable and it should be fast enough for the stuff that I'm doing here on the outside this thing is actually very very compact uh it's about the same size as an AMD ryzen CPU box if you've got one of those lying around then now you know it's also about the same footprint as a 120 mm fan which is super super compact in terms of volume which is the typical measurement
for a tiny PC this thing is 0.8 L they've also packed a decent amount of I/O on this thing uh unfortunately no SD card slot or USB Type A like you'll get on the Mac Studio which is a bit larger but definitely enough USBC and Thunderbolt 4 there's also a neat little headphone jack at the front I actually went with the absolute base spec on this thing as well so 10 core CPU 10 core GPU 16 GB of shared memory between them and only 256 GB of storage I mean apple is clearly nerfing their storage
in their devices so that you end up paying for an iCloud subscription down the road cranking up the storage in the machine as well is a hard pill to swallow it gets very expensive very quickly if you're trying to be economical about things I would just recommend grabbing a big external SSD like a T5 for 100 or a couple hundred bucks Ram unfortunately is not upgradeable either so if you're doing some heavy edits on this thing working with large files for example definitely consider bumping that up because you won't be able to afterwards this can
also be speced with the M4 Pro chip couple of options there including a 20 core GPU which is double what I have in my one but yeah just be careful with over specking the storage and the RAM on this thing the pricing gets very insane very quickly this little Bas spec one though $600 us does actually get you the fastest CPU boost clocks out of the M4 chip which is something I really appreciate that Apple does if you want the fastest CPU boost clocks out of an AMD or Intel chip you've got to buy their
like 16 core 24 core CPUs which is just something that I've always disliked single core performance I understand it's not that exciting you know why does it matter when you've got multiple cores in something like this well lots of engineering apps lots of 3D modeling apps and design programs as well have sequential operations they have tasks and functions which can only be completed across a single thread so for example this is Autodesk Fusion 360 it's a 3D modeling and simulation program and usually if I'm sitting at the setup doing some proper work then this will
usually be what's open and this is a moderate 3D scan that I did recently and has millions of vertices as you can see just like moving it around the viewport it can be a little bit sluggish even with the beefiest systems out there so one of the first things I'll do with a raw 3D scan like this is hit something called reduce and that will basically cut down all of the vertices that we see here to a fraction of what they were before cleans the model up and makes it a lot easier to work with
this function takes about 13 seconds on my M1 Max MacBook Pro takes 10 seconds on a 950x and 4090 PC and it takes 8.4 seconds on the new Mac Mini and then there's something like this so this is a shape optimization simulation for a rear wi strut of a car so basically it's trying to optimize the mass versus stiffness of the model and this actually runs completely in the cloud so it doesn't matter how many 409s you have in your system or how many you know thread rippers you've got there's no way to run this
locally it will always just run in the cloud which is kind of a bit unfortunate if you have specked out a pretty beefy system but once the simulation has finished running you can you know find a model that you like and then turn it into an actual 3D mesh that can be produced and this is another area where the M4 Mac Mini is pretty much as fast as it gets and I know these Time Savings they don't seem that big you know a few seconds here a few seconds there but what if we're working with
larger simulations or larger meshes much larger 3D scans for example of an entire car then the savings really add up and you know what if for example you had to wait for one of these operations for every minute that you spent working quickly you can see how important that single-threaded performance really is the CPU multi-core performance as well is really good for the money apple is still splitting their core counts between faster performance cores for the stuff that we just looked at and efficiency cause for stuff like rendering and encoding performance there lands just below
amd's 9600 X which has six Calles and 12 threads which considering that's a CPU you couldn't fit in a complete 600 PC build I would say that's pretty decent but what about video editing again this is not something that I'm typically doing here at the studio it takes a little bit more time so I'd rather do it at home which is a little bit more comfortable I can play with my cats between you know breakes for example but let's say I wanted to edit here at the studio could the Mac Mini do what I'm throwing
at it usually the most demanding thing on my own editing timelines is heavily denoised 4K footage so it's one of the trade-offs of having a really dark studio is that you do get a little bit more grainy nois in the shadow areas but we can handle that with a denoise filter the only problem then is that it's a little bit harder to play back my 490 system at home can do it the 9950 X 490 system here can do it and also my MacBook Pro can do it most of the time as well and the
new M4 Mac Mini can almost do it it is a few frames shy of achieving that 30fps timeline that I'm after but really the only thing I need to do is drop the comparison frames down from five to three and then we get Flawless playback of this footage yeah even with Heavy D noising this seems to be playing absolutely fine which tells me I could edit here if I really wanted to but again it just comes down to the price like $600 us and it can do this there is no $600 pre-built PC out there
where I would even attempt to throw 4K denoised footage at it because most of the time you're getting just a CPU with integrated graphics and that's it maybe at best an APU the GPU on this on the other hand is as fast as my M1 Max MacBook Pro it's you know nothing super impressive out there but it is also the lowest spec GPU that Apple are currently making in their M4 lineup so the fact that it can at least keep up with this is you know relatively impressive so will this thing be replacing my insanely
Overkill Mini PC uh no I still need all of that heavy GPU rendering power for those larger video edits the blender animations and of course gaming which apple and Mac OS is still pretty bad at but by the time the new M4 Ultra chip comes out which should have around roughly 7 to 8 times the GPU processing power compared to this my answer might be different at least for production workloads but for what I'm doing here at this setup the new Mac Mini is honestly kind of perfect the size the price that unbeatable single-threaded performance
as well the only thing I dislike about this device is how apple is still approaching their storage options I mean 256 gab in 2025 it just does not feel like a real storage option especially for something as premium and snappy as this really apple is just kind of evil and is setting people up to run out of storage really quickly so that they end up purchasing an iCloud subscription and let's be real storage these days is not that expensive yeah I've been wanting a little compact affordable dedicated system for this setup for a couple of
months now I was going to buy the previous gen Mac Mini luckily I didn't this thing dropped at the perfect time
