Base Mac Mini M4 Pro – Quiet Under Creative Workloads?

[Apple Fanboy333]

I’m currently on a base 14” MacBook Pro M1 Pro, using it for UI/UX design, motion design, interactive prototyping, digital art, and occasional 3D work. Tools include Figma, ProtoPie, Rive, DaVinci Resolve, the Affinity suite, and Blender. It’s been near-silent—I’ve only heard the fans only a handful of times.

I’m now considering a base Mac Mini M4 Pro mainly for the 3D performance bump. However, I’ve seen some reports about fan noise under load. For my use case, would the Mac Mini stay quiet like my M1 Pro MacBook, or does it tend to spin up the fans noticeably?

If it’s likely to be noisy under these workloads, I’d consider a base Mac Studio M4 Max instead—but I’d prefer the Mini if it can handle things quietly.

Would appreciate any insight from those with hands-on experience.

 

[Norbert Mikołajczyk]

I’m currently on a base 14” MacBook Pro M1 Pro, using it for UI/UX design, motion design, interactive prototyping, digital art, and occasional 3D work. Tools include Figma, ProtoPie, Rive, DaVinci Resolve, the Affinity suite, and Blender. It’s been near-silent—I’ve only heard the fans only a handful of times.

I’m now considering a base Mac Mini M4 Pro mainly for the 3D performance bump. However, I’ve seen some reports about fan noise under load. For my use case, would the Mac Mini stay quiet like my M1 Pro MacBook, or does it tend to spin up the fans noticeably?

If it’s likely to be noisy under these workloads, I’d consider a base Mac Studio M4 Max instead—but I’d prefer the Mini if it can handle things quietly.

Would appreciate any insight from those with hands-on experience.

It depends on you workflow. Pushing the cpu to its limits make the fans spins (rendering with cpu like Cinebench or rendering some big, heavy projects in After Effects).
But rendering scenes (not animations) with Blender with GPU for instance is silent.
Working in Illustrator, Figma, Photoshop and After Effects (2d animations) it is completely silent.
I only heard fans during cpu (not gpu nor single core) torture test in Cinebench 24 (loud) and while rendering some big AE projects with tracking and some 3d animated layers (acceptable hum).
With my 95% of work Mac Mini Pro is completely silent but for heavy 3d or AE compositing, long, time consuming work the noise could be from acceptable to loud and noisy vacuum.