MINI REVIEW FOR GAMING SOFTWARE FROM THE

I will be posting my thoughts, results, screenshots, and settings used below. I picked this up and am now busy running various games. Game benchmarks for M1 Mac mini with 8gb ram inside Apple Silicon.

ItвЂ™s no secret IвЂ™m a PC nerd. IntelвЂ™s Hades Canyon NUC is. Many similarly priced desktops come with a discrete graphics card either standard or as an option. Gaming is mainstream, but the Mac Mini canвЂ™t handle most titles. I dont strive for 60 FPS lock, unless its FPS, MOBA, or an Action game.

Lets take a look and IвЂ™ll show you what I mean.The new Mac mini looks exactly like the old Mac mini, save for the new color alignment (Space Gray) with the rest of the Mac lineup. Basically, IвЂ™m the exact opposite of the target market for this thing, and yet, itвЂ™s fascinating. IвЂ™ve never outright owned an Apple product, I have relatively limited experience with MacOS and have no need for their вЂecosystemвЂ™. So me having thisвЂ¦ is a little strange.

0:00 Introduction 0:13 Specs and Testing MethodologyYouвЂ™ve probably already seen this a thousand ways from Sunday, but allow me to recap briefly. M1 Mac Mini Gaming Performance and Thermal Benchmarks Fornite, World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, LoL. To sum up the new Mac mini appearance, itвЂ™s 7.7 x 7.7 x 1.4-inch Space Gray box that weighs 2.9 lbs, and has just a single light indicator in the front to show if the.

The fact itвЂ™s in a Mac Mini doesnвЂ™t make much of a difference as despite the expanse of empty space inside this AND the massive heatsink and fan, this chip doesnвЂ™t run any faster than the Macbook Air and Pro 13 versions. ItвЂ™s an 8 core chip that offers desktop CPU stomping performance with thin and light laptop levels of power draw вЂ“ if not better.The M1 is what piqued my interest. This chip was heralded as offering вЂњthe worldвЂ™s fastest CPU core in low-power siliconвЂќ and a breakthrough for portable computing. This one though, comes with AppleвЂ™s own CPU, based on вЂApple SiliconвЂ™, the M1.

ARM, a British company, design processors and licenses those designs to people like Samsung, Qualcomm, and Apple. MicrosoftвЂ™s x86 emulator barely worked, when it did it was buggy and not being able to run the vast majority standard applications just made it a dealbreaker so Apple managing it well is genuinely interesting.Lets take a step back though and explain what makes this unique. IвЂ™ve used MicrosoftвЂ™s Surface Pro X and it was hopeless.

Mini Review For Gaming Software From The

So, for Apple to offer an ARM based chip as a desktop CPU, they are fighting an uphill battle to get a chip thatвЂ™s going to even boot the operating system, let alone run any programs. RISC runs the exact thing it wants to do, like loading a value, adding to it, and storing it, whereas with x86 you can just tell it to вЂњaddвЂќ and itвЂ™ll go away and get the values, add them and store them again without you having to tell it anything more than вЂњaddвЂќ.The reason all that is important is all the software from the operating system to the programs you run are all designed around the x86 instruction set, not RISC, and they arenвЂ™t directly compatible. ThatвЂ™s generally less efficiently designed as itвЂ™s instruction set is more complex and abstract. Compare that to x86, the instruction set your desktop Intel or AMD CPU uses, along with AMD64 which is itвЂ™s 64 bit counterpart. They use RISC or reduced instruction set computing which basically means itвЂ™s a more optimised design that can run more efficiently, albeit with less built in diversity.

Here I am running Blender render, and you are seeing the total system power draw вЂ“ every electron flying through the power wire to make this machine drive a 1440p display, and render this scene. Microsoft, take notes.So, why go to all the effort of using an ARM based chip if everyone else is using x86 happily? This is why. Editing a video in Premiere is seamless as if I was editing on an Intel CPU. Running вЂIntelвЂ™ based apps as it shows in Activity Monitor, open and run without fault. In my testing, it seems like running a native version of an app can be between 30% and 50% faster than running it through Rosetta, but itвЂ™s otherwise flawless. ItвЂ™s called Rosetta 2, and itвЂ™s pretty insane.

Sure, in all core workloads the Ryzen chip is still 17% faster, but thatвЂ™s thanks to Apples chip design choice. Notice anything? The laptop CPU that is the M1, heck its basically a modified ipad CPU, is 15% faster than the desktop Ryzen CPU. IвЂ™m going to throw up a graph here showing a comparison to a desktop Ryzen 3600X, a 6 core 12 thread CPU that, for context, draws 85W just from the CPU alone. Now let me run Cinebench R23 which is a native app, not running through Rosetta, and youвЂ™ll see something amazing.

Apple use 4 вЂefficiencyвЂ™ cores, and 4 вЂhigh powerвЂ™ cores, which is why itвЂ™s all core performance doesnвЂ™t even match a 6 core desktop, from my testing it seems like the lower power cores only account for 1-1.5 вЂbig coresвЂ™ worth of performance.In the real world, this is plenty fast enough to do any basic task, and even have an excellent experience when editing videos in Final Cut, or hell even editing in Premiere is still decent. That helps give this chip incredible efficiency in itвЂ™s laptop versions, and how it helps extend its battery life beyond anything Intel can currently offer. The slower low power cores take care of running the background tasks and basic stuff, while the high power cores turn off until you want to do something intensive. ARM offers a thing called big.LITTLE, and means you can pair slower, lower power cores with higher power higher performance cores all on the same chip.

If I want a laptop, itвЂ™d be a gaming machine to game and edit from on the go, not a thin and light which rules out any Apple device, M1 or not. And even when the 16, 32 or 64 core versions of this turn up, I have an extreme dislike of AppleвЂ™s closed off walled garden ecosystem and would rather have slower performance but a PC I feel I actually own and control. The performance per watt this offers is insane for sure, but I donвЂ™t need a laptop CPU. I had to hold the power button down to turn it off, then when I booted again it was fixed.For me, as a PC nerd, this is interesting вЂ“ but IвЂ™d never buy one.

Mac Mini Review For Gaming