As young PC builders, you will be tempted by sleek, shiny options,
but you mustn't take the easy path. Oh, is that the Mac Mini? Awesome!
Elijah, you didn't even try to resist it! It's a $600 computer. Nothing even compares to this.
And while thousands took to the online streets to rip into Apple's outrageous storage pricing,
it doesn't change the fact that for the base model M4 Mac Mini, he's right.
If all you want to do is email and video conferencing, some light professional work,
even some casual gaming, $600 seems like an outright steal for this new machine.
I mean, heck, I'd probably recommend it to a friend who just needed a decent computer at a fair price.
So has Apple built the best system for the 99%?
To find out, we're going to drag race it against both a $600 mini-PC
and a tower desktop PC while also discussing some of the pros and cons that you might
gloss over if you take these devices at face value.
But be sure not to gloss over our sponsor.
Let's meet our three computers. For Team Malice, standing at a height of two inches and featuring 10 CPU and 10 GPU cores,
the Mac Mini! Will it be held back by its lack of storage or will its unified memory
deliver a knockout blow? For Team PC, standing at two inches tall,
the Minus Forum Venus, and towering over the rest at 15 inches,
the cobbled together desktop tower. This machine sure takes up a lot of room,
but its dedicated graphics card means that when it comes to gaming, it means business.
There is, of course, a lot more to know about each system, so here it is.
But those are just details for now. What matters is that at the time of ordering,
each of these machines came in under $600 US dollars before taxes and shipping,
which brings us then, without further ado, to benchmark number one, Cinebench in both single
and multi-core flavors. And go!
Here we go.
Oh god. This is not going to be close, dude.
Wow. Wait, it might be a little close. Oh, this is spinning up.
Oh, it is starting to slow down, but it's not slowing down much.
Wait, wow, this passed it.
Wait, what? That's very surprising.
I am also surprised.
What's in here? Huh, that's not even current gen Ryzen.
If you remember as well, this is normally $150 over our $600 budget, but it was on sale.
I like sales. So it's kind of, you know, being a little bit of a cheater here by joining the lower weight
class. Anyway, while these run, let's talk about Apple's new M4 silicon. Compared to last year's
M3, Apple's added two more efficiency cores, they have more than doubled the number of operations
that their neural engine can complete per second, and they have increased the memory bandwidth of
their already fast unified memory by 20%. Perhaps most importantly, though, compared to their most
recent Mac Mini, which had an M2 processor, and even compared to their other M3 devices,
Apple has doubled the memory capacity of the base configuration from just 8 gigabytes to 16.
Now, I have no doubt that the most tab hungry of you could easily make use of more, but we've at
least reached the point where I'm not uncomfortable recommending a base configuration. So good job,
Apple. And good job on the processor itself. We'll talk about performance in a second, but first,
I want to talk about energy efficiency. Look at this thing. Here's all three machines running
the same load, except the M4 is using a fraction of the power of the other two. For a desktop,
obviously this level of efficiency matters less than it does in a phone or a thin and light laptop,
but less power consumption means less heat output and quieter operation. You can see,
even when it's running a test, does it even have a fan? Oh yeah, it does. Wow, is it ever quiet,
enough fawning though. Let's take a look at the performance. And wow, the desktop and the Mac mini
are shockingly close in multicore. But what's really surprising to me is how far out ahead that
mini's forum pulls. Two extra performance cores goes a long way for the multicore. But does that
hold up for single core? Let's see. Three, two, one. And now we wait. A while. I mean, technically,
we don't have the final result, but we have enough of it. Where the M4 really excels is
single threaded performance, which is one of the things that contributes to Apple Silicon machines
feeling so responsive and snappy. Even the first generation ones, which seems to have become a
bit of a drag on Apple sales. You talk to an M1 Mac owner and they're like, upgrade? Why? Who needs
to upgrade? Wait, there's one right now. Let's move on to our next test. Here we're going to target
the GPU using Blender to render the classroom test scene. And go. Okay. What are we expecting?
Oh, dedicated GPU turns out having one of those. That's a thing. But an outstanding integrated GPU.
It's doing much better than this one. That's a thing too. Yeah, he was invited.
Oh, wait, is that frozen? Oh, no, there goes a minute. Yeah. Okay. That's about 12 seconds slower
than our tower PC, but a lot faster than this. Is this even done yet? No, it has quite a ways to go.
Good Lord. Now, in fairness, 3050, not exactly the most impressive GPU to be
almost on par with, but when we consider that this is on board, it's pretty darn impressive.
However, custom form factor machines like this are giving up a lot in terms of
upgrade ability in the long term, which makes them a pretty questionable value.
If GPU performance is a priority, not just today, but in the future. Because this 3050,
we can get rid of it, throw something else in there, and we're going to be even faster.
All right, movie magic cut final score just under four minutes. Wow. The Mac mini is just a quarter
the time. And you've got to give it credit. It's just so cute, which like it or not,
is a significant factor for some people when they're choosing a computer.
Now, before we get to gaming, let's take a look at a large language model, specifically Llama.
How about we have them each write 10 haikus about our tech bro vest now available on lttstore.com.
I was the medium labeled Elijah, no offense, but I don't think so. Bruh.
What? You're taller than me. And wider. I don't think I'm an XL though.
Wow, you really do look like budget sandbanks right now.
Ready? Go. This is the same test we used back in our 50 versus $50,000 computer video. And
while I don't expect as big of a difference on these three machines today,
it is an opportunity for us to talk about one of Apple's biggest advantages.
If there happens to be an AI workload that utilizes GPU memory, the typical wisdom has been,
sure, no problem. Just slap some high capacity GPUs like our Quadro into your system.
But with Apple's unified memory, the SoC is able to dynamically adjust how much RAM each section
has access to, whether it's the CPU, the GPU, or in this case, Apple's neural engine. Faded glory
worn. My love for tech still shines through all. Vest is my heart.
Tech bro flair that won't be beat. Are you rolling on this? This is freaking ridiculous.
Look, the quality is not what we're using to evaluate them here, because they're all using
the same model. So theoretically, they should be about the same. What we're interested in is the
speed. And if you guys were looking over my shoulder, you'll have seen that the M4 absolutely
destroyed the others. So unless you're a data center and you need the absolute best in AI
performance and you're willing to spend millions of dollars to get it, one of these with a little
RAM upgrade might be the better choice for you. Although RAM upgrades on this are a pretty big
room elephant. Yes, my friends, we saw the Reddit post that you could buy two base model Mac mini's
for the price of one that has twice as much RAM and storage in it. Apple is still pricing their
storage at the literal weight of gold, which is an awful value. Another source spot for some is the
power button, which is not only now on the bottom of the machine, but at the back of the bottom.
With those two things aside, though, there's no denying that the machine we're reviewing,
which is the base model, absolutely kicks but for the price. But does it hold up in gaming?
While Apple Silicon has the raw grunt to put up decent gaming performance numbers,
compatibility continues to be a struggle. Now, of course, most Mac users aren't going to expect
to play the latest triple A game. So we're just using Shadow of the Tomb Raider as a tool to measure
the performance of the GPU in a different way and also to enjoy the onboard speaker that actually
sounds a lot better than not having a speaker at all. It's not a fair... Okay, that's fair, I guess.
What it is. Yeah. Oh, wow. What's also not fair is having a dedicated GPU apparently.
Dude, this poor thing. Yeah.
Even this one, though. It started before. Let Tim cook.
Hey!
Of course, the Mac couldn't hold a candle to our mid tower PC, but in fairness to it,
it held up quite well against a last generation AMD onboard GPU. And I know some of you are
going to say, well, AMD has newer ones, like that's nice, but we're looking at price comparables here,
not generation comparables. So what's our conclusion then? Mid tower PC wins?
I don't think it's that simple. No, it really isn't, is it? I mean, on the one hand,
good job with the high FPS there, buddy. But on the other hand, there's a lot more to life than
gaming and our M4 mini excels in areas that our custom PC falls flat in. Now, if you're the average
LTT viewer, the size, relatively high noise and power consumption, and the inconvenience of digging
through PC part picker for the best deals and then assembling everything, that's all part of the fun
rather than a burden and totally worth it for the upgrade ability and customizability of a machine
like this. But if your mom phones you up and she wants help troubleshooting this thing, wouldn't
you rather just send her to Tim Apple's house for help? And I didn't even mention it has a headphone
jack and Thunderbolt. This thing is sick. Now the upgraded configs suck and Apple really needs to
give their collective heads a shake. But this base model for $600 is every bit as good as it seems
on paper. If someone you know wants a computer on a budget, ask them what it's for. And if you
don't hear gaming, I think that the mini PCs take the victory. And if that user happens to already
own an iDevice, the Mac mini gets a pretty big boost. The workflow of like air dropping and using
iCloud between devices really is kind of magic sometimes. Just like this magic spell to take you
to our sponsor. Thanks for watching. If you guys liked this video, why don't you check out the
$10,000 Mac Pro Killer that we made almost a year ago? Apple definitely doesn't perform as well
when you start going up into the higher price range.