Mac Min M4 or Windows PC?

I mean that an external drive (Thunderbolt / USB4 / Whatever) won't give you better performances than the same drive as internal plugged on its native interface.

The Mac Mini cannot take anything but the Apple internal drive

Really? What a shame... Another reason why I'd never buy Apple computers.

I had a similar view of Apple computers as I had always made my own PC's. However two years ago when I wanted to update my GPU for a 3090 they were not available. That was the time when GPU's were being used by bitcoin miners and there were none available. At that time the Studio Max came out and I realized the price difference between a Studio Max and a 3090 in Canada was a few dollars. Also my issue of making myself and repairing was not valid either as I was not going to repair a 3090 if it failed? So I bought the Studio Max and have been happy with it. Since updated my PC with a 4070Ti so have the advantage of silent editing with Studio Max and faster rendering on the PC if there is a lot of noise reduction or Fusion titles etc. I think you have to consider the Mac as a compute piece of the puzzle. Get enough RAM to reduce swapping and use external storage.

The memory chips on the SSD can be removed and replaced with higher capacity ones - clearly this is not something for the faint of heart. I can do a little BGA but not "mobile size" BGA. But at least it's doable so I'm sure something will come up.

To be fair, with Thunderbolt 4 you can get an external SSD with similar/same/better performance so not a big deal. But yes, the Mac Mini is non-upgradeable.

I am a Windows person. Always been. But this machine is just amazing. It's super small, I've been abusing it with anything I can think of and it seldom gets warm

When I ran Cinebench on my Windows laptop, I could hear it from 2 floors below!

Hi all,

I want to buy Computer for Davinci - input videos from DJI Osmo Pocket 2 - 4K 60FPS H264.
Usage: Cut, color grading, some effects - holiday videos

I am deciding between
Mac Mini M4 16GB/24 GB RAM 256GB hard drive + 1TB external hard drive OR - around 1250 EUR

Windows Computer - Around 1700 EUR
Motherboard: MSI MAG B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI
Processor (CPU): AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
Cooling (CPU): ARCTIC Freezer 36 Black
Memory (RAM): Kingston FURY 64GB KIT DDR5 6000MT/s CL30 Beast Black EX
Graphics Card (GPU): GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4070 WINDFORCE OC 12G (replacing SAPPHIRE PULSE AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT 20G)
Storage (SSD): WD BLACK SN850X NVMe 1TB Heatsink
Case: Endorfy Arx 500 Air
Power Supply (PSU): ADATA XPG CORE REACTOR II 850 W



Please help what will be better

Well, the PC will give you plenty of flexibility and a 4070 is MUCH faster at rendering than the Mac Mini base model. 2-3 times faster.

The "editing" though is snappier on macOS.

So I'd say it's up to what you're looking for.

Also, if you feel like opening the Mac Mini on day 1 - there are now third party "SSD" for the Mac Mini. With $300 you can get a 2TB module which you can install directly inside the Mac Mini. But the external SSD also works fine and will have similar speeds.

Second that. The Mac mini feels very smooth when editing, in particular with GOP codecs.
But if you often have massive renderings and tight deadlines, you're better off with that PC.
BTW, if you want to replace the internal SSD, you'll temporarily need a second Mac for the process.

With a base Mac Mini you need an external SSD - they're even faster than the internal one.

That's not possible.

Here is an external Thunderbolt 5 SSD that is faster than the internal 1TB SSD on an M4 Mac Mini. This included the difficult case of sustained writing that many reviewers do not test.

Those GB/sec seeds are totally irrelevant for 98% of Resolve users as they don't touch DPX or EXRs.
No idea why people are so obsessed with SSD speed when they use typically 200Mbit/sec h264/5 sources
Even if you use ProRes444 4K sources you're still absolutely fine with today's typical SSD at 1GB/sec speeds.

Aside that- I like this enclosure.

Well, when I transfer files to and from the SSD, it's nice to have those speeds!

For editing though, they're not necessary as you say.

Does your typical source disk with assets has those speeds as well, so transfer can use max speed ?
Nothing wrong to have those very fast drives, but it's not essential at all and won't speed up your typical work.

Some people are obsessed with speeds you may need only with uncompressed Alexa LF footage…

Does your typical source disk with assets has those speeds as well, so transfer can use max speed ?
Nothing wrong to have those very fast drives, but it's not essential at all and won't speed up your typical work.

No, but I backup on a gen4 SSD which can do 7GB/s.

But yes, when using resolve there is no improvement of course.

Second that. The Mac mini feels very smooth when editing, in particular with GOP codecs.
But if you often have massive renderings and tight deadlines, you're better off with that PC.
BTW, if you want to replace the internal SSD, you'll temporarily need a second Mac for the process.

Editing is just a hobby for me, so I prefer smooth timeline performance. Rendering can run overnight, so that's not an issue.

However, I’m a Windows user and have never used a Mac before. In my opinion, a PC is more expandable and easier to upgrade in the future.

My main question is: Will editing on my PC build be as smooth as on a Mac Mini M4? If yes, I’d prefer to stick with my PC build. If not, I might need to consider the Mac Mini, as I don’t want to invest in a PC build upgrade right now.

My main question is: Will editing on my PC build be as smooth as on a Mac Mini M4?

The answer depends on full detail about your incoming footage, like codec, bit depth and color subsampling. If any of your codecs is not supported in hardware by your PC, the Mac will be smoother.
And then, don't be afraid to use MacOS. Once DR is started, it looks very much the same. I still have to jump between systems all the time, even if it's getting better recently.

A PC will give you expandability a Mac will never have.
And a Mac with the same "rendering power" of a PC will cost you a fortune.

My systems are in my signature. I use H264. It's supported in HW by both my PC and the Mac. But somehow the Mac is as smooth as the PC when I create proxies - even more.

That said, I'm not saying that the PC stutters and the Mac if fluid. They're both fluid. Just the Mac is "more fluid". It reacts instantly to change of playback speed, change of playback direction. The PC takes that split moment to comply.

The basic mini is dirt cheap (especially on Amazon) so it is a no-brainer as they say across the pond.

And instead of upgrading you can simply retire it as a home media server.

A PC will give you expandability a Mac will never have...And a Mac with the same "rendering power" of a PC will cost you a fortune...

That was the old viewpoint, and I think it was valid back then. E.g, the fastest 2019 iMac 27 had an i9-9900K Coffee Lake CPU and an 8GB Radeon Pro Vega 48. A top-spec configuration in 2019 cost about $5,000. You could obviously build a faster PC back then for $5k, esp. GPU performance.

OTOH today your RTX 3070 costs more than an entire M4 Mac Mini. You could upgrade the GPU to a 16GB RTX 5080, but that costs more than an entire M4 Pro Mac Mini.

That M4 Pro Mac Mini has about 1.8x the single-core CPU performance as your Ryzen 5700X, and 2.3x the multi-core performance.

The GeekBench 6 OpenCL GPU score for the RTX 3070 might only be about 9% faster than the M4 Pro Mac Mini GPU's Metal score. That's not a great test using two different APIs, but they are supposed to represent equivalent units of work.

There's an easy way to test that on a real-world workload, which is using NeatBench 6. I suspect even your current RTX 3070 is considerably faster on NeatBench 6 than the M4 Pro Mac Mini, but why not try it?

https://www.neatvideo.com/download/neatbench

I have an M4 Pro Mac Mini, and I got these results on NeatBench 6 at the default 4k settings:

CPU (13 cores) and GPU (Apple M4 Pro): 15.74 frames/sec

Despite the progress with Apple Silicon, the NeatBench 6 scores for the RTX 5090 are vastly faster than an M4 Pro Mac Mini -- about 3x faster than my scores.

OTOH it's only about 2x faster than my now-obsolete M1 Ultra, and the M4 Ultra will probably be about 2x faster -- maybe rough parity with the 5090 on some tests. It will be interesting to see.

The M2 Ultra Mac Studio is about $5k, and if the M4 Ultra Mac Studio is about the same price, I'm not sure that would cost much more than an equivalent PC with similar CPU and GPU performance. The 5090 alone is about $2k.

Another key issue is the increasing use of AI neural network code paths in local apps. The new GeekBench AI test shows the quantized Neural Engine score on my M4 Pro Mac Mini is about 3x faster on that test than my M1 Ultra, 49289 vs 15984.
https://www.geekbench.com/ai/

Macs think NeatBench 6 is malware so it is necessary to open the security tab in System Settings to override it.

My basic M2 mini only achieved this miserly score though I did have a pile of other apps open.

CPU (7 cores) and GPU (Apple M2): 5.44 frames/sec

I quit the dozen apps that were open and the score increased massively to . . .

CPU (7 cores) and GPU (Apple M2): 5.60 frames/sec

I think the main leverage of a PC is the flexibility to assemble a very powerful CPU ( like a Threadripper) and a very powerful GPU ( like a NVIDIA 5090 ). Will for sure be faster than a Mac but consume as much power as your house does to heat !! For Resolve the GPU is really the power source but when a NVIDIA 5090 cost as much as a kitted out Mac Mini and neither are user repairable really one has to look at things differently. As I mentioned earlier I am still really a PC person but changed when trying a get a 3090 back a few years cost as much as an M1 Studio Max which was available unlike the 3090 at that time. I now like having both for their individual advantages. I have software that only works on the PC that I like. Also software common to both does not always run the same speed either. For instance Topaz is quicker on the PC. My advice now to people is get both PC and Mac. With software like Resolve, Topaz and Affinity allowing you to run on both machines with same ID one can use the one most appropriate for the task at hand.

That Mac will be painfully slow. I tried out a MBP M4 Max with 30-some GPU cores and 30-something GB of RAM. I returned it within a week. My new laptop has 32 GB of RAM plus 16 for the GPU and I max them out. 16GB total.... shared... won't cut it. For video editing you want a 4090. When you know, you'll know.

A PC will give you expandability a Mac will never have...And a Mac with the same "rendering power" of a PC will cost you a fortune...

That was the old viewpoint, and I think it was valid back then.

That M4 Pro Mac Mini has about 1.8x the single-core CPU performance as your Ryzen 5700X, and 2.3x the multi-core performance.

Well, my Mac Mini M4 base is 2-3 time slower at rendering. So while editing is smoother even with a base model, my 3070 has more "raw power" to render in a third of the time. If you want to match that speed with a Mac, it can be done. But then your system is not going to be £599

Just to give an example of usage.

I have a Mac Ultra M1, lower tier model with 20 Core CPU and 48 Core GPU, and 64GB RAM.

I use the App called Stats to see the CPU, GPU and RAM usage.

With some Fusion compositions, the GPU can often be totally maxed out 100%, but the CPU is just around 10%, and the RAM is about 60-80% used. Hence, for the Fusion compositions I'm working on, the GPU is always the ceiling.

I hear many comments that Fusion is CPU reliant, single core. But my observation for my Fusion compositions is that GPU tends to be the ceiling.

BM is moving Fusion functions more and more to the GPU with every iteration.
So, that notion regarding CPU is a bit outdated. But RAM is still very helpful.

Watching the post BTS for Surveillance, all the eħa colorists were using the Mac Mini M4 Pro to edit and grade that flick. Of course it’s an Apple+ series.

Watching the post BTS for Surveillance, all the eħa colorists were using the Mac Mini M4 Pro to edit and grade that flick. Of course it’s an Apple+ series.

I expect they would have been using the Mac Studio Ultra if it had been available.

Just to give an example of usage.

I have a Mac Ultra M1, lower tier model with 20 Core CPU and 48 Core GPU, and 64GB RAM.

I use the App called Stats to see the CPU, GPU and RAM usage.

With some Fusion compositions, the GPU can often be totally maxed out 100%, but the CPU is just around 10%, and the RAM is about 60-80% used. Hence, for the Fusion compositions I'm working on, the GPU is always the ceiling.

I hear many comments that Fusion is CPU reliant, single core. But my observation for my Fusion compositions is that GPU tends to be the ceiling.

I do not use a lot of fusion other than things like scrolling titles or moving graphics. I can clearly see the difference then between my Studio max which is maxed out and my PC with 4070Ti that is often 4 or 5 times faster for encode. On both machines little use of CPU as you say. A little more on the PC as it has to do the decode of h265 that is hardware on the Mac. GPU is becoming more important I think.

I thought nVidia had H265 HW decoding and encoding?

I thought nVidia had H265 HW decoding and encoding?

The RTX 40 series does not have H265 acceleration for 8-bit 4:2:2 or 10-bit 4:2:2.

The 4070Ti should hardware decode my GH6 5.7k h265 10 bit 4:2:0 but it doesn't !! No problem for the Studio Max for editing work flow. Different when encoding though from the same project that will not run smooth on the timeline the PC is faster to encode than the Studio Max. Must be the difference between having to display as well as decode. But both GH6 and GH5S can record 10 bit 4:2:2 and this definitely will not hardware decode on my PC.

Watching the post BTS for Surveillance, all the eħa colorists were using the Mac Mini M4 Pro to edit and grade that flick. Of course it’s an Apple+ series.

I expect they would have been using the Mac Studio Ultra if it had been available.

With such a big budget they could used any computer they wanted. The point is if they can cut and grade marketable feature narrative with a Mac mini M4 Pro on Resolve, why need something more that would just be overkill? Great editors and colorists don’t rely on AI or cool effects to make good pictures and AI and heavy effects is why you need those extra juices. They can deliver better results with less. I really like that in talent. Joe Walker (editor/colorist) been around for a long time in HW with his latest work being “Dune”, still uses a 2019 Intel IMac for editing and grading. There’s likely many more. So I think that is a very good thing when software like Resolve can be efficient and productive on commodity and affordable platforms like the MM M4, or for that matter a PC with an older GPU that doesn’t cost more than the computer itself.

My point was purely advertising for Apple . Nothing to do with machine capabilities. With newer capabilities we are talking about time to do things, not whether it is possible with older hardware.

My point was purely advertising for Apple . Nothing to do with machine capabilities. With newer capabilities we are talking about time to do things, not whether it is possible with older hardware.

I agree with you. I was not suggesting we look at using older hardware. I was more suggesting that with little (or older but usable technology) hardware a good editor/colorist can do more than the novice who has the ultimate hardware, coz at the end it’s how the story is cut to have visual continuity and storytelling.