Energy Efficiency of M4 Mini

[waloshin]

We all know the M silicone Macs are very energy efficient! I did some testing with 2 hour ProRes 480i footage with my custom build editing rig 13700K, RTX 3080 10 Gb, 64 Gigabyte desktop sounding like a vacuum I use 600 watts exporting this file in Premiere Pro. On my new M4 Mini 16 Gb 256 GB with an OWC 1M2 enclosure I only use 33 watts fan not even noticeable at all.

 

[heretiq]

That's impressive with the Mini; but 33w with the mini vs 600w to do the same thing with your 13700K, RTX 3080 10 Gb, 64 Gigabyte desktop sounds ridiculous. Are you sure these power consumption numbers are a legit apples-to-apples comparison? Not challenging your report -- just curious to hear some more details.

 

[waloshin]

That's impressive with the Mini; but 33w with the mini vs 600w to do the same thing with your 13700K, RTX 3080 10 Gb, 64 Gigabyte desktop sounds ridiculous. Are you sure these power consumption numbers are a legit apples-to-apples comparison? Not challenging your report -- just curious to hear some more details.

Yes both were using the latest Premiere Pro to export the same video. My desktop has a lot going on with it though such as everything mentioned above onto of:

1. AJA LHI capture PCIe capture card.
2. 2 LG Blu-ray burners
3. 2 NVME SSDs
3. 2 Sata SSDs, 1 mechanical hard drive
4. 3 case fans
5. AIO water cooler for the CPU

These all add into the overall power consumption. Premiere pro does utilize the CPU and GPU at 100% while on Mac OS it does not seem to or not need too.

 

[840quadra]

It is a bit more power hungry than I expected, though still FAR better than my 12 core Mac Pro with a modern RX580 video card actively operating.

Idle power draw

Mac Pro 5,1 12 core with Sapphire RX580 PCIE Card	255 Watts
Mac mini M4 Pro (12 core, 24GB RAM)	27 Watts
MacBook Pro M1	12 Watts

I am hoping my M4 Pro will draw less power at Idle as it is still new and likely still optimizing the OS and installed applications.

Once I am done setting it up, I intend to have a few server services running 24/7 and hope their power draw is equal to or less than the currently optimizing new system.

• Software to bridge unsupported cameras into HomeKit
• software to bring iMessage to my Android phones
• Content caching
• Plex server
• Radio SDR interface for local monitoring / scanning using my antennas
• Home sharing for music and videos

Going to take a few days to migrate many of these items over from the I5 Mac mini I plan on retiring, but hoping the overall power use is reasonable. Clearly will be better than the 12 core Mac Pro however, or my gaming PC that I don't really do production work on at all.

 

[MacCheetah3]

Mac mini power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information - Apple Support

Learn about the power consumption and thermal output of Mac mini computers.

support.apple.com

 

[mi7chy]

Difference is M4 is on 3nm node and has hardware accelerated ProRes while 10nm Intel 13700K and 8nm 3080 do not. For supported codecs, Intel QuickSync is quite capable so it's a matter of picking the right hardware for the codec(s) you'll be working with.