YouTuber Max Tech recently pit Apple’s newly launched M2 Pro-powered Mac mini against a $15,000 USD (about $20,000 CAD) Intel Mac Pro configuration in a series of benchmarks and real-world workloads, most of which the smaller machine absolutely dominated in.
Apple’s refreshed Mac mini comes in vanilla M2 and M2 Pro flavours, starting at just $799 CAD and topping out at $5,699. The unit tested by the YouTuber cost $2,299 USD ($2,949 CAD) after upgrading to 32GB of Unified Memory and 1TB of SSD storage.
Apple’s Intel-based Mac Pro, as tested, was equipped with a 4.4GHz, 12-core Intel Xeon CPU, a Vega II GPU with 32GB of VRAM, a whopping 192GB of DDR4 RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, and the optional Afterburner card.
Thanks to Apple’s optimizations and purpose-built hardware, the M2 Pro chip in the new Mac mini makes massive leaps in performance, not just over its predecessor but also over the Mac Pro’s Xeon CPU.
Max Tech found the M2 Pro Mac mini to be the first Apple Silicon-based machine to beat the Mac Pro in sheer CPU power, posting a 20% higher multi-core score and 74% higher single-core score in Geekbench 5.
Graphics performance was a similar story, with the Mac mini being about 2.5% faster in GFXBench’s Metal benchmark while sipping back a cool 30 watts of power compared to the Mac Pro’s 250-watt power budget.
In Cinebench R23, the M2 Pro Mac mini beat the Mac Pro by a margin of over 4% while using just 18% of the Mac Pro’s power draw and operating silently. Unlike the Mac Pro, the Mac mini was also able to comfortably handle a load that simultaneously maxed out its CPU and GPU capabilities.
It looks like the Mac mini will dominate desktop performance on the Apple side — at least until the Apple Silicon-powered Mac Pro that we’re still waiting on comes out.
Check out Max Tech‘s full video below for more benchmark results and real-world performance comparisons:
