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Mac Mini m2 Pro - 16GB vs 32GB
- Thread starter icemantx
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The Apple Silicon series cannot use an eGPU (presently).
I’m happily using a 6900XTXH in a Hackintosh, works great in MacOS, but for whatever reason Apple chooses not to support it in AS.
It's been discussed on MacRumors before: swap file and cache sizes should be compared with paging for a true perf impact. iStat Menus will show that:
![1686331032365.png]( "1686331032365.png")
No. Remember, Tim Cook is the king of just-in-time manufacturing.
While I think you are right (Tim's really good), I do think there will continue to be edge cases for those with the time and inclination to pursue that side of the market. Witness the 14" MBP2021 for $1300 at Woot recently, and the $1500 16" MBP2021 at Costco. Deals exist, one just has to be willing to take the time / energy to get them. And, fair warning, it's quite a bit.
Hi folks, forum newcomer here.
I stumbled upon this thread while seaching about subjective impressions related to ram amount in M silicon macs. A lot of people here seems to care (with good reason) about swapping speed once ram is fully used. Trust me about that:
what really matters for system responsiveness once it starts swapping is not sequential speed, but RANDOM speed with short queue length and small amounts of data (that is, random 4K1Q, typically), and M silicon ssds are quite wanting in that respect. On my 512 M1 mba it does 30-35 Mb/s. It seems that even the (sequentially) fast >1Tb drive on M2 pro/max is stuck below 40 Mb/s, because adding nand channels only boosts seq performance.
As a comparison, my SN850 (2tb) is around 80 Mb/s, while the extremely expensive 3D Xpoint SLC ssds (Intel Optane and Samsung Z-drive) can go over 170-180 Mb/s, and that's exactly what justifies the high cost, since sequential performance is identical to common consumer ssds.
Remember that when the OS swaps on disk, the disk is used as ram, and the r in ram stands for *random*.
Sequential performance is important, but for other uses.
I stumbled upon this thread while seaching about subjective impressions related to ram amount in M silicon macs. A lot of people here seems to care (with good reason) about swapping speed once ram is fully used. Trust me about that:
what really matters for system responsiveness once it starts swapping is not sequential speed, but RANDOM speed with short queue length and small amounts of data (that is, random 4K1Q, typically), and M silicon ssds are quite wanting in that respect. On my 512 M1 mba it does 30-35 Mb/s. It seems that even the (sequentially) fast >1Tb drive on M2 pro/max is stuck below 40 Mb/s, because adding nand channels only boosts seq performance.
As a comparison, my SN850 (2tb) is around 80 Mb/s, while the extremely expensive 3D Xpoint SLC ssds (Intel Optane and Samsung Z-drive) can go over 170-180 Mb/s, and that's exactly what justifies the high cost, since sequential performance is identical to common consumer ssds.
Remember that when the OS swaps on disk, the disk is used as ram, and the r in ram stands for *random*.
Sequential performance is important, but for other uses.
That's interesting. I thought that the noise issue with the Studio had been solved already with the latest M1 Studios, and that the M2 version was essentially dead silent even under full load. Or at least a lot of reviewers on ytb said so.
Please confirm that you got an M2 max mac studio and it was noisy. Thanks!
There are several threads discussing noise on the M2 Mac Studio, for example here and here.
I purchased one because the Mac Mini I was planning on, M2 Pro with 12 core processor, 1T SSD, 32G RAM and 10G Ethernet, was going to be more expensive than the Mac Studio M2 Max with 1T SSD.
Mine is completely silent.
That's exactly what I did after giving the Mac Studio serious consideration. I just do light photo editing these days so really didn't need to upgrade that much. I'm replacing a 2015 iMac that died last week. I was hoping for more time with it, but it said I'm done! I traded the screen to a repair store for the removal of the HD. It just shipped and will be here next week.
I downloaded iStat Menus thanks to this thread (or one like it that showed how it records memory pressure over time).
My employer-provided M1 Max MacBook Pro has 32gb of RAM. I have maxed out at 14% memory pressure this week doing everyday tasks.... hah. So I'm guessing I could probably be fine with 16gb if I bought a Mac mini M2 Pro to be able to do the same work at home? It's just tempting because the base M2 Pro is on sale at Costco for $1099 and would be roughly half of what I'd end up spending on a Mac Studio (I'd likely bump storage to 1tb on the Studio). My 2018 i7 Mac mini has 32gb that I put in myself-- ahh, the good old days-- and I probably never came close to taxing that either. Turns out Ventura slowed it down more than lack of RAM ever did when it comes to future-proofing.
Psychologically it's difficult to "go back" to 16gb, but practically it might not ever be noticeable-- but I don't fully understand memory pressure and at what percent I would start to see a performance hit. Any thoughts?
My employer-provided M1 Max MacBook Pro has 32gb of RAM. I have maxed out at 14% memory pressure this week doing everyday tasks.... hah. So I'm guessing I could probably be fine with 16gb if I bought a Mac mini M2 Pro to be able to do the same work at home? It's just tempting because the base M2 Pro is on sale at Costco for $1099 and would be roughly half of what I'd end up spending on a Mac Studio (I'd likely bump storage to 1tb on the Studio). My 2018 i7 Mac mini has 32gb that I put in myself-- ahh, the good old days-- and I probably never came close to taxing that either. Turns out Ventura slowed it down more than lack of RAM ever did when it comes to future-proofing.
Psychologically it's difficult to "go back" to 16gb, but practically it might not ever be noticeable-- but I don't fully understand memory pressure and at what percent I would start to see a performance hit. Any thoughts?
You didn't say what you're doing with the machine, aside from "everyday tasks".
My family members' "everyday tasks" involve email, surfing with half a dozen tabs or so, Word & Pages, Messages, various Google web-based applications, etc., and even their 8 GB machines are fine for that.
I have the usual corporate apps open usually-- MS Word, Outlook, Teams, and then the Adobe Suite-- usually use Adobe XD, occasionally some photoshop, illustrator or indesign, nothing really demanding there these days. Often use a text editor for HTML / CSS. Not doing anything with video or motion design, and rarely anything high res with photo. For personal use I'd probably be editing some 24mp images occasionally.
I also don't have a tendency to keep sets of browser tabs open on Mac, and I only use Chrome to test things.
I mostly was just looking for a bit of illumination on how to interpret memory pressure percentages. Like, at what percent do I get into the yellow range?
If it's not red, you've sufficient RAM. A 16GB machine is more than enough for the vast, vast, vast majority.
I'd say 16 GB minimum, but 24-32 GB is preferable, esp. if you plan on keeping it a long time.
I would not be very happy if my machine often hit yellow memory pressure.
Thanks for the input. In all likelihood, if I went with a base M2 Pro setup, it would be a stopgap for a year or so. I’m curious to see if and what M3 macs we see this fall (I don’t expect a new mini— I expect that to not materialize until the M3 Pro is ready some time next year), but I might consider an iMac if the M3 brings a higher memory ceiling than 24gb. (Also, picking up that base m2 pro from Costco would give me a 90 day window I guess to return if it wasn’t passing muster.)
I kinda wish the mini had some ports on the front like the Studio, I just like the form factor better.
There's something wrong with Photos. Quit it, give the system a few minutes to rebalance, then tell me what everything shows.
You've encountered a bug. I would never suggest buying more RAM to accommodate a bug; fix the problem. Photos appears to have a massive memory leak.
You should see something like that. No swap to speak of, and no crazy outliers (Photos!) grabbing all your RAM x 8. That's crazy.
Yes, Photos has a memory leak. However, the point is yellow already suggests insufficient memory. If you're often hitting yellow, you probably need more memory. I wouldn't want to wait until I'm often hitting red.
IOW, I don't agree with this statement:
Instead, I'd say if it's not often yellow, you've sufficient RAM.
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Well, yes, but the reason you are in the yellow is because you are running an application with a problem (Photos, in this case) and that's causing the problem. If you fix the problem, you won't have a RAM issue anymore. You don't need more RAM; you need to run better apps.
Given I suspect Apple would quickly fix any Photos memory leak problems, I am guessing there's a plug in or something else interfering with it.