The Mac Mini M2 Pro made available to us by Apple is equipped with the SoC Silicon M2 Pro in its version with 12 CPU cores and 19 GPU cores, an option billed at €345 since the basic configuration is equipped with an M2 Pro with 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores.
The Mac Mini 2023 and its M2 Pro (12/19) obtain a performance index of 168. The gain compared to the Mac Mini M1 is considerable, +86% (90), and sufficient to create a range effect with the Mac Mini M2 which obtains an index of 120 (+40%). Obviously, it will not work on the flower beds of the Mac Studio which, with its M1 Ultra, is some 20% more efficient (202) than our Mac Mini M2 Pro (12/19).
To find an equivalent on the side of x86 processors at Intel and AMD, you have to turn to the Intel Core i7-12700H present in the Lenovo Legion 7 Pro (189) or the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS of the Corsair Voyager a1600 (145 ).
The 12 CPU cores are also well helped by the 19 GPU cores, which work wonders with 3D and video rendering applications. Thus, our Blender scene is completed in 8 min 38 s without using GPU cores. By activating Metal, this calculation increases to 3 min 33 s, a time saving of 59%. Ditto, in Photoshop, our filter application goes from 1 min 22 s to 15 s!
As usual on Apple M platforms, we couldn’t resist the urge to launch the game Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. On our Full HD screen with the Very High preset, the Mac Mini M2 Pro achieved an average of 62 fps, well above the 23 fps achieved by the Mac Mini M2.
A word about the 2 TB SSD on board our model; it easily reaches 5.5 GB/s in reading and 4.9 GB/s in writing.
For once, we measured the consumption of the Mac Mini M2 Pro:
- Idle: 3W
- Apple TV+ video playback: 4W
- Game Shadow Of The Tomb Raider : 49 W
- Game Metro Exodus : 59 W
- Blender Metal : 31 W
- CineBench R23: 50 W
- Blender Metal + CineBench R23 : 83 W
The consumption of the Mac Mini M2 Pro is therefore particularly low, whatever the scenarios. For comparison, a Lenovo Legion 5 with Ryzen 5 5600H and RTX 3060 consumes 34 W at idle (with its screen), 110 W encoding and 160 W in game.