APPLE MAC MINI REVIEW MOVIE

A machine like this is more suited for a studio apartment than a movie studio and a business lobby rather than a Call of Duty lobby. The mini's internal GPU will handle 4K and 6K output without issue, but if you’re planning on using it for your next Hollywood production or Major League Gaming tournament, you’re going to be disappointed. But let us be clear, while you may play games on the Mac mini M1, this is not a gaming computer. It's also not meant for the type of graphic-intensive work that might need an external GPU. Some users need the extra oomph an external GPU provides for in-game graphics processing or heavy graphics applications. The Mac mini M1 does not support external GPUs. The available display options are decent enough for most users, but if you’re looking for additional external display power you’ll have to look elsewhere. After some deliberation, we chose to stick with the single display, opting to use an iPad Pro and Sidecar for additional screen real estate.

APPLE MAC MINI REVIEW 1080P

We also tried hooking up a BenQ Zowie 24” RL2455 1080P monitor with the LG, but the difference in display resolution was enough to be distracting. And for brave DIYers who didn’t mind tinkering, RAM on previous Intel machines could be upgraded by the user.

For previous Intel mini’s, RAM topped out at 64 GB.

Limiting the M1 to only 8 or 16 GB may cause power users to understandably balk. The biggest drawback we found here was the lack of user-upgradeable RAM. Based on our testing though, it seems like 8 GB is plenty of RAM for most normal computing tasks. Once we closed a few tabs, the performance of the mini returned to normal.Īpple does offer a more robust 16 GB M1 on its website, but we were unable to procure one of these models before this review.

It wasn’t until we tried to play 14 simultaneous YouTube videos that we noticed significant beach-balling. Additionally, multiple open applications, several open Safari tabs, and YouTube streaming in 4K did not slow down our demo mini, despite its paltry 8 GB of RAM. Our benchmark testing of RAM proved many of Apple’s claims. M1 uses a single cache of RAM that the SoC can access without having to use separate RAM “pools.” This means better overall performance and less power consumption. This architecture allows the SoC to access RAM with low-latency and high-bandwidth. One of the most interesting, yet double-edged, features of the M1 chip is its new unified memory architecture.

Apple mac mini review