[leptons]

>The Mac mini M4 performance is around 4-5x in DaVinci Resolve for me - compared to my HP laptop (i5-1135G7).

You could pick a variety of non Apple CPUs that easily deliver 4-5x the performance of an 11th gen i5. Maybe don't be disingenous and compare the M4 to a more recent CPU like i5-14600K, which is also 4x the performance. I'm not comparing on power efficiency, since that was not mentioned at all as part of your comment.

[matthew-wegner]

Is it 4x the performance?

Passmark shows 38,951 / 4,282 versus 24,724 / 4,555:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-14600...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+10+Core&id...

So i5-14600K is 1.57x on multi-core, slightly worse on single-core. $235 for the CPU versus $599 for a whole system. Could maybe match the total price, but Intel won't be able to come anywhere close on the power efficiency.

[dansky]

The 120GB/s memory bandwidth of the unified memory helps especially with video, I guess. The M4 CPU isn't really stressed out most of the time. Only multicam and HLG conversations it maxes out.

Once I patched my old Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support yet the iGPU of the i5 1135-g7 had similar GPU performance for video as the Intel Arc A380 in the desktop PC. The old PCIe3 speed limited its performance. I heard others reported a smoother replay experience with Apple silicon compared to even a RTX4090.

I get some delays when fast scrubbing through a 9 multicam 720p timeline and just 360p proxies. Still impressed compared to what I was used to. Video editors may be surprised about the performance for the price.

[ciupicri]

How did you patch the Dell T1650 BIOS for ReBAR support?

[dansky]

There is a Github project [1] which has detailed instructions. The ancient i5-3570 only allowed 2GB ReBAR, BTW. GPU-Z says ReBAR / 4G is activated and working, Intel Arc Driver does not see it but seems to use it. Some part of the BIOS had to be manually fixed, AFAIR.

The PC was given for free, the CPU €11 yet overall I wouldn't recommend the process just for the result. It's only little benefit, if at all, though fun. On that occasion I also added some NVMe driver which works well, demonstrated for the similar Dell Optiplex [2][3]..

[1] https://github.com/xcuri0/rebaruefi

[2] https://www.tachytelic.net/2021/12/dell-optiplex-7010-pcie-n...

[3] https://github.com/jrdoughty/Dell-7010-rebar-guide

Edit: some wording

[Rohansi]

4x vs. the old i5, not the M4. They are trying to say that comparing to a CPU released four years ago is pointless because the newer CPU is obviously much better.

[nl]

It's not disingenuous to do a real-world comparison to a system you already own when stating the specs. It's actually much more useful to hear these real world anecdotes than to look at geekbench numbers.

[dansky]

Thank you!

I expected a fast M4 package but still was mind blown to see the video editing performance. After all these video renders run for many hours.

My 2 year old i5 laptop - even with 64GB RAM and 2x2TB SSDs upgrades - was around the same price like the base M4 Mac mini / uses similar Power. The PC surely is way more versatile with these specs and expandability.

Staying mostly in X86-land due to affordable RAM & storage, nothing I currently have comes close to the M4 performance per Watt - and now even performance per $/€ - in my video-editing use case.

[leptons]

It's comparing apples to oranges. If you want to compare computers, compare a macbook with an old i5 to your laptop with an old i5. Comparing an M4 to an old i5 is just silly. Of course it's going to be faster.

[dansky]

It's a comparison of two CPU/iGPU combos I have on my desk with similar power draw. Those iGPUs are most power efficient for video editing as I like QuickSync from Intel.

The i5-1135G7 (17W TDP) has 2 Media Engines which I use for proxy generation in parallel for example and pretty versatile so I use it daily (64GB RAM..).

Still, I think it's a notable achievement to get 4x performance with the M4 for video at similar wattage of the i5. I don't have an M4 MacBook but I guess the M4 would perform similar to the one in the Mac mini.