Experience with the M2 Pro, the Apple Mac Mini enters another galaxy

The Mac Mini M2 Pro that Apple offers us is equipped with the SoC Silicon M2 Pro in its version with 12 CPU cores and 19 GPU cores, an option paid for 345 euros since the basic configuration is equipped with the M2 Pro with 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores.

The Mac Mini 2023 and its M2 Pro (12/19) each get a Performance Index of 168. The gain over the Mac Mini M1 is significant, +86% (90), and enough to create the effect of range with the Mac Mini M2 which had a Score of 120 (+40%). It obviously won’t work on the flower beds of the Mac Studio, which, with the M1 Ultra, is about 20% (202) more efficient than the Mac Mini M2 Pro (12/19).

To find an equivalent on the x86 side of Intel and AMD processors, you’ll have to refer to the Intel Core i7-12700H found in the Lenovo Legion 7 Pro (189) or the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS from the Corsair Voyager a1600 (145).

The 12 CPU cores are also well supported by the 19 GPU cores, which work wonders with 3D video rendering applications. Thus, our Blender scene completes in 8 minutes 38 seconds without using GPU cores. By activating the metal, this calculation increases to 3 minutes and 33 seconds, saving time by 59%. Ditto, in Photoshop our filter app goes from 1 minute 22 seconds to 15 seconds!

As usual on Apple M platforms, we couldn’t resist the urge to launch the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider. On a Full HD screen with the Very High preset, the Mac Mini M2 Pro achieved an average of 62 fps, much higher than the 23 fps achieved by the Mac Mini M2.

A word on the 2TB SSD onboard our model; It easily reaches 5.5GB/s reading and 4.9GB/s writing.

For once, we measured the consumption of the Mac Mini M2 Pro:

• Idle: 3 watts
• Apple TV + video playback: 4 watts
• Game Shadow of the Tomb Raider : 49 watts
• Game metro exodus : 59 watts
• Metal mixer: 31 watts
• CineBench R23: 50W
• Metal Mixer + CineBench R23: 83 Watts

Thus, the consumption of the Mac Mini M2 Pro is particularly low, whatever the scenarios. For comparison, the Lenovo Legion 5 with Ryzen 5 5600H and RTX 3060 consumes 34 watts idle (with its screen on), 110 watts encoding and 160 watts in game.