M1 Max but as a PC.

[neomorpheus]

Hello,

Interested in replacing my PC for a Mac, but i’m not a creator, artist or nothing like that.

I will be doing Linux and windows VM, then regular usage like testing harddrives (normally get them used, so need to test and wipe to resell), office, pdfs, web surfing and playing with AI like LM Studio.

I have a budget of around 1500 dollars and found some good M1 Max Studios with 64gb of ram and 1tb storage.

How performant would this be compared to a similarly priced M4 Mac Mini?

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Bigwaff]

General performance comparison between systems...

Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench

Note Linux and Windows VM's will need to be ARM versions of operating systems as x86 VM's will not run on Apple Silicon (unless under emulation which is practically useless from a performance perspective).

 

[neomorpheus]

General performance comparison between systems...

Mac Benchmarks - Geekbench

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Note Linux and Windows VM's will need to be ARM versions of operating systems as x86 VM's will not run on Apple Silicon (unless under emulation which is practically useless from a performance perspective).

Thank, im familiar with that site and compared the M1 Max to the M4 and a Ryzen 9700x and according to them, the M1 is 120% slower.

But itself doesnt tell me much besides that.

Also, Arm versions of Linux and windows in this case, would be a plus

 

[Basic75]

the M1 is 120% slower

What does that mean? How can something be 120% slower? Does that mean it's negatively fast?

Anyhow, I'm not sure an Apple Silicon Mac is the best choice to be running mostly Linux and Windows, you can't even boot natively into either of them (there is Asahi Linux, but from what I gather it's not daily driver ready and doesn't support all the hardware).

 

[neomorpheus]

Meaning that compared to new M4s, M1 are simply that slow. Just go to geekbench scores and compare.

No, i wont be running VMs all day, thats just one of the many possible task that I might run.

To be honest,im interested in AI tasks and tools, like ollama and lm studio